I think your aspiration for two-sidedness for history departments might go over better if it was built around a shared interest in understanding accurately what each side is saying--but also in not trying to slip around both fundamental differences in perspective and in genuine disagreements about key points. For example, in South Africa particularly, at least some of what you've encountered from history students, humanities faculty and so on is informed by several strains of Marxist inquiry, which I think actually very much recognize the overall growth of wealth, the general transformation of the material conditions of human societies, etc., and see those changes as important precursors of the future political transformation that they hope for, but they would argue that trying to decouple exploitation and material improvement is missing the point in a fundamental way. E.g., it's not a balance sheet of bad things and good things, it's that the good thing is in the present *political economy* inextricably bound to the bad thing. You can certainly disagree, but if you want to be heard for what you have to say, I think you want to not just wave that fairly deep-seated perspective off as if it's just obviously an empirical error.
I think if you move away from that specific long-running meta-argument, a lot of humanists are also seriously engaged in trying to think about how the world feels and looks to people at any single moment in time, at any single location. So to say to someone living in relative poverty today--say, a 28-year old man in Cape Flats whose only income is from occasional informal-sector work and who has little sense of any aspirational future--that he is so much better off than a Xhosa subsistence farmer living in the Zuurveld in the 15th Century makes no sense even if it is true within the framework you are laying out.
And yet that is what celebrating this moment as "progress" in some sense has to mean. Right now, it only scans or feels like progress to the people who are best off, say the upper 25% or so the income distribution in many societies, or at a global scale--then what we really mean is that there are more people in terms of raw numbers who are materially well-off and the kind of wealth they have is almost unimaginable by the standards of past centuries. That's all true in the sense that as an upper middle-class professional living in the United States, my income lets me eat, drink, be clothed and have leisure in a way that rivals princes and emperors of eight or nine centuries ago, and there are millions like me across the planet. I have affordances that no human alive could even have dreamed of three centuries ago. But that's an intellectual comparison--what I feel in a day-to-day sense is how I stand in relationship to the world around me, about whether my prospects will continue to improve, about whether my situation is threatened by relative decline overall or specific degradation of services and infrastructure where I live and work. E.g., what informs my state of mind more is if my healthcare provision both feels worse and is by the same kinds of data you're privileging also worse--to say "well, at least I have better healthcare than writers and intellectuals in Augustan England" is true but isn't terribly meaningful. At the other end of the global income distribution, even less so, especially when people are living in structural poverty that is physically proximate to extraordinary wealth--that they have material affordances that a much greater percentage of poor people would have had five or six hundred years ago isn't just intellectually and emotionally irrelevant to them, and it feels a bit farcical to say with a straight face "but this is progress!" in that context. (If by that we mean, "our present progress within our present systems will eventually lift up even their circumstances to a basic level of universal security and comfort" then I think you have to loop back to the critique offered by left intellectuals and activists who have some reason to think this is not so.)
As always, Timothy, thank you for this very thoughtful response. You make several excellent points. I read the first part as 'reference points matter'; if you're from a poor, rural community, then progress might feel frustratingly slow (or absent) compared to what you observe in Stellenbosch. Your reference point is not your ancestors but your acquaintances.
Yet is it not the job of lecturers to shift those reference points? Should we not do a better job of explaining that the free access we have to a world of information, or to communicate to loved ones instantaneously over long distances, or to equality before the law, or to be able to vote, or to, in the extreme, be alive (given the high rates of infant mortality before 1900), is something to marvel at? And that, if we want to address the structural poverty of today, it is by learning the lessons of what worked (and did not)?
My primary concern is that the students I encounter in these classes have no sensible policies they can propose to address the very real challenges we see around us today.
There are days where I'm not sure anybody does, e.g., where I think liberalism (broadly imagined) has run out of runway when it comes to addressing the shortfall between its stated aspirations and the world as it is. But even if we think progress will continue and over some fairly long interval address those real challenges, the perspectival issue is a problem here too--it is not very comforting to think that your own present suffering or the suffering of real people around you will be ameliorated in some future generation.
