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The science of history

By David Long - posted Friday, 14 September 2007


At the risk of annoying all those history professors and teachers and enthusiastic, amateur historians, something must be said about the idea of a uniform history curriculum for Australia.

Yes, it stinks! But not for the reasons the above folk might think.

Most Australians are aware that the Federal Government has announced the membership of its Australian History Curriculum Board. They probably think that federal funding has overcome ideology and with it, the black arm-band view of Australian history that has been inflicted on generations of Australian children.

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What the government has not shown, however, is that a new history curriculum will be any more useful than the one it replaces.

If we want kids to grow up with a capacity to use their reason, to discern the difference between reasonableness and sophistry, between democratic government and tyranny and to recognise the noble from the base, then they must be given an education which cultivates those powers.

The current history debate is about which version of history contains the truth; but that ducks the question of the type of truth there is in history studies and what use that truth has.

History is such an amorphous collection of topics that someone might object that the uniform curriculum will relate only to Australian history. To this objection, it can be responded that a single day contains 86,400 seconds per person; a year contains about 3.5 million seconds per person. History, by its criteria, will only ever be a mere subjective glimpse of a land that will remain fundamentally unknown, where some may look but never visit. Is it possible to document the whole history of Australia?

The simple answer is that history is by its nature selective and it becomes increasingly selective with each step backwards. When we reach, for example, the year 1752, we might ask what is the possible benefit in knowing that Rousseau published his essay Discourse On the Origins of Inequality in that otherwise un-momentous year?

There is, however, great benefit in understanding the ideas that his essay contains, since those ideas had a momentous influence on the rest of the world.

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This debate between what is taught as the history of events and what could be taught as the history of ideas is part of the wider contest within the university between liberal education and the social sciences that includes historicism.

In defence of the history of events, it has been said that those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat its mistakes. It has also been said that if we know how we got to where we are, we shall know where we are heading and why. These statements, however, are absurd.

First, no student “learns history” in the sense of the whole story. A student learns a very edited, sub-edited and condensed view of history for two very good reasons:

First, because no records are kept for the whole of any period; the sheer weight of data that is available requires the historian to choose what will be published and in choosing the data the historian is compelled to make value judgments.

Second, because history does not repeat itself. Every human life faces its own unique problems in its own unique terms and the way each person deals with them depends on the moral principles that have formed that person’s character.

The nature of moral principles and how they can be acquired is not something that can be obtained from a history book. Only an already moral person will see the moral principle in a particular event.

The most influential book on education ever written did not consider history a necessary subject of instruction. For over 2,000 years, The Republic of Plato not only provided a pattern for its students to examine, it anchored the education in literature and ideas that we know as a liberal education. A liberal education is an education in books, the great books. It cultivates the reason by allowing the student to engage in a dialogue with the thought of the greatest minds as they examine the eternal problem of how man ought to live.

Unfortunately, a liberal education has never been available in this country whose universities are dominated by the positivistic social sciences and, to a lesser extent, the value-relative science of history, historicism.

The study of history gripped the intellectuals of the 19th century who were convinced that history alone held the key to answering the eternal questions about man. As Professor Leo Strauss states in his book Natural Right and History, the historical school “believed that by understanding their past, their heritage, their historical situation, men could arrive at principles that would be as objective as those the older prehistoricist political philosophy had claimed to be …”

The implicit premise on which the science of history rests is that mankind’s actions are not the result of any deliberate choice; rather they are a reaction by the passions to factors. A person might think that he chooses to act because it was in his opinion the right thing to do. The historian, however, understands his actions as a reaction to the surrounding circumstances. Thus the historicist understands people better than they understand themselves. If scientific history bears a strange similarity Newton’s law of action and reaction, it is because when free choice is removed only action and reaction, matter in motion, remains - and, this, science can explain.

The most striking example of historicism is Marx’s analysis of capitalism, where the means of production is the force causing the development of human rationality until, at the end of history, everyone is rational. That historicists have a tendency towards the left is to be expected when they share Marx’s view that all thought is relative to its time.

But, if all thought is a product of its time, is not the historicist’s truth merely a product of his time? His absolute insight merely relative to his epoch? The historicist will claim that the scientific method allows him to stand outside of the historical forces that determine humanity’s actions. Thus, he says, he can show objectively what are the causes of human thought and action. He can show that reason, rather than being free to choose, is merely the slave of the passions.

We should, however, contrast this view with the understanding of ordinary people. Every person understands their own actions to be the result of the choices they have made to do or not to do things they thought would produce some good. This is the essence of free will; and Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics that every choice is said to aim at something good.

The retreat from human reason to human history was the result of Jean Jacques Rousseau argument with the Enlightenment.

In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau describes the origin of pre-social, natural man as a speechless pre-reasoning animal in a state of nature. Rousseau is the first to investigate man’s history in order to understand present man. His Discourse on Inequality was published almost 100 years before Darwin’s Origin of the Species.

If, for Aristotle, man possessed speech and reason naturally, for Rousseau, man by nature was no different from any irrational beast; beginning to speak, and therefore think, by some chance natural phenomenon that brought men together and forced them to interact with one another. From Rousseau's premise, all human language and human thought - moral, political, and religious - are the purposeless effects of purposeless physical causes; whatever you might think.

Rousseau wants man to live a life according to his nature. But Rousseau’s man is a solitary individual first, and social only by training. Thus, social or civilised man is alienated from his natural state and his natural happiness. The source of his alienation is discoverable only in his history.

The science of history asserts that it alone understands man, that its truth about human affairs is superior to that of philosophy. Unfortunately, science can not validate its own claim. It will always rest on an assertion supported by nothing more than a philosophical argument.

Is there a point in learning history? Simply put, the answer is no. There is, however, a point in studying the history of ideas and to illustrate the history of ideas by reference to various historical events. Thus one could compare the founding of the American Republic and the ideas on which it was based with the founding of the French Republic and the ideas on which its revolution was based with some very illuminating consequences.

The history of Australia that offends Mr Howard might actually have been cut directly from Rousseau’s template. A happy life in the state of nature, the rural idyll destroyed by a civilisation that alienates the Indigenous people from everything they hold dear.

The irony of Mr Howard’s proposal for a new curriculum is that he has sought to change the history that is taught in the schools when what is taught in the universities is the real problem: for it is the university that teaches the future teachers a methodology that states that all value judgments are subjective. By the time they leave university, the teachers have already learnt that their personal opinions of the simple, natural, idyllic Aboriginal life and the violent military occupation of aboriginal lands by the British government and white settlers are subjective.

If Mr Howard wants to assist Aborigines he might begin by ensuring that white men and Aborigines are educated to understand the meaning of civilisation and why liberal democracy is superior to the regime of the tribe. For those who wish to start, they should acquire a copy of Professor Harry Jaffa’s book on Abraham Lincoln, A New Birth of Freedom. Professor Jaffa’s understanding of the political science of republican government is unequalled.

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About the Author

David Long is a lawyer and writer with an interest in classical political philosophy and Shakespeare. He has written previously for The Bulletin and The Review.

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