Scholarship and the Future of Society
Historians like to say that correlation is not the same as causation. But evidence of correlation is often the starting point for an inquiry into causation. Here is one such inquiry: How might the loss of humanistic thinking generally, and historical thinking specifically, be connected to the current dysfunction of American politics and to the erosion of America’s position in the world?
In asking this question, I do not mean to suggest that the loss of humanistic and historical thinking is the only cause, or even most important one; clearly there are many causes. Some very important ones relate to form or structure, such as closed primaries and gerrymandering. But a quasi-mechanistic diagnosis of what ails the United States is inadequate. Something even more fundamental has gone wrong — a sickness of the soul, not just a sickness of the body. A sickness of the body calls for the sciences. A sickness of the soul calls for the humanities. The difficulty is that the humanities, as currently constituted, are in no position to provide a remedy, having themselves contributed to the illness in the first place.
Properly understood, the scholarly humanities have both substantive and procedural commitments, which feed each other. The substantive commitment is that human beings are worth trying to understand in all their diversity and complexity. The procedural commitment is that there are certain rules, particularly concerning the use of evidence, that one must follow in attempting to understand human beings. These two commitments secure each other: we have rules to ensure that we are trying to understand people on their own terms, because it is so tempting to narcissistically impose our own humanity on others; and we see people in all their complexity because our rules encourage us to do so. The importance of rules is why the scholarly fields are called the scholarly disciplines, and not the scholarly do-whatever-you-wants.
All the humanities enlarge our understanding of what it means to be human, but only the study of history does so by tethering that understanding to the largest store of facts (however they are interpreted) about real human behavior that we have, which is the past. This axiomatic realism is what distinguishes history from literature. While the other humanistic disciplines cultivate similar qualities of empathy and imagination, only the study of history subjects those qualities to the procedural requirements governing the interpretation of historical evidence. Unlike writers and poets and painters, historians must answer to those requirements: they are obliged to refrain from cherry-picking or inventing evidence, to consider alternative explanations, to test their hypotheses, and so forth, not only for the sake of intellectual rigor but also because we study real people, with no more or less human dignity than we ourselves possess.
The complex interplay between the study of human beings who lived in the past and the rules governing that study are essential to the formation of a humane sense of self — one bounded by, and bounding, a sense of other selves. The historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood called this interplay “re-enactment” and saw it as fundamental to self-knowledge and to the knowledge of others. From his perspective, re-enactment involves a delicate balancing act between self-surrender and self-assertion, passivity and activity, altruism and narcissism. On the one hand, it requires trying to set one’s own ego aside in order to see the world through someone else’s eyes. On the other hand, the only way to translate, or make sense of, someone else’s life experience is in the context of one’s own. This attempt at sense-making is active, not passive: the historian re-enacting another’s knowledge “criticizes it, forms his own judgement of its value, corrects whatever errors he can discern in it.” Hence, Collingwood reasoned, “it may thus be said that historical inquiry reveals to the historian the powers of his own mind.” Since people can gain these forms of self-knowledge and knowledge of others only through the historical method, it is as vital in the present as it is for the past: “If it is by historical thinking that we re-think and so rediscover the thought of Hammurabi or Solon, it is in the same way that we discover the thought of a friend who writes us a letter, or a stranger who crosses the street.” People who cannot think historically, in other words, are cut off from their own humanity and that of others, cut off from Milton’s “human face divine.”
Much as historical thinking nurtures inter-subjective humility, so it nurtures inter-generational humility. If “re-enactment” of another’s experiences is how we establish our sense of self in space, then it is also how we establish our sense of self in time. The historian William Appleman Williams beautifully connected the methods of the historical discipline to its inter-generational substance:
The method of history is neither to by-pass and dismiss nor to pick and choose according to preconceived notions; rather it is a study of the past so that we can come back into our own time of troubles having shared with the men of the past their dilemmas, having learned from the experiences, having been buoyed up by their courage and creativeness and sobered by their shortsightedness and failures. We shall then be better equipped to redefine our own dilemmas and problems as opportunities and possibilities and to proceed with positive rather than negative programs and policies. This enrichment and improvement through research and reflection is the essence of being human, and it is the heart of the historical method.
Practicing the historical method cultivates, or ought to cultivate, a humble sense of our own temporal finitude, and along with it a sense of inter-generational stewardship. In effect, it extends the golden rule through time: do unto past generations as you would like future generations to do unto you. By treating past generations as subjects to be understood, rather than as objects to be manipulated for contemporary advantage, the present generation stakes its moral claim to be treated with the same respect by future generations.