I think the job of lecturers is certainly to challenge the reference points that students bring with them--learning is transformational--but I think the certainty that they will or should shift towards what the lecturer is saying isn't something we should count on. Learning is also contingent, and there are times where we discover that our students (and colleagues) are sticking to a position whose merits or foundation that we didn't ourselves know enough about. There are occasions in my life where I've been teaching students or working with colleagues where I'm the one who learns something or shifts position--or at least I've come to understand more about why a point that I want to make doesn't seem to register.
This is an important topic. I'd add a small clarification in that what it appears you are mainly describing is the Marxification of the humanities, AKA the Grievance Studies (see Peter Boghossian et al). I majored in History just before the student bodies started chanting to 'decolonize' things, including the sciences. To focus on "pure" history or philosophy is mostly safe, but the social anthropology and related depts tend to be extremely corrupted. I don't belive the sciences ever got completely overrun, but instead we see that the average western corporate workplace seems to have taken up the Marxification reigns so as to affect the broadest cohort, via HR departments and Longhouse Politics.
I think this is part of the story, Kerrin, but not entirely. There are also other reasons why historians have shifted away from the 'big questions', such as focusing on the experiences of the ordinary individual, itself the consequence of various ideological and methodological shifts. That said, there certainly are strands of postmodernism that have become very fashionable beyond academia.
"To avoid this one-sided view of history, History departments would do well to incorporate more economic history texts that acknowledge both the triumphs and trials of the past into their curriculums" -- totally agree!
Generally agree with your conclusion but one has to be careful not to tilt the pendulum too far the other way. Material progress has had and continues to have negative externalities such as pollution, climate change. So the pursuit of technological progress has to be with that in mind. Using economic incentives to mitigate externalities. And there have been plenty of lovers in that progress such as the mass exploitation of generations of labour through slavery or migrant labour. This is an unacceptable price for progress.
Thanks Ashok. I can only agree. There is no doubt that much of our (initial) progress has harmed the environment, but I would argue that it is only technology (and progress) that can rectify those harms. For example, rich countries can afford to protect their natural environment far more than poor countries can. I've written about it here: https://www.ourlongwalk.com/p/how-do-we-save-the-environment?
I think your aspiration for two-sidedness for history departments might go over better if it was built around a shared interest in understanding accurately what each side is saying--but also in not trying to slip around both fundamental differences in perspective and in genuine disagreements about key points. For example, in South Africa particularly, at least some of what you've encountered from history students, humanities faculty and so on is informed by several strains of Marxist inquiry, which I think actually very much recognize the overall growth of wealth, the general transformation of the material conditions of human societies, etc., and see those changes as important precursors of the future political transformation that they hope for, but they would argue that trying to decouple exploitation and material improvement is missing the point in a fundamental way. E.g., it's not a balance sheet of bad things and good things, it's that the good thing is in the present *political economy* inextricably bound to the bad thing. You can certainly disagree, but if you want to be heard for what you have to say, I think you want to not just wave that fairly deep-seated perspective off as if it's just obviously an empirical error.
I think if you move away from that specific long-running meta-argument, a lot of humanists are also seriously engaged in trying to think about how the world feels and looks to people at any single moment in time, at any single location. So to say to someone living in relative poverty today--say, a 28-year old man in Cape Flats whose only income is from occasional informal-sector work and who has little sense of any aspirational future--that he is so much better off than a Xhosa subsistence farmer living in the Zuurveld in the 15th Century makes no sense even if it is true within the framework you are laying out.
