Can There Be a Video Game Too Immoral to Play?

In a Jonathan Haidt style exercise of asking disturbing moral questions that people feel strongly about even as they are unable to defend their positions, I asked a student of mine whether it is possible for there to be a video that would be immoral to play. He immediately jumped on the obvious liberal utilitarian response of no; simply playing a game, by definition, cannot, in of itself, harm anyone so it can never be immoral.

Level One: Wolfenstein 3D.




This classic game involves running around and systematically shooting people and dogs, who scream and produce pools of highly pixelated blood. Of course, the people you are shooting are Nazis (as are the dogs one guesses) so pretending to commit mass murder is, perhaps, defensible.

Level Two: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR).




It is a feature of a number of Star Wars games that you can choose to turn to the Dark Side. This means that instead of light-sabering and blasting your way through stormtroopers (the moral equivalent of Nazis) you can murder innocent people on your path to becoming the Sith Lord ruler of the galaxy, bringing misery to trillions of beings.




In defense of KOTOR, the violence here is safely out of the realm of reality. None of us can use the Force (let alone become Sith Lords) or lightsabers. Perhaps, the distance from actual mass murder is enough that pretending to commit such horrors is not in bad taste.

Level Three: Grand Theft Auto (GTA).

GTA allows you to play a street-level criminal. You can commit crimes ranging from selling drugs to running over the prostitutes of a rival pimp and shooting police officers. Unlike Sith Lord, this is a plausible career choice for players. This raises the question of whether GTA encourages violence. Alternatively, a person who likes GTA is at least signaling that he might wish to behave like this in real life. Clearly, a game like GTA forces our utilitarian to hunker down on his insistence that direct physical harm should be relevant. He is particularly vulnerable here as it is hardly obvious that banning the game would not reduce crime. By insisting on only direct harm, our utilitarian is showing that it is his liberal convictions that dominate.

Level Four: Racial Violence

It is my understanding that neo-nazis and others of that ilk have produced games that allow players to fight a race war against blacks, Jews, and other "undesirables." Imagine a game where you can shoot your way through a black church and then burn it down with small children inside.

My student conceded that such a game would be immoral to play though he could not offer a reason why pretending to murder black people in church should be wrong while pretending to murder cops is ok. It cannot be simply that playing a racist game is itself racist and not just pretend racism. To be ok with shooting cops in a game also demonstrates a lack of concern for the lives of cops, particularly to the extent that you are not ok with shooting blacks in a game.

The stakes here are very high and not just for video games. Once we acknowledge that there are some things so horrible that you should not even pretend to do them, much of literature becomes endangered. Plato famously wanted to ban the Homeric epics on account of their immoral behavior. In defense of Plato, the fact that Achilles and Odysseus make lies, murder, and sexual assault appear respectable, arguably makes the Illiad and the Odyssey a greater moral threat to society than a racist video game.

I agree with my student that there is an important line between GTA and racist violence games. If I were to defend this position, I would argue that even pretend racist violence is out of bounds because it violates a kind of social contract in ways that regular pretend violence does not. Chris Caldwell argues that the 1964 Civil Rights Act created a new constitution with the power to trump even the actual Constitution. Similarly, we can see American whites after the Civil Rights Movement agreeing to a new social contract with blacks. Since blacks had the moral high ground due to the fact that America's history of slavery and segregation was particularly embarrassing during a period of post-colonialism and the Cold War, they could demand not only technical legal equality but also that the American narrative should be reimagined to place the struggle over racism at the center. Blacks got to become an essential part of the American story and not just an inconvenient historical quirk. Liberal whites got to be the whites who fought for equality. Now for a white person to now be a "good American" they must actively present themselves as active opponents of racism.

Part of what makes this new social contract possible is that whites consistently underestimate the difficulty of living up to their end of it. It is easy to condemn racism as something other less enlightened people do. Truly opposing racism is actually quite impossible. For a white person to argue that they are free from racism is to demonstrate that they are actually racist as they fail to appreciate the true centrality of racism. To the extent that any white person can escape the taint of racism, it loses some of its centrality and reduces the relevance of blacks.