Indeed, one way to convey the social, cultural, and political stakes of the scholarly humanities is to say that they secularize the moral and epistemological dilemma at the heart of the Christian doctrine of original sin. The dilemma consists of being unable to have knowledge — of self and of goodness — without disunion from God and each other, and of being unable to be self-knowing and good without union with God and each other. This is the great theme of Genesis and of its finest exegesis, Milton’s Paradise Lost. Until Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they live in perfect union with God and with each other, and their bliss is ignorance. God himself creates the possibility of disunity by giving them free will, because He understands that unity without freedom lacks faith and goodness (“Not free, what proof could they have giv’n sincere / of true allegiance, constant faith or love, / Where only what they needs must do, appeared, / Not what they would?”). Total unity is, in a sense, totalitarian. Adam’s and Eve’s decision to eat from the tree constitutes the first act of human freedom and the origins of knowledge — of good as different from evil, of humanity as different from God, of human beings as different from each other. In Paradise Lost, it also constitutes the beginning of history, which will end at the time of the Second Coming, when Milton’s God (as in 1 Corinthians 15:28) will once again be “All in All” — a state of perfect unity.
During this period of history, humankind exists in a state of epistemological and moral dilemma. We cannot know ourselves without having a sense of otherness, but a sense of otherness easily transmutes into a sense of self-inadequacy (self-abnegation) or justifies a sense of self-superiority (narcissism). As Reinhold Niebuhr put it,
Self-consciousness means the recognition of finiteness within infinity. The mind recognizes the ego as an insignificant point amidst the immensities of the world. In all vital self-consciousness there is a note of protest against this finiteness. It may express itself in religion by the desire to be absorbed in infinitude. On the secular level it expresses itself in man’s effort to universalize himself and give his life a significance beyond himself. The root of imperialism is therefore in all self-consciousness.
Here is expressed the basic dilemma of historical re-enactment identified by Collingwood. Historians can enlarge their self-knowledge only by acquiring knowledge of others. But that attempt to understand others easily transmutes into a loss of sense of self, whereby one becomes subsumed into the infinitude of evidence (and never publishes), or into a tyrannical sense of self, whereby one imposes one’s own selfhood on others (by cherry-picking evidence in support of one’s preferred thesis). The same dilemma exists across time as well as space. Historians can become so absorbed in the past that they cannot translate it to the present (antiquarianism), or they can become so dominated by the present that they refuse to try to understand the past on its own terms (presentism). Historical re-enactment is thus a constant toggling between what Martin Buber called “I-thou” relationships and “I-it” relationships, between empathizing with others as subjects through unity with their consciousness and studying them as objects through disunity with their consciousness.
By accustoming people to live with this dilemma, the scholarly humanities tend to inoculate against humanity’s worst scourges: the perennial false promise of ideological absolutism, and the distinctively modern false promise of technocratic optimization. Both of these are forms of anti-politics, to borrow David Bell’s term in these pages, pretending to offer an escape from the world of dilemma, which is to say from the world of liberal-democratic politics — the world of compromise, of messiness, of choosing between bad and worse options rather than between good and bad options. Like Christian humanism, secular humanism teaches that the acceptance of dilemma is humane, while attempts to escape it lead to gross inhumanity. The similarities go farther still. Both Christian and secular humanism seek goodness rather than perfection, because both understand that perfection belongs to an inhuman realm, and thus that any human quest for perfection is hubristic. Both are anti-utopian. Both have a sense of limits, especially of self-limitation, as an ethical imperative, so as to honor the humanity of others and acknowledge the imperfections of one’s own. Both accept the impossibility of fully straightening out humankind’s crooked timber; both see that attempts to do so must lead to great evil. Both have a conservative streak, which does not prevent them from pursuing progress but does make them sensitive to its imperfections and downsides.
Both also involve living with doubt about how well or badly one is doing as measured against a sense of the absolute, which is how Niebuhr defined religion. In Christianity, the absolute is God; in the scholarly humanities, the absolute is what Donne called “that library where every book shall lie open to one another.” For Donne, God, and only God, was the perfect scholar, whose hand was capable of translating the chapters of human life into a better language and re-binding the leaves that scattered with original sin. But Donne encouraged the pursuit of scholarship by heeding the message of the tolling bell, which calls us to read as many chapters of humanity as we can in our fallen state. Partial failure is guaranteed. Thus scholars who hear the tolling bell feel both a sense of the absolute and a sense of doubt about their proximity to it.