And yet that is what celebrating this moment as "progress" in some sense has to mean. Right now, it only scans or feels like progress to the people who are best off, say the upper 25% or so the income distribution in many societies, or at a global scale--then what we really mean is that there are more people in terms of raw numbers who are materially well-off and the kind of wealth they have is almost unimaginable by the standards of past centuries. That's all true in the sense that as an upper middle-class professional living in the United States, my income lets me eat, drink, be clothed and have leisure in a way that rivals princes and emperors of eight or nine centuries ago, and there are millions like me across the planet. I have affordances that no human alive could even have dreamed of three centuries ago. But that's an intellectual comparison--what I feel in a day-to-day sense is how I stand in relationship to the world around me, about whether my prospects will continue to improve, about whether my situation is threatened by relative decline overall or specific degradation of services and infrastructure where I live and work. E.g., what informs my state of mind more is if my healthcare provision both feels worse and is by the same kinds of data you're privileging also worse--to say "well, at least I have better healthcare than writers and intellectuals in Augustan England" is true but isn't terribly meaningful. At the other end of the global income distribution, even less so, especially when people are living in structural poverty that is physically proximate to extraordinary wealth--that they have material affordances that a much greater percentage of poor people would have had five or six hundred years ago isn't just intellectually and emotionally irrelevant to them, and it feels a bit farcical to say with a straight face "but this is progress!" in that context. (If by that we mean, "our present progress within our present systems will eventually lift up even their circumstances to a basic level of universal security and comfort" then I think you have to loop back to the critique offered by left intellectuals and activists who have some reason to think this is not so.)
As always, Timothy, thank you for this very thoughtful response. You make several excellent points. I read the first part as 'reference points matter'; if you're from a poor, rural community, then progress might feel frustratingly slow (or absent) compared to what you observe in Stellenbosch. Your reference point is not your ancestors but your acquaintances.
Yet is it not the job of lecturers to shift those reference points? Should we not do a better job of explaining that the free access we have to a world of information, or to communicate to loved ones instantaneously over long distances, or to equality before the law, or to be able to vote, or to, in the extreme, be alive (given the high rates of infant mortality before 1900), is something to marvel at? And that, if we want to address the structural poverty of today, it is by learning the lessons of what worked (and did not)?
My primary concern is that the students I encounter in these classes have no sensible policies they can propose to address the very real challenges we see around us today.
There are days where I'm not sure anybody does, e.g., where I think liberalism (broadly imagined) has run out of runway when it comes to addressing the shortfall between its stated aspirations and the world as it is. But even if we think progress will continue and over some fairly long interval address those real challenges, the perspectival issue is a problem here too--it is not very comforting to think that your own present suffering or the suffering of real people around you will be ameliorated in some future generation.
I think the job of lecturers is certainly to challenge the reference points that students bring with them--learning is transformational--but I think the certainty that they will or should shift towards what the lecturer is saying isn't something we should count on. Learning is also contingent, and there are times where we discover that our students (and colleagues) are sticking to a position whose merits or foundation that we didn't ourselves know enough about. There are occasions in my life where I've been teaching students or working with colleagues where I'm the one who learns something or shifts position--or at least I've come to understand more about why a point that I want to make doesn't seem to register.
This is an important topic. I'd add a small clarification in that what it appears you are mainly describing is the Marxification of the humanities, AKA the Grievance Studies (see Peter Boghossian et al). I majored in History just before the student bodies started chanting to 'decolonize' things, including the sciences. To focus on "pure" history or philosophy is mostly safe, but the social anthropology and related depts tend to be extremely corrupted. I don't belive the sciences ever got completely overrun, but instead we see that the average western corporate workplace seems to have taken up the Marxification reigns so as to affect the broadest cohort, via HR departments and Longhouse Politics.
I think this is part of the story, Kerrin, but not entirely. There are also other reasons why historians have shifted away from the 'big questions', such as focusing on the experiences of the ordinary individual, itself the consequence of various ideological and methodological shifts. That said, there certainly are strands of postmodernism that have become very fashionable beyond academia.
"To avoid this one-sided view of history, History departments would do well to incorporate more economic history texts that acknowledge both the triumphs and trials of the past into their curriculums" -- totally agree!
Thanks Wandile.
Generally agree with your conclusion but one has to be careful not to tilt the pendulum too far the other way. Material progress has had and continues to have negative externalities such as pollution, climate change. So the pursuit of technological progress has to be with that in mind. Using economic incentives to mitigate externalities. And there have been plenty of lovers in that progress such as the mass exploitation of generations of labour through slavery or migrant labour. This is an unacceptable price for progress.
Thanks Ashok. I can only agree. There is no doubt that much of our (initial) progress has harmed the environment, but I would argue that it is only technology (and progress) that can rectify those harms. For example, rich countries can afford to protect their natural environment far more than poor countries can. I've written about it here: https://www.ourlongwalk.com/p/how-do-we-save-the-environment?