To be white in America is to be Tantalus, ever reaching for that reasonable goal of not judging people by the color of their skin and hoping that black people will give them absolution. If we only denounce other white people slightly less embedded within this narrative then that absolution can be ours. This game gains its highly seductive power precisely because it appears so reasonable. Racism is real and it should be denounced. Reasonable people should be able to agree that certain things, particularly within the context of the real horrors of American history, should not be said or done. So only a "racist" could reject this process. For example, I oppose the use of blackface and the n-word. I oppose Trump largely because he empowers genuine racists. Does this protect me against the charge of racism? To believe that it might would demonstrate that I am, in fact, a secret racist.

From this perspective, playing a racist game raises a different question from playing a murderer. For the American post-Civil Rights narrative to function, we must see the murder of blacks as different from other kinds of murder to the extent that we would take racist murder as something personal that strikes at our very being. Anything else demonstrates that we do not truly buy into the notion that racial struggle is central to American identity or worse that we take the white-supremacist side. Regardless of how we really feel about a racist game, it is of even greater importance that we condemn other people for being open to playing such games. Who can resist the opportunity to earn a little absolution for racism at so little cost by taking a stance against a hypothetical game?

There is a certain irony here. Freedom of expression is an intrinsic part of American identity. As such, it would be considered un-American to condemn the playing of a game even one that advocates murdering prostitutes and cops. To even attempt to argue from the perspective of virtue ethics that such a game could corrupt one's soul simply and that one should at least be bothered by the concept demonstrates that one is not sufficiently embedded within the American notions of freedom of expression. To support censorship when it comes to racist violence becomes a kind of antinomian embrace of American values. You value the new narrative of defining America in terms of the struggle against racism that you are even willing to support censorship, risking your American identity.

As Haidt argues, our moral values are intuitively formed in our emotions and it is left to our intellects to justify our morality after the fact. My objection to racist games is honestly heartfelt. As a product of the post Civil Rights social contract, I was educated to not only oppose racism intellectually but, more importantly, to be horrified at the concept. Any attempt on my part to defend anti-racism on intellectual grounds is bound to feel contrived at best. 

So I put it to my readers, is it immoral to play a racist game as opposed to shooting cops in a game? If so, what intellectual justification are you willing to offer as opposed to strongly worded self-righteousness?

The Utilitarian Logic of Killing Ben Shapiro

In response to Ben Shapiro's coming visit to the University of Utah, Ian Decker defends, in a letter to the Salt Lake Tribune, the attempt to shut Shapiro down. According to Decker:

Utah is already a state with a homelessness and suicide crisis amongst LGBTQ youth. Ben Shapiro has openly called transgender people mentally ill. He portrays the gay rights movement as a conspiracy to “root out god-based institutions.” He has recently defended conversion therapy, which is nothing short of abuse.

I assume Decker's argument is that if Shapiro is allowed to speak, such right-wing beliefs will become further normalized and LGBTQ youth homelessness and suicide rates in Utah will get even worse than their current state. Otherwise, it makes no sense to even bring up the challenges to LGBTQ youth. In fact, Decker makes a point in arguing that Shapiro's visit will have material consequences. 

I am perfectly willing to accept Decker's assumptions. I lose nothing by taking down Shapiro. What interests me is Decker's logic. He has a plausible utilitarian argument that, in order to save the lives of LGBTQ youth, it is morally justifiable to interfere with the ability of the University of Utah conservatives to exercise their free speech and of Shapiro to earn his livelihood traveling to college campuses to say inflammatory things. Note that Decker willingly abandons the moral high ground of simply defending his right to publically denounce Shapiro while not physically interfering with Shapiro's ability to speak. Decker states that his purpose is "shutting down Ben Shapiro." 