Humanistic proceduralism, the imperative of method, which has the moral force of the biblical commandments, exists to calibrate scholars’ doubt. On the one hand, following procedure gives scholars confidence in the integrity of their work. On the other hand, following procedure prevents this confidence from transmuting into arrogance, a false belief in the definitiveness of their work. Procedure forces humanists to slow down, to be attentive to the complexity of evidence that narcissists, imperialists, and tyrants try to over-simplify. Scholars submit to the discipline of procedure, even — especially — when they would rather rush into print, in order to ensure that they treat their subjects as real people to be understood and explained, not as abstract projections of their own egos to be praised or blamed.
This scholarly practice is also a political one. Understanding its politics is critical to defending liberalism against its opponents.
The most common scholarly analogy for liberalism is science, and understandably, given that its historical instantiations have tended to believe in the scientistic trinity of rationalism, technology, and progress. In its scientific mode, liberalism is apt to be experienced as cold, lonely, and alienating. It lacks a sense of connection to other human beings as thinking, feeling creatures. But liberalism also has a humanistic mode, which cultivates empathy where scientific liberalism does not. Empathy need not lead to feelings of warmth — it can lead to revulsion, as indeed it sometimes should — but it is a precondition for friendship and love. How can any human union — marital, national, or otherwise — survive without friendship and love, without re-enacting at human scale what the religious mind understands as the communion between God and man?
The strongest humanistic scholarship supplies the strongest possible basis for mutual understanding, and therefore for the strongest secular unions. Those bonds are humanistic bonds. In a wonderful essay in these pages, Michael Ignatieff correctly observed that rigorous scholarship, whether humanistic or scientific, has an “intransigently solitary” quality that places it “in radical contradiction” with “the ethos that liberal democracy encourages — civility, deliberation, compromise.” But as he himself notes, rigorous scholarship also “demands a difficult kind of honesty, a willingness to concede defeat when the evidence is against you, and enough resilience to resume the search for the answer that still eludes you.” Given that “the evidence” in the humanities consists of other human beings, scholarship has a profoundly social as well as solitary (or anti-social) quality. The willingness to concede when the human evidence gathered by the scholarly process fails to provide the outcome one wants — this is the essence of liberal democracy. If following the rules doesn’t get you the result you want, you don’t get to change the rules.
Like liberal democracy, humanism, whether religious or scholarly, balances rights and obligations, self-assertion and self-restraint. The “post-liberals” on the right today err by reducing liberalism to the former and ignoring the latter. Liberalism evolved its balance of rights and restraints in reaction against the violence caused by political and religious absolutism. Liberalism diagnosed this violence as stemming, in a sense, from narcissism — from the monarchical or religious ego run imperialistically amok, as concerned with its own rights as it was unconcerned with anyone else’s. Liberalism did not oppose religion per se — if it did, it would not protect religious liberty alongside other liberties — but rather a particular kind of religiosity, one whose anti-humanism and inhumaneness made its earthly as well as heavenly ambitions totalitarian. Liberalism’s conceptualization of the rights-bearing individual as the proper locus of political order was indeed a major innovation, but so, too, was its insight that nothing, not even religion or kingship, licensed the abrogation of individual rights. All people, religious or otherwise, however convinced of their own righteousness, were obliged to limit the pursuit of their own perceived rights within the bounds of non-conflict with others’ rights.
Liberalism thus evolved as an antidote to authoritarian libertinism, not as a license to it, contra the post-liberals. Its innovation of the rights-bearing individual was necessarily accompanied by the innovation of the obligations-bearing individual. The bearer is individual, but the obligations are communal. This dual innovation so closely mimics the logic of Christian humanism as to call into question whether it was any more an Enlightenment innovation, which is how some of its defenders as well as its opponents understand it, than a religious bequest. In effect, liberal democracy, like scholarly humanism, has the functional equivalent of the doctrine of original sin.
This functionally religious logic helps to explain why liberal democracy attracts opposition not only from religious absolutists but also from neo-Nietzscheans, with whom the religionists sometimes make strange bedfellows. If liberal democracy had no restraints, if it were truly a system of libertinism and licentiousness, neo-Nietzscheans would have nothing to complain about. They could pursue meaning and authenticity however they wished; they could be supermen, and beyond good and evil. But liberal democracy does not permit them to do so. It demands that they, like everyone else, balance their self-assertion with their self-restraint.
Historically, liberal conceptions of self-restraint have extended from the political to the sexual realm, and this extension helps to explain why the counter-reaction to liberalism so often focuses on gender and sexuality. A defining characteristic of the premier liberals of the nineteenth century, the Victorians, was their ethic of sexual self-restraint (which disappears in post-liberals’ account of liberalism as libertine). This ethic had a strong norm, however honored in the breach, against men having sex outside of marriage; it sought to domesticate testosterone, so to speak, and thus can be seen as feminizing. Unsurprisingly, some particularly trenchant critics of liberalism have been men — such as Nietzsche, Foucault, and Costin Alamariu (a.k.a. “Bronze Age Pervert,” a prominent thinker on the “new right”) — whose sexuality has not conformed to Victorian norms.
These men, whose politics do not fall neatly on a left-right spectrum, take liberalism’s bourgeois sexual repressiveness as a metaphor for liberalism as a whole. For them, liberalism is simply a mask for power, one that in some profound sense alienates humanity from itself. The queer theory of Foucault’s disciples, the gay aestheticism of Diaghilev, and fascism’s “aestheticization of politics” (to borrow Modris Eksteins’ borrowing of Walter Benjamin) all owe an intellectual debt to this neo-Nietzschean tradition. Wokeness is the political project associated with the intellectual tradition of queer theory, a branch of critical theory; fascism is the political project associated with that of Nietzscheanism. Although the historical instantiation that dominates our image of fascism — Nazism — was deeply homophobic, fascism need not be; indeed the homo-sociality of the trench spirit that the Nazis sought to recreate, as well as the homo-eroticism of Nazi art, reflect the neo-Nietzschean influence. Fascism may be understood as a toxically masculine response to what fascists regard as the toxic femininity of liberalism.
The point here is not that reading Foucault makes you woke or reading Nietzsche makes you a fascist, any more than reading Marx makes you a communist. The intellectual traditions of critical theory, Nietzscheanism, and Marxism are complex; reading in them can deepen and enrich one’s commitment to liberal democracy no less than overturn it. The political projects with which these traditions have historically been associated cannot be reduced to them.
But that said, these traditions lend themselves to certain political projects. What unites woke queer theorists and fascist neo-Nietzscheans with post-liberal religious believers is a shared opposition to liberal-democratic humanism. Woke queer theorists don’t like that this tradition has restraints. Fascists and post-liberals don’t like that the restraints in this tradition operate against them. Gay fascists and post-liberals may split over the question of homosexuality, but they share an anti-feminism, rooted in their sense of liberalism as excessively feminized. All of these people — woke queer theorists, fascists, and post-liberals — have given up on working out norms around gender and sexuality, or around anything else, that comport with liberal-democratic humanism, as if decency lies elsewhere or nowhere at all.
Viewing this formidable array of opponents to liberal-democratic humanism, you might think that the scholarly humanities, and especially historians, would rally to the defense of their finest traditions, demanding maximal procedural rigor in the pursuit of substantive excellence. You would, of course, be wrong.
The scholarly humanities have momentously decided to join, rather than to try to beat, the forces arrayed against liberal-democratic humanism. As the rhetoric of war against internal enemies has suffused the new right, the humanities have declined to treat their allergy to the study of war and foolishly ceded military history and its larger implications to parochial clique. Instead of fighting under the sign of Clausewitz, whose understanding of war as the continuation of politics by other means expressed his profound humanism, they have chosen instead to fight under the sign of Foucault, whose inversion of the Clausewitzian dictum reflected his equally profound anti-humanism. The Foucauldian inversion — that politics is the continuation of war by other means — is an anti-politics. It replaces the argument, persuasion, negotiation, compromise, and tolerance at the heart of liberal-democratic politics with a brute struggle for power. It is as though ostensible humanists have decided to try to fight what they regard as fascism on fascism’s own terms. For people who see themselves as beleaguered resistance fighters, symmetrical warfare is a strange strategic choice — though a more rational one for those who occupy a strong position on the commanding heights of culture.
Wokeness is the most remarked-upon result of this strategy, but it is much more symptom than disease. It could not have ravaged the body humanistic if it had encountered a stronger immune system, one with a greater commitment to scholarly process. Key tenets of wokeness, which draws on multiple branches of critical theory — including both queer theory and critical race theory — are inconsistent with each other and cannot withstand scrutiny. Race, for instance, which has virtually no biological basis, is radically essentialized (trans-racialism is therefore impossible), while gender, which has a stronger claim to a biological basis however mediated by culture, is radically de-essentialized (trans-genderism is therefore a matter of self-identification). But humanists either cannot see these inconsistencies or will not point them out. A collapse of humanistic standards and an epidemic of moral cowardice made wokeness in academia possible, not vice-versa — much as anti-humanism and moral cowardice in the Republican Party made Donald Trump possible. That collapse has deep roots.
Like Trumpism, wokeness is not infrequently compared to a religious cult, and with reason — but if wokeness is a religion, then it is one with a distinctive understanding of the relationship between the human and the divine, of original sin, and of the place of doubt in faith. The Church of Wokeness has no notion of all human beings having been made in God’s image. There is no common humanity to hold us all together; there is only a relentlessly atomizing impulse to discover our own uniqueness, or the bulldozing of individuality by sub-group identities. Hence the Church of Wokeness does not understand original sin to afflict all human beings qua human beings, but only those belonging to particular groups. For those in the wrong identity groups, there is no hope of divine grace or of humanistic self-transcendence through inter-subjective understanding; there is only the purchase of indulgences from the high priests of DEI. Thus indoctrinated, members of the Church of Wokeness oscillate wildly between the two extremes that humanism navigates: on the one hand, absolute certainty in their own virtue; on the other hand, self-abnegating certainty in the impossibility of grace. If the Church of the Humanities had been stronger, it would have denounced the Church of Wokeness as a breakaway sect, but its own faith had grown so weak that it could not recognize the sectarianism.
The historical profession has participated in, perhaps even led, the humanities’ turn away from the liberal-democratic politics of scholarly humanism. Its alternative politics can be understood as illiberal politics or as anti-politics, which are functionally similar. On the one hand, the historical profession today indulges in narcissistic, imperialistic presentism, replacing an “I-thou” relationship between the present and past with an “I-it” relationship. A good example of this tendency may be found in one of the statements by the American Historical Association (AHA), prompted by the controversy over the 1619 Project, in which the AHA declared that “knowledge of the past exists to serve the needs of the living.” On the other hand, the historical profession invokes its technocratic credentials to deny that it is behaving politically, while adopting a militaristic bunker mentality of being under attack by outside forces. The bunker mentality in turn justifies an ever greater reluctance to find enemies to the left and ever more intellectually dishonest recourse to the camouflage of technocracy. A good example of this tendency appeared in the previous sentence of the same AHA statement, which declared that “educators must provide an accurate view of the past” and that “professional educators,” not “elected officials,” should decide what constitutes accuracy. There is a certain tension, shall we say, between those two sentences.
That tension points to the flaws in the prevailing understanding of the role of critical theory in the culture wars. Contra the right, critical theory is not the problem with wokeness, at least not in any straightforward way. In fact, the problem could just as easily be described as an absence of critical theory: people who reflexively invoke their disciplinary credentials (“follow the PhDs!”) to defend against attacks from populists are not people who take Foucault’s defense of subjugated knowledges as seriously as they claim. Indeed, the anti-Foucauldian behavior of the woke left in academia (and other sense-making institutions) is why so many on the right have turned to critical theory to attack wokeness. For instance, concepts put forward by thinkers on the new right — for instance, the “Cathedral” of Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug) and the “Iron Prison” of Alamariu, which describe a distributed set of disciplinary technocratic institutions — are Foucauldian to their core. Sometimes critics of wokeness on the right honestly acknowledge their debt to critical theory, like those White House advisors to Trump who, as Geoff Shullenberger has shown, did graduate work on the subject. At other times, these critics plagiarize, à la Ron DeSantis, denouncing critical theory even as they draw on its insights into the working of informal cultural, as distinct from formal political, power. The woke left does not call out this plagiarism, despite its crocodile tears over right-wing violations of scholarly standards, because the appearance of total polarity serves its interests no less than those of the MAGA movement. The fundamental problem with wokeness in academia is not that it is left-wing, but that it is anti-scholarly
All the pathologies of the woke turn — or rather the anti-scholarly turn — in the humanities were on display in l’affaire James Sweet. To recap: in August 2022, Sweet, the president of the AHA and a historian of slavery, used his monthly column in the AHA’s newsletter to suggest, by way of analyzing contemporary public debates over the history of slavery, that the profession’s rampant presentism might not serve its long-term interests or honor its fiduciary obligations to the public. His energetic attempts to bend over backwards so as to avoid offending his woke colleagues made his column rather milquetoast but, predictably, his exaggerated sensitivities availed him not at all, and the usual mob reaction ensued. On “academic Twitter” (a contradiction in terms), he was accused of being racist, of hurting his black colleagues, and of carrying water for the right. Within forty-eight hours he issued an apology, which he insists did not constitute a retraction. (He smoked but he didn’t inhale.) Sweet’s sin, in the eyes of his critics, was that he had broken faith with wokeness. MAGA has its RINOs (Republican in Name Only); wokeness has its WINOs (Woke in Name Only). Religions don’t like heretics, but they hate apostates, who, unlike heretics, do not have the excuse of never having known any better. The Sweet affair demonstrated the inversion of the substantive and procedural commitments at the heart of historical study. Instead of a virtuous feedback loop between humanism and proceduralism, we now have a vicious feedback loop between anti-humanism and anti-proceduralism. The essential connection between method and tolerance has been erased. This degradation of the humanities is driven by the conviction that our issues today are so much more important than whatever happened in the past that we are justified in turning historical subjects into historical objects — making them playthings of whatever contemporary political, social, or other agenda we seek to advance.
This behavior is professionally idiotic and civically tragic. When historians and humanists pooh-pooh their almost invariably left-wing violations of scholarly rules as misdemeanors compared to the felonies of the right, they betray a bizarre and unfounded lack of confidence in the importance of what they do. What is more important than educating the young? What is more important than safeguarding our generational right to be treated with respect by future generations? What is more important than preserving the treasures of the civilization that makes our livelihoods possible? What is more important than protecting the largest database of human behavior we have from cynical instrumentalization? Have we not read 1984?
One of the crucial ingredients of tyranny in the present is control of historical knowledge — indeed, it is difficult to imagine a tyrant who lacks such control, lest the past afford politically threatening visions of how society should be more justly structured. From the tyrant’s perspective, the past is no less potent a rival power center than an opposition political party or an independent judiciary. Why did Stalin erase the victims of purges from photographs? Why does Putin claim that Ukraine has always been Russian? Tyrants weaponize the past in order to crush their opponents in the present. How unutterably self-defeating, how deep a betrayal of their civic duty, for historians to legitimize such weaponization by engaging in it themselves for their own preferred ends! It is an abuse of power. Like tyrants, we are insisting on a right to discipline others while refusing to discipline ourselves. Expertise is meaningless if it is not limited. If we do not respect the limits of our expertise, why should anyone respect our expertise?
It cannot be a mere coincidence that as the historical profession has so largely given up on its commitment to scholarly humanism and scholarly proceduralism, so many Americans across the political spectrum have given up on civic humanism and liberal-democratic proceduralism.
The rising tide of illiberalism on both the hard left and the hard right is characterized by an ends-justify-the-means mentality — a willingness to break the rules in order to secure the outcome they want. This is the political analogue of the narcissistic anti-proceduralism, the rejection of method in favor of ideology, in the historical profession. Just as it is incompatible with humanistic scholarship, so it is incompatible with liberal democracy, which is based on the proceduralist commitment that outcomes reached through procedural violations, however morally appealing their substance may be, are illegitimate.
In liberal-democratic politics as in scholarship, the commitment to procedure has a moral basis. Essentially, it lifts the golden rule — do unto others as you would have them do unto you — to the level of a whole nation. Being enraged at someone is not a sufficient justification to strip them of their right to due process, any more than someone else being enraged at you is sufficient justification to strip you of your right to due process. The substantive moral commitment which grounds proceduralism, as it does the golden rule, is the belief in shared human dignity. That humanistic conviction is why proceduralism prohibits us from violating the rights of our fellow citizens. We may not like them, but we recognize that their humanity has no weaker a claim on rights than ours. Proceduralism thus goes hand-in-hand with humanism.
But the feedback loop between them is now moving in reverse. In politics, as in the historical profession, anti-humanism and anti-proceduralism are feeding each other.
On the one hand, across the political spectrum, there is a rampant reliance on caricatures, a refusal to see individuals in their three-dimensional human complexity. The hard right lumps everyone it dislikes into “woