View the h-history-and-theory Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in h-history-and-theory's September 2001 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in h-history-and-theory's September 2001 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the h-history-and-theory home page.
Mr. Irwin's post is very thought provoking. I can't help but shout: "right on!" And yet, here's my quandary. I did not approach my study of human nature through history, but through biosciences. I bet my decades of research career and clinical practice on the notion that the basic model had not changed through recorded time. I, therefore, share Mr. Irwin's view that history is a reflection of each of us in very many predictable ways. However, I wonder if historians come to know *enough* about their subject of study to really put together a *real* instead of a "confabulated" (in the neurologic sense of unconsciously composed from memory and imagination) prototype. Let me give an example. On H-DIPLO recently, I brought up the question of the importance of a major historical figure's medical history. I also suggested that we might apply to historical protagonists what is known about physiology-- especially stress physiology, as I suggested on this site, because it might confound the rationality of decison making. Since on H-DIPLO people seem to be affraid to post, unlike this collegial site, most responses (quite a few, indeed) came to me personally, taking the attitude: That's your job; I'm a historian, not a physician or biologist, so I'm not going to start to learn all that phisiology now." What gets me is that these are people who theorize on the policy and decision making process! Many of these social scientists seem married to the "rational choise theory" that economists abandoned long ago. What if FDR had a mini-stroke (a TIA) at Yalta and sought to keep going by just submitting to Stalin's badgering requests? I also can't imagine how those stubby little Romans kept fighting those Nordic giants in the harsh cold of Northern Europe while their compatriots in sunny Rome partied all night? All in all, much can be said for a "people's history" as well. As I contemplate Mr. Irwin's point I think of my three children, unlike him, students, who just can't warm up to history. But their reason for that is unanimous: we can't relate to *artificial* two-dimentioned characters and their baggage-- dates, places and lots of "dynamite quotes." Their point is well taken. But I don't know if Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao-- just to name a few figures about which we now know a lot-- are characters with whose thought patterns college students can relate. I would suggest to Mr. Irwin that at least these characters got neurologically and medically twisted inside as they played slim life and death odds-- odds like Mr. Irwin and my three kids probably never faced. Can he put himself in these tyrants' shoes, based on his life experience? Can he learn much about himself from learning much about them? Mr. Irwin wrote: "Mr. Teodoru has it backwards. Students do not need to have experiences to empathize with those of the past, we need to teach history in a way that will relate to the experiences they are already having. In other words, history must be taught with a presentist perspective; and, the reason we can do this is because the way we eat, drink, clothe ourselves, recreate, war, make love, hate, etc. may change but that does not change what we are in essence. I am no different physically, emotionally, or psychologically than my forebears of 200 years ago, even though by all outward appearances I am completely different." Somehow, it seems to me there is a generation gap between Mr. Irwin's and my children's generation and mine. Three wars, decades as a wondering refugee, not knowing if those are my real parents or just some West Europeans that want to be nice and take care of me, etc., are all unique experiences, begining with a WWII childhood that probably warped my thinking somewhat. Then there's the issue of my years in the "real world," the one that many of us seek to evade by going right from high school streight to a PhD in the protected uterine academic environment, where we achieve "tenure," oh so warm and so secure. When I was at UC Berkeley in the 1960s they called the campus the "sandbox" where "students" played and evaded social issues in need of revolutionary action. Those radical students insisted, to quote Mario Savio, that time has come to "bring the wheels of the university to a grinding hault" because it provided a protected environment in which we all "criminally" evaded the harsh realities of the people outside of campus. Classes would be disrupted-- especially in History-- by brave radicals who rose up and insisted: "Prof. So-and-So, we demand "relevance" in our education. We demand that the plight of the working class be presented in the name of *meaningful dialogue*." The radicalization of UC Berkeley came to an end, as best as I could see, in 1966, when Medger Evers brother had been invited to speak on the famous steps of Sproul Hall. A couple of hundred students were standing there listening. But a comic mime troupe from a San Fransisco Haight-Ashbury Distric boite-de- soir came to Sather Gate, several hundred yards from Sproul Steps. As they promoted their weekend show with skits on the street outside the gate, the small crowd of students gathered to hear Mr. Evers gravitated to the gate and he ended-up speaking to no one, as the students were all having "fun" watching the mime troupe. And what happened to all those SDS revolutionaries who supposedly went off in summer after to "proletarianize" themselves as members of the working class? Well, they almost all went on to get PhDs and become safely tenured academics, assured, not only a stable and secure, work life-- accountable to no one and able to do whatever "scholarship" they want, all in the name of "academic freedom"-- but they were assured good pensions from their KEO Plans that invested on Wall Street! This invariably raises the question: can such people appreciate the historic life of trully struggling historical figures-- be they the tyrant at the top or the guerrilla at the bottom? In fact, we in the humble "real world" who spent our whole lives fighting Communism, for example, fell into the same psychotic confusion that Left Academics fell into when the Soviet Union collapsed. Now, for a decade a student of history, I look at very many of the "historians" I encounter and can't help asking when I listen to them lecture or as I read their works explaining why it imploded: What in God's name have you been smoking? I do not feel that Post-modernism is so absurd, nor do I feel it to be as outrageous as the mendacious and sophistic Left academics who pounded their catechismal mantras into students-- all in the name of "academic freedom"-- terrorizing doubters with grades. And it goes further. Isolated from the "real world" because they have lost credibility with our society-- especially historians, who, unfortunately, were not seen as too relevant to begin with in a society that asks: never mind where we've been, I want to know where we're going?-- social scientists have huddled into their academic world, neurotically insisting that without jumping *their* hoops for a PhD certification from them,. you just can't know. Thus, anyone who enters the world of academia from the real world must-- yes, must-- suffer the initiating abuse and uneven playing field, despite any real world-aquired expertise, in order to get that PhD. And once you've got it, you find that there's nothing there because your profs have so discredited themselves that they left the cupboard bare! It is ironic to see such academics passing psychiatric judgements on post-modernism. At least post-modernists seem to be asking the very same questions humble little uneducated non-academics out there with daily real world experiences are asking. The "dynamite quotes" academics are passing themselves off as "empiric academics," defending realism from post-modernist psychosis. Typical of academic hedonism such academic "realists" never seem to introspect. Instead they have developed an ecclesiastic pecking order-- you want the job, you recite the credo! Could it be that those supposedly "real dumb undergraduates" see through all that? Could it be that they can't take seriously historians that seek to escape from history by hidding out on campus, where they can create their own history? I suggest that Mr. Irwin talk to Vietnam War Vets who went back to school to study history. It's amazing how "irrelevant" academics who have never been near the palce feel is the experience of the vets. I was raised by my academics parents to equate intellect with humility-- always feeling that even the lowest *existentially real* person has something to teach to those people who, in the words of Prof. Doug MacDonald-- a real world guy who became an academic-- "are payed to read." But the current emphasis on academic degree as the only basis for competence seems absurd. I can see its value in the physical sciences and in the professions where "expertise" is clearly defined; but what would make Mr. Irwin's views so much more valid when he has a PhD than they are now? Is his graduate program going to knock out of him that humble realism that he so refreshingly expressed in his post? I would conclude by agreeing fully with his view of history-- when all the pieces are in the mosaic. When a lot are missing, the brain fills in the "scotomas" with "confabulations" of which the historian is not aware, unless he takes time to introspect. My concern is with those confabulations, serving unconscious biases. In science these are pushed away by the data. But in history, there often is little data available to clarify the epistemologic distinction between knowledge and imagination. I never cared much about Vietnam, for example, until Lt. Tuan pushed me out of the way and took the bullet that might have had my name on it. Seeing his brains splattered in a pool of blood and matted hair, I swore that I would retire from neuroscience someday to try and understand why such a good young man had to die. That, Mr. Irwin, is the kind of experience that causes me to approach history with *reverence*; too many people, far more valuable and good than me, died so that I could spend the last and next decade trying to understand why they died. Of course, when I say reverence, I mean seeking the REAL truth. Are we really not in the same boat, despite our age difference? Daniel E. Teodoru
|