Does History Have any Utilitarian Value? A Response

In Part II you state, "The humanities have no utilitarian." In Part III, you state that history-buffs are of "no practical use to anyone" because they do not analyze primary/secondary sources and do not use the historical method, which in turn implies that the work of historians does have practical value. In Part IV, you challenge post-modernists who do not believe that the humanities have intrinsic value. My confusion may be cleared up if you could explain the relationship between those statements. Does your assertion that the "humanities have no utilitarian value" exclude history (i.e. Does history have utilitarian value? Practical value? Non-utilitarian value?). Also, is History part of the Humanities or is it a Social Science? Does it make a difference as to whether History has utilitarian value if you classify it as one or the other? 

I view history as part of the humanities and not as one of the sciences, social or any other. As part of the humanities, history has no utilitarian value; it does not produce any goods with direct empirical benefits for human beings. Also, history is outside of the sciences as it has no predictive value. During the nineteenth century, it was quite common to view history as a science and to formulate specific laws. Hegel and Marx are good examples of this. In fact, Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, because he saw what he was doing for history what Darwin had done for biology. This endeavor to find laws for history and create an overarching narrative has failed. Admittedly there is still the popular notion that one can learn from the past. But you will find about as many professional historians who believe this as you do scientists who reject evolution. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series there is a character named Hari Seldon who, through his study of psychohistory, is able to formulate laws as to how human societies work to such an extent that he is able to predict the future with mathematical precision. He foresees the collapse of the Galactic Empire and a Dark Age lasting thirty thousand years. Through the creation of the Foundation, Seldon hopes to preserve the knowledge of the Empire so that the Dark Age would last only one thousand years. (Asimov essentially took Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and turned it into a series of science fiction novels.) No historian can do what Seldon does. We are just as clueless as everyone else. History as a science, therefore, is going to have to stay, for now, in the same realm as hyperspace travel, in science fiction. 

So what purpose does history serve that we bother to have students waste some of their valuable time studying it? The most obvious answer, and in my view the least important, is that history is useful for giving context for present-day events. For example, it is reasonable to expect that young people participating in our recent election of Barack Obama should know something about the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It may also be reasonable to expect that they know something about the history of American slavery, about the Civil War and about Abraham Lincoln. It is reasonable to expect that, with all the discussion about the recent downturn in the economy, people should know something about the Great Depression. Again this is not learning lessons from the past, this is just being able to put events into a certain context. The key difference between lessons and context is that context does not point and say that this happened in the past therefore you should do … . (whatever action fits into the ideology of the speaker) This understanding of history justifies at the very least that students in elementary school and high school should have to take some basic history courses taught by a teacher with a degree in education but not history. 

For me, history is important for three reasons. The first is that history is a method of thinking, a way of interrogating texts that is of vital importance for processing present-day issues. When I read a newspaper or listen to a public speaker, because I filter everything through the historical method, I read and hear a very different text. One that the authors of the text usually do not want me to pick up on. This interrogation of texts is quite similar to a police interrogation of witnesses and suspects. While it is possible to learn this method without studying history, I would say that history is a very useful setting because it allows you to step away from the issues of your day. For example, most people living in modern America have no particular strongly felt convictions one way or another as to who was right in the Hundred Years War, the English or the French. This leads to my second reason. History, when properly taught, encourages one to transcend issues. While the English and the French fought the Hundred Years War, for the historian, neither side is right or wrong. Both sides are products of their specific place in history. The historian, in his own mind, gets to bring both sides together and make a sort of peace between them. Imagine a generation of politicians trained on this sort of historical thinking and imagine how different our public discourse would be. (For more on this concept see Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History.) The third important thing that history does is that it forces one to confront a culture whose values are not one’s own. Not only is one forced to confront this different culture but one also finds oneself, in some sense, being drafted to defend this culture, now dead and buried, to a world that has passed on. In one sense this is very conservative as one is defending the past; in another sense, this is very liberal as it involves challenging present norms in society. 

With these three reasons in mind, I can affirmatively say with a clear conscious that history is an important field of study. Important enough that not only should children study it in elementary school and high school but that they need to be taught it by a teacher trained in the historical method and not an education major staying a chapter ahead of them in the textbook. Furthermore, history is something that should be a requirement in universities. Finally, for a select few, history and the historical method should become a way of life that they devote themselves to mind, body, and soul.

Historians in the Philosophy Department: A Response (Part II)

(Part I)

What does Goldish mean when he says that your work must fit into "some larger narrative?" Do you fit your work into a narrative that other historians have created?
On a normative level, should historians be creating "narratives?" And who are these narratives created for? The general public? Other historians? Academia in general? Posterity? It seems I would favor your initial desire to just do a textual analysis, and eschew from making your work fit into a larger narrative. The main reasons to fit your work into a narrative would be for personal ends (i.e. career advancement, pleasing your superiors) than for any pedagogical or academic ends. One last thing I'd like to touch on is the relationship between "fitting your work into a narrative" and post-modernism's criticism and skepticism toward such metanarratives. I agree with your general assessment that post-modernism offers interesting analytical tools, but is probably misguided as an end in itself. Could you elaborate your thoughts on this topic?


There is, without question, a pragmatic issue at stake; one day, with the help of God, I hope to find myself, with my dissertation in hand, applying for a job at some university. I will be sitting in a conference room with a collection of professors from both inside and outside the history department, administrators, graduate, and undergraduate students. (I have been one of those "other" people sitting in the room.) It is likely that there will not be a single Isaac Abarbanel scholar, apart from me, in the room. Most of the people will not have much of a background in Jewish studies nor will most of them even be medievalists or early modernists. At some point, a scholar, maybe from the gender studies program or a modern American history person, is going to ask, not necessarily even with words, "why anyone should care?" There is, furthermore, a particular subtext to go with this question; why should anyone care enough about what I am saying to give me a position at this university that could just as easily be given to someone who does gender studies or modern American history?

At a broader level, anyone who wants to work in the humanities is going to have to answer this question in the courthouse of society. The fact is that jobs in the humanities are dwindling; there are not enough jobs for all the newly minted PhDs that our universities produce each year. This situation has only been made worse by the recent downturn in the economy. (For more on this topic, I recommend The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue. Donoghue, coincidently, used to work at Ohio State.) Ohio State recently slashed its search for someone to fill a new position in the women’s studies department. I do not expect the people in the women’s studies department to forget this and it is going to be an issue for anyone, like me, who does “dead white male” history, trying to get a job at Ohio State.

The humanities have no utilitarian value. I know that nothing that I or any of my colleagues, both the ones whom I work with here at Ohio State and the ones I will compete with in the future, do is going to cure cancer, stop Global Warming, or end our dependence on foreign oil. My younger brother is about to start medical school. I joke that he is a modern doctor while I am a medieval doctor; you come to me if you need your humours balanced or some limbs cut off. It is certainly a fair question to ask why society should fund my work and not simply leave it as a hobby for those who enjoy this sort of thing. Last I checked Ohio State is not offering any jobs for people who can beat Super Mario Brothers. (I seem to recall a Farside cartoon on the subject.) This question is particularly acute because up until the nineteenth-century history was merely a hobby for gentlemen of leisure. Edward Gibbon was a member of the British Parliament in the eighteenth century who, on the side, wrote a seven-volume work called The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that we could go back to this state of affairs. There are thousands of accountants and lawyers with an encyclopedic knowledge of the American Civil War. (I used to be one of those people during my adolescence.) Why do you need professional Civil War historians?

(To be continued …)

Secular Theodicy: A Review of Day of Empire (Part III)

(Part I) (Part II) 

Something should be said about Amy Chua’s scholarship or lack of which. The book offers a veritable shooting gallery of poor historical scholarship. I do not think that it is a coincidence that, of the four blurbs written on the back cover of the book, only one is written by an actual historian, Naill Ferguson and even he does not actually praise the book. For a trained historian to publically take a positive view of this book it would require serious brain damage or serious bribery. I would like to offer some examples that deal with issues close to my heart. 

When reading her account of the Roman Empire and its downfall, it immediately struck me how Edward Gibbon like it sounded. I quickly turned to the endnotes and lo and behold, her sources were, by and large, taken from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I have spoken in the past about Whigs being dependent upon Gibbon. In Chua’s case, this is quite literal. This is the equivalent of a creationist quoting eighteenth-century naturalists as scientific evidence. The field of history has advanced since the time of Gibbon; to pretend otherwise is a slap in the face to two centuries' worth of historians. Chua’s dependence on Gibbon explains a number of things that might otherwise have proved perplexing. For example, Chua seems obsessed with establishing when Rome’s “golden age” occurred. According to Chua: “… most historians agree that the High Empire, from AD 70-192, represented the apogee of Roman civilization.” (Pg. 31) If Chua actually bothered to read any history written in the later part of the twentieth century she might have realized that historians today are not seriously concerned with defining when a given civilization reached its zenith and when it began to fall. For that matter, historians today do not try to define the essence of a civilization. That was the nineteenth century; we have moved past that. It was Gibbon who wrote about the four “good emperors,” creating a romanticized image of the second century, which Chua has swallowed hook, line and sinker.

Chua also drags out the old canard that Christianity, with its “intolerant” beliefs, brought about the downfall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon did not invent this idea; he simply represents one of the premiere examples of it. Chua’s Gibbon-like history carries into the Middle Ages. According to Chua: “Christian Europe was fragmented and fanatic, consumed with the Crusades, sectarian rivalry, anti-Semitism, and the persecution of infidels.” (Pg. 109) This is Chua’s version of thirteenth-century Europe. Besides for ignoring the rise of Scholasticism (This was the age of Thomas Aquinas.), she also fails to consider the rise of the French, Castilian and Aragonese states. These states gained power through such acts of “intolerance” as the Albigensian Crusade and the Reconquista. This goes against what Chua is trying to argue so she simply ignores the problem. 

Chua’s negative portrayal of Christian Europe is contrasted oddly enough with the Mongols. This is quite strange since Genghis Khan killed far more people than any “fanatical” Christian cleric. Genghis Khan manages to get into Chua’s good graces, despite slaughtering tens of thousands of people, because he was willing to put up with people regardless of their religion. In addition to followers of the native Mongol beliefs, his army included Confucians, Muslims, and Christians. Of course, Genghis Khan also took an equal opportunity approach when it came to killing people as well. Calling Genghis Khan tolerate misses the point. He was someone who did not care what god someone worshipped as long as that person served him; those who did not he killed. 

Chua’s footnotes on Spain repeatedly refer to David Nirenberg’s Communities of Violence and the work of Henry Kamen, both excellent present-day scholars. Unfortunately, she appears not to have actually read these books. If she had she might have been alerted to certain nuances that her beloved Whig narrative ignores. The whole premise behind Communities of Violence is that the paradigm of intolerance leading to violence, so basic to Chua’s book, does not work; the acts of violence against Jews and Muslims are extensions of a popular common culture, one in which Jews and Muslims were part of. Kamen has often been labeled as an apologist for the Inquisition. This may be just a bit unfair to Kamen, but Kamen does serve as a counterweight to the traditional “black legend” of the Inquisition and the portrayal of Spain as a country that sunk under the weight of barbarism and superstition. Chua seems to be blissfully unaware of this. One can only conclude gross levels of ignorance or dishonesty on her part. Chua comments: 

Why sixteenth-century Spain declined has been a favorite topic of historians. Technological backwardness, entrenched feudal traditions, crushing foreign debt, the lack of a significant industrial and entrepreneurial sector, demographic decline, a weak state apparatus, and chronic budgetary crises are some of the contributing factors most often cited. (Pg. 156) 

This statement is an utter lie. It might be true to say this about seventeenth or eighteenth-century Spain, but to say this about sixteenth-century Spain is ludicrous. What sixteenth-century Spain is she talking about? Is she referring to the Spain of Charles V, which encompassed Spain, its empire in the New World, and the Holy Roman Empire? Maybe she is referring to the Spain of Philip II, which spearheaded the Catholic assault against Protestantism. The seeds may have already been there for its eventual downfall, but sixteenth-century Spain has a good a claim to hyperpower status as just about any of Chua’s other contenders. She cannot bring herself to call Spain a tolerant society so she has to deny that they were a hyperpower. Since the facts of history do not fit she simply goes for made-up facts, recycling the made-up history of centuries past. 

Chua’s dishonesty in regard to Spain becomes truly unforgivable when it is placed side by side with how she treats the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century. She holds up the Dutch Republic as a contrast to Spain to show how the more tolerant Dutch Republic became a hyperpower. The Dutch Republic did not conquer for itself any empires it was not, militarily, that successful. All it was a small country that proved to be a remarkable economic success. I would give the modern example of the State of Israel. Israel is a remarkable success, particularly economically. That being said, no matter what the Arabs might say, Israel is not a hyperpower or even a superpower; Israel does not dominate the world. Reading this, one can only conclude that Chua has absolutely no regard for historical facts and is simply making stuff up as she goes along. 

I have placed Day of Empire on my shelf next to Rabbi Yosef Eisen’s Miraculous Journey. I think these two authors deserve each other as they are a match in terms of their sloppy thinking and lack of scholarly standards. They are both intellectual frauds, who in pursuit of their own personal theologies actively distort historical facts. Unfortunately, for some strange reason, Chua seems to have been allowed to gain a position of public trust as a professor at Yale. The fact that the Yale law school would employ such a person forces one to question the legitimacy of the school and the value of any degree that it might confer. I would say no differently if a university employed a creationist or a holocaust denier even if they were not working as scientists or historians.

On the Comforts of Reading Isaac Asimov

I spent this past Rosh Hashana with a family in the community here in Columbus. Right before the holiday began I was wandering through their living room and I came across an Isaac Asimov novel. I picked it up and started reading simply to see what it was about and immediately fell entranced into it. Despite the fact that I had brought other books with me I ended up abandoning those books and reading the Asimov novel instead. I would compare reading Asimov to drinking a twelve dollar bottle of Moscato d’Asti. It might not be high class but it also is not some cheap junk; it requires a certain level of sophistication to appreciate, but not too much so that it ceases to be fun.

There is a simplicity to Asimov that makes him such a readable writer. While Asimov was a science fiction writer, who usually wrote about societies far across the galaxy and far into the future, he kept his work grounded in our world. One never doubts that Asimov’s characters, despite the exotic worlds they live in, are anything but twentieth-century humans. This may make for bad science writing but it is great science fiction. Practically any other writer trying to do this would end up sounding drab and preachy. It is Asimov’s genius that he was able to pull it off. As with J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, the question that you have to ask with Asimov is not whether this is good writing in any technical sense. The question that you have to ask is, granted that this is not what is usually understood as good writing, why does it still hold together and work despite its obvious flaws.

There is a certain comfort in being able to curl up on a couch and escape into Asimov’s universe. One knows that the world that he is writing about is really our world and his version of our world has very clear-cut heroes and villains and a clear message as to how to solve the issues of our day. There are the heroic scientist characters, usually professional scientists but sometimes just lay individuals who think along the lines of the scientific method. They fight to maintain and advance the flame of reason against the vast hordes of ignorance and superstition, aided and abetted if not actually caused by the forces of religion. Reading Asimov, one can lie back, just for a moment, and actually believe that the world was really that simple. This is simply a secular version of the comforting certitude of religion. Religion offers a set answers to the world that are comfortable, in large part, because they are direct and simple. Most people, I think, want some set of simple answers to make themselves comfortable; it does not really matter if it is a religious or secular set of answers.

While Asimov might not be fitting reading for Rosh Hashana this Asimov novel, Nightfall,[1] ironically enough did sort of fit the holiday spirit. Nightfall is about the apocalyptic end of a world. It is about a planet, Kalgash, that has six suns. The people on this planet have no experience dealing with darkness and are particularly unsuited for it; being exposed to darkness for even a few minutes is enough to cause nervous breakdowns and even permanent insanity. Every 2049 years, though, the planet, due to a complex alignment of the celestial spheres, undergoes a worldwide blackout. This blackout is about to happen. Over the course of a day everyone on this planet will undergo several hours of darkness. By the end, the entire civilization will be destroyed as most of the population goes insane and riots, burning down entire cities just to create some light. The essential conflict of the book is the race to prepare for this end, to be in a position to pick up the pieces and rebuild a new civilization once everything has been destroyed. On one side is a scientific community centered around Saro University. On the other side is a religious cult, the Apostles of the Flame. The scientists want to save the knowledge of their civilization so that the world does not completely fall into a dark age. The Apostles of the Flame see the coming blackout as the fulfillment of the prophecies told in their book of Revelations, a book written in the aftermath of the last blackout. They believe that the blackout is a punishment from the gods upon the sinners of the world. Once the world is “cleansed” they hope to be able to establish a new godly civilization, complete with restrictions on what sort of bathing suits women will be allowed to wear.

Early in the book one is tempted to think that maybe the scientists and the religious people are really not so far apart, that they really want the same things and that they are going to be able to work together. In other words, one almost thinks that Asimov, for once, got it right and created a world in which the lines between religion and science are blurry and it is not simply a matter of heroic scientists battling fanatical religion. Asimov disabuses us of this notion soon enough. The religious characters are as bad as we might have suspected them to be.

Asimov was an example of a secularist who crafted his worldview with the help of the Whig historical narrative and Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in particular. (See here) Asimov’s Foundation series (his best work and what people will, hopefully, remember him for) is a science fiction retelling of Decline and Fall. Nightfall is also premised around Gibbon’s version of the end of the Roman Empire and the coming of the Middle Ages. A golden age of civilization is about to end and everything is going to fall to the forces of barbarism and religion. It is only a question of allowing some flicker of knowledge to survive so that one day the flame of progress can be reignited.

My world would be a lot simpler if it was all God, his Torah, and the Jewish people, if my Rosh Hashana could be solely about going through the long prayer services, getting right with God, and doing all the fun Jewish customs, such as eating apples dipped in honey for a sweet new year. But my world also includes Asimov, his science fiction and his secularism. Not having Isaac Asimov would make things easier and a lot more comfortable and sometimes I need to curl up with a book that gives me that world. I choose, though, to live in my life in a complex world, with its God, Day of Judgment and its Asimov.

[1] I should point out that this novel was co-authored by Robert Silverberg, who I assume did most of the actual writing. This novel is based, though, on an earlier Asimov short story and is written in a very Asimov fashion. So even if Silverberg was the real author he still was imitating Asimov and probably doing it, at the very least, with Asimov’s help.

The Whig Narrative of History: Secular Creationism (Part I)

One of the continuing influences on how the general public understands Western History is the Whig narrative. This view of History was supported by such figures as the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and twentieth-century historians such as Will and Ariel Durant, in their eleven volume Story of Civilization. Since the mid 20th century, though, this view has been rejected by the historical community. Nevertheless, this narrative continues to be put forward, in various forms, in our popular culture, in textbooks, and in classrooms. I would argue that the reason for the continued tolerance the Whig narrative is that it benefits secularism. In a sense, the Whig narrative is secularism’s own creation myth; it explains the creation of modern secularism in such a way as to ensconce the secularist as the hero of the narrative and those opposed to secularism as the villains.

In essence, the Whig narrative is as follows: there were the golden ages of Greece and Rome, during which philosophy, art, and literature flourished. But, with the fall of the Roman Empire in 476, western civilization fell into a thousand year dark age, the Middle Ages. The chief cause of the downfall of the Roman Empire was the rise of Christianity, which undermined the Roman Empire from within as the barbarian invaders attacked from without.

The Middle Ages was a time when men lived under the physical tyranny of Feudalism and the spiritual tyranny of the Church. The Church and the aristocracy both supported each other. The Church told the populace that it was God’s will that they live under the rule of kings and noblemen and that any rebellion against the established order was a rebellion against the authority of God. In turn, the feudal aristocracy supported the Church; bishops lived like noblemen, popes like kings. The feudal aristocracy made Christianity the official religion throughout Europe and persecuted all those who did not comply.

The Church kept the populace in its grip by playing on popular superstition and popular bigotry. Instead of looking toward science and reason to explain things, people resorted to supernatural explanations. The medieval world was populated by saints, angels, and demons, who were viewed as the cause of things. In order to protect themselves, people, instead of turning to science, prayed to saints or resorted to the use of holy relics, which they believed possessed magical powers. If a plague struck it was due to the malevolence of witches or the Devil. This resulted in witch hunts and thousands of innocent people, mostly women, were executed as witches.

Like all tyrannical regimes, the Church used scapegoats in order to divert the attention of the populace and keep them compliant. The Church’s favorite scapegoat was the Jews. The Jews were accused of having committed the crime of deicide, the crucifixion of Jesus. Not only did Jews commit this act in the first century, but, according to the Church, Jews reenacted this crime every year on the holiday of Passover by murdering a Christian child and using the blood for their matzos. This accusation, known as the blood libel, caused the murder of hundreds of Jews. In addition, Jews were often accused of desecrating the Eucharist, of worshipping the Devil and of poisoning the wells. Jews were forbidden from most trades and were forced to become moneylenders and were villainized for that as well.

While the Church preached that the Bible was the infallible word of God, it also turned to Greek philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Aristotle to support itself. While it might seem ironic that Christians would turn to a pagan such as Aristotle, the Church incorporated Aristotle into its tradition and just as it was forbidden to question the teachings of the Bible so to it became forbidden to question Aristotle. This held true even when the teachings of the Bible or of Aristotle contradicted the observation of nature. Medieval thought, Scholasticism, closed its eyes to the natural world around it. Scholastics believed that one could learn all one needed to know simply by looking in books, which contained the traditions of the ancients, which Scholastics took to be infallible truths.

Ultimately the medieval world was one dominated by religion. All the many horrible things that went on, during this dark and violent age, was the direct result of the Christian beliefs of the time. It was the Church that kept people oppressed under the chains of Feudalism; it was the Church that taught people to hate; it was the Church that opposed scientific inquiry.

(To be continued …)