If we seriously accept Decker's utilitarian argument about sacrificing free speech to save lives, why stop at just shutting down Shapiro tomorrow; why not seek a more permanent solution? I know the synagogue where Shapiro prays. It would not be difficult, during the coming Jewish holidays, to walk up to him and shoot him at point-blank range. It should be noted that the empirical fact that it is childishly easy for any relevant human political actor to kill any other human is one of the foundations of any meaningful political science (try making sense of Hobbes without this assumption). Decker's politics requires this assumption more than most as he needs to postulate that Shapiro can bring about the deaths of LGBTQ youths without even ever approaching them with a gun. 

To my liberal readers, let me pose the following challenges. Is there a morally principled argument (as opposed to the practicalities of political reality) that allows you to shut Shapiro down (as opposed to just denouncing him) that cannot equally be used to justify murdering him? Keep in mind that Decker takes it as a given that Shapiro's actions will cost lives. Imagine, God forbid, that some leftist accepted my line of thinking and actually did gun down Shapiro. You are on the jury and the defense pursues an unorthodox defense. Unable to challenge the fact that the defendant killed Shapiro, they convincingly demonstrate that, since the murder, LGBTQ youth suicides have gone down. Thus, the defendant has actually saved lives through his actions. Would you be willing to vote for an acquittal?   

One recalls the Talmudic doctrine of the rodef that it can be permissible to kill someone in order to save the life of a third party. This doctrine was infamously weaponized by Yigal Amir to justify assassinating Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. With Rabin as well, the utilitarian argument was quite powerful. His policies got Israelis killed and there is nothing absurd about the idea that killing Rabin saved lives. We may be horrified by this thinking, but that does nothing to challenge the soundness of its logic. 

If you are not terrified as to the implications of arming conservatives with the rodef argument, consider what it would mean for conservatives to wake up with concrete evidence that they can be murdered in cold blood and liberal jurors will let the killer walk. That being said, such practical considerations do not count as principles. Why should Shapiro not assume that if Decker and those trying to shut him down ever took power he would find himself on a train heading to a gas chamber? I mean, clearly, LGBTQ youth lives matter.     

An Apology for Adelai: Why Malcolm Reynolds Should Have Stolen the Medicine

(Recently, I have been taking part in an online discussion group devoted to Firefly and Libertarianism, which served to inspire this piece.)

Part of the charm of Firefly for Libertarians is its rather nuanced take on the Alliance government. As the central villain of the series, it would have been easy for Joss Whedon to have turned the Alliance into something sinister akin to the Empire of Star Wars. Yet, throughout the series, we are never really given a reason to question the fact that the Alliance is competent and, in general, improves the lives of its citizens. Yes, they kidnap children and operate on them. Yes, they employ secretive and spooky agents. That being said, it is only with the discovery of Miranda at the end of the Serenity movie that we are given an example where it can be said that the Alliance messed up. Everything else is easy to defend on utilitarian grounds that the galaxy is left a better place. And even Miranda is hardly something to delegitimize the Alliance (even as it does convert the Operative). Sure the Alliance exposed people to chemicals that turned them into the zombie space barbarian Reavers. But they meant well and is this really worse than all the times the United States has armed different groups with unexpected consequences? The fact that the Alliance is a pretty good government, forces Malcolm Reynolds and his friends to fall back on principles to defend their refusal to bow to the Alliance. Having no empirical grounds for claiming that they have a plan for a better galaxy (or any plan at all), all they can demand is their right to go their own way regardless of the consequences.

One of the chief examples on the show where the Alliance comes across in a positive light is the "Train Job" episode. Here, Mal is hired by the brutal crime boss Adelai Niska to steal a crate of goods from an Alliance train. When it turns out that the crate contains needed medicine for the local townspeople of Paradiso, Mal returns the goods, giving up a valuable payday and making himself a dangerous enemy. In keeping with the theme of valuing libertarian principles over pragmatic utilitarianism, I wish to offer a defense of Niska stealing the medicine and an argument as to why Mal should not have given it back.

I assume most viewers support Mal's decision to take the job in the first place when the crate was simply some unnamed goods (perhaps the newest iPhone to be sold to the town's wealthy). As an enemy of the Alliance and a soldier in a war against them, Mal has no social contract with the Alliance that would prohibit him from robbing them. It is irrelevant that the Alliance won the war and now possesses a very real monopoly on violence throughout known space. On the contrary, the Alliance's possession of such power simply demonstrates that they are the aggressors and not Mal. Mal is justified in stealing from the Alliance despite the fact that, from a galactic utilitarian view, Mal's theft is harmful. He is not producing any goods. Once he has finished with his theft, the galactic economy will be left with the same goods minus the cost of the crew of Serenity's time and effort along with the damage done to the train and injuries to soldiers.

If you are willing to support Mal when we assumed it was just luxury goods for the rich being stolen, you should logically be willing to follow this position when it is a little less favorable to Mal. What if the crate contained aid for the poor people not immediately threatened with death? Here we have the literary example of Ragnar Danneskjold, the anti-Robin Hood privateer of Atlas Shrugged. Ragnar makes a point of only attacking government aid ships. His reasoning is that the goods have been stolen from hard-working capitalists and are being used to prop up socialist regimes that will further oppress people. By robbing aid ships he is helping to bring down socialism and repay capitalists like Hank Rearden what the government stole from him in taxes. The fact that there are people who need these goods far more than Rearden does is irrelevant to Rand's philosophy.

The Alliance has stolen the goods from hard-working productive individuals like Niska. We can assume that Niska is productive as people clearly want to do business with him so badly that they are willing to step outside the law and become criminals to do so. (See Defending the Undefendable by Walter Block.) We can assume that an intelligent man like Niska manages to avoid paying taxes to the Alliance. That being said, Niska indirectly pays a hefty price for being on the wrong side of Alliance law in that he is left without a suitable court to settle business disagreements. This leaves him with no choice but to brutally torture people to death whenever they fail him.

In general, it is irrational to kill people as it is economically inefficient. Standard economics and Occam's Razor force us to assume that Niska is rational and is only killing people because the Alliance makes him do it and not because he is a psychopath. Even if Niska was a psychopath, his actions would still be the Alliance's fault as they made otherwise legitimate businesses illegal, creating a market that psychopaths could easily take over and become rich and powerful instead of falling to the power of the free market, which punishes people for irrational behavior far more effectively than government ever would. It should be noted that, at the end of the episode, Mal knocks one of Niska's henchmen into a spaceship engine while the latter is tied up and defenseless. If you are willing to accept such cold-blooded murder as necessary under the circumstances then you should, at least hypothetically, be willing to accept that Niska needs to kill people sometimes simply to make a point and maintain his reputation.

While the residents of the town could use the aid, they never had a right to it. I assume we can accept that it would be immoral for them to turn to piracy to get their needs even if they were stealing from people who could easily spare the goods. Furthermore, it would be justifiable to respond to such piracy with deadly force. Therefore it is immoral for the town to have the Alliance use legal theft to supply the aid. There is a larger issue at stake here in that giving aid is a major propaganda boost, making the case that the Alliance really is making the galaxy a better place. This would be the same problem as accepting a donation from the Mafia no matter how noble the cause.

Now we come to the really tricky matter where, in fact, Mal is not stealing luxuries from the rich or even needed aid for the poor but medical supplies, without which people are going to die. Keep in mind that we have already surrendered any claim to utility and are solely concerned with the principle of liberty. Now we should consider why Niska might have wanted to steal the medicine in the first place and what he might want to do with it. The most logical thing would be to immediately sell the medicine back to the town at an exorbitant price. Presumably, the Alliance would have to step in and come up with the money. In this case, we would be back to the first scenario where it would be no different than if the crate had been full of money. One can go so far as to argue that even if Niska was not planning on doing this, Mal would be justified in assuming that was his intention and wash his hands of the affair. 

It is possible that Niska is planning on selling the medicine to other miners who need it to live. If this were the case then Mal would be justified as the lives of Niska's people are no less valuable than that of the Alliance citizens. On the contrary, Niska's people have clearly committed less aggression.

What if Niska was planning on simply using the medicine to make a face cream for a celebrity or simply to destroy it out of spite? Valuing silly luxuries for celebrities over medicine for poor people is something that society does every day when people throw money away on movie tickets instead of giving to charity. (Clearly, the world of Firefly still has movie theaters as Shepherd Book reserves a special place in Hell for people who talk in them.) In this case, Niska can hardly be blamed for following the same logic to its extreme conclusion. Destroying the medicine could also be seen as a worthwhile deed as it would humiliate the Alliance and demonstrate that they are not as all-powerful as most people think. This would help undermine the Alliance, which might not actually improve anyone's existence but would still be consistent with advancing liberty.

It should be understood that my entire argument rests on the assumption that it was ok for Mal to steal from the Alliance in the first place even if it was just luxury goods for the rich. This would require us to reject the Alliance's moral authority as well as any claims to utilitarian benefit. Once we start down this path then very quickly we find ourselves with a license to let people die from lack of medicine.

Of Aspergers and Robots (They Just Might Both be Capable of Emotions)

I ended my previous post with a word in about the importance of emotions and a sense of humor even in seemingly strictly rational endeavors and I thought that the topic deserved some further discussion. As with most Aspergers, I struggle against a public perception that we are simply rational automatons, robots without emotions. Anyone who has ever spent time with Aspergers knows that this is false. Asperger syndrome is not the lack of emotions; it is the inability to effectively display emotion in a manner understandable to others. In other words, it is the "disability" of neurotypicals, who cannot understand our emotions to the same extent that we seem to be hopeless at deciphering their emotions. By emotions, I mean in the positive sense of being able to desire, hope and even find joy and in the negative sense to be able to have one's feelings hurt, to be afraid, and even at times to fall into despair. The hallmark of all of these things is that in of themselves they are not rational, not subject to rational control (in terms of feelings, not actions), and have no direct Utilitarian value.

There are a number of reasons why Aspergers come across as lacking emotions. The first is that we relate to the world primarily in terms of information and not social connections. So Aspergers have an affinity for strings of information, in my case primarily history, but also politics and even the lyrics of Broadway musicals (I can remember lyrics, I just cannot sing them). The obvious conclusion from seeing someone spouting information is that such a person is precisely that, just information without emotion; what a robot would do. This is only enhanced by the fact that most Aspergers do not convey facial expressions in the same way and to the same extent as neurotypicals. Just as Aspergers have trouble reading neurotypical body language, neurotypicals have trouble reading Asperger body language. (I will leave it as an open question as to whether Aspergers fail to read body language due to not having developed one of their own or whether they do not develop conventional body language due to their inability to read the body language of others.)

What should strike one as odd about this seemingly common-sense view of Aspergers as information-spewing robots is that it fails to explain why an Asperger would bother going through the effort of learning the information and passing it along? Might I suggest that the reason why Aspergers do this is that it makes them happy in the same irrational way that neurotypicals find happiness in the mere presence of friends and in having a relationship with them? The very act of being a "robot" it turns out is only possible for one with emotions.

One has to understand that the Asperger experience is profoundly one not of lacking emotions, but of having emotions and not having them being understood while at the same time being held hostage to the emotional demands of others. Is it any wonder that one might wish from time to time to cut away one's heart and be just pure reason? Aspergers learn from early on to attempt to distinguish between emotions and reason. Reason is that which you have some hope of being able to convey to others so that they will listen. Recently I was sitting in a lounge when I overheard a meeting for a planned student trip to Germany. What struck me was the leader's continuous emphasis on the need to distinguish between reason and emotions. It is well and good for these students to find Germany and setting foot on German soil to be emotionally trying. No one is asking them to ever become comfortable with Germany or ever wish to live there. That being said, it would not be appropriate to take these emotions out on Germans they meet, the vast majority of them being born after World War II and in no way responsible for the Holocaust. Possibly for the first time in their lives, these students were being asked to do what I do every day, recognize that their emotions have no validity outside of their own heads and cannot be used to gain moral leverage over others.

Probably the greatest proof that Aspergers have emotions is that, unfortunately, so many of us suffer from depression. It makes sense; you would also be depressed if you had to live your life cut off from other people in a world distinctively not made with you in mind. To be depressed means that you can be bothered by these things, something only possible with deep emotions. For this reason, I strongly relate to Marvin, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's depressed robot. With the exception of Arthur Dent, Marvin is the most poignantly human character in the series. If I am going to be stuck as a robot, I would hope to transcend my depressive existence by becoming Wall-E, a trash can robot, who says almost nothing but manages to be the fictional humanist hero of the decade.

The Humanities on Trial

In previous posts I discussed the situation of the humanities and the challenge faced by those in these fields to justify their value in face of their lack of any utilitarian benefits. The comic strip PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper) has taken this concept quite literally and for the past few strips has put their humanities student on trial to justify his continued presence in the strip in light of the economic downturn.

RVA’s Response to “Does History Have any Utilitarian Value?”

Here is RVA’s response to my recent post on the purpose of history specifically and the humanities in general. This is part of a running conversation going over a number of posts and I encourage readers to go back to the beginning. One of the perks of writing a blog is that one gets to come in contact with many interesting people. It has certainly been a pleasure talking to RVA, though he has chosen to maintain his anonymity, which I respect. 

I'm very much intrigued by your assertion that the "humanities have no utilitarian value." I often struggle with this question and have not come to a conclusion, although I sympathize with your position. I would argue that whether the humanities have any utilitarian value ultimately depends on your conception of what a "legitimate" society should look like. To play the devil’s advocate, I’ll venture a counter-argument, noting at the outset that I don’t necessarily agree with the following theory. The discipline of history has intrinsic utilitarian value because it insulates “history” from political and social propaganda by government and organized factions. If we assume that historians strive to be honest and earnest, objective inasmuch as possible, then they serve two important roles (which I delineated from your Part III post): 1) preservation of primary sources, 2) creation of objective secondary sources. (Assuming that the creation of an “objective” body of discourse is itself possible.) These two functions have practical value, not for the scholarly or academic issues they study and analyze, but because the work of historians collectively creates a body of discourse that strives for an authentic recitation of historical events. Each individual historian is himself superfluous, but the collective construction of history becomes the fruit of their labor. This body of discourse will then be protected by historians from outsiders (e.g. governments) and other historians who seek to “falsify” or “distort” history to suit their own political or social ends. The mere fact that than an objective body of discourse exists lets an individual in society make a comparison between “history” and “interpretations of history” by outsiders. If one's conception of a "legitimate" society requires it to sincerely acknowledge its own history, then preservation of its history becomes vital, and therefore History has a utilitarian function. The utilitarian value DOES NOT emerge from learning lessons from the past, but from preventing the manipulation of a society's history to suit political/social ends (e.g. Eastern European autocrats selectively constructing Nationalist ideologies to suit their political ends in post-Communist Europe). On a related note, I sometimes wonder what it would be like living in a world without formal historians. Informal and ad hoc history would be similar to how American Law treats "out-of-court statements presented for the truth of the mattered asserted": hearsay. It would be distressing to encounter a society where history would have no more depth than a Wikipedia entry. Is formal History inevitable in any advanced human society? Not sure, but probably not. I think stable societies are a fragile phenomenon and there is no guarantee of their continuance. Thus even if History becomes formalized in a society, its continued operation is always premised on the continued stability of the State, which is never a guarantee. I can also imagine police states in the distant future which are repressive far beyond anything the 20th century encountered. When societies begin to disintegrate, there's a strong possibility of losing substantial portions of the accumulated knowledge of a civilization (which was why Seldon thought an Encyclopedia Galactica was necessary in light of the coming collapse of the Empire, even though this was only the Foundation's purported purpose). Is formal history necessary for a legitimate society? Murky. I would say probably because it would otherwise be difficult to combat the construction of self-serving narratives by social, political and religious factions. In some respects, attempts at formalizing History would be inevitable because there would always be skeptics and dissidents (at least I hope there will be!) who would challenge self-serving historical narratives, and some skeptics would in turn attempt to formalize the History to prevent its usurpation by others. Or it could be that skeptics would merely create their own counter-self-serving narratives to advance their own interests?

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 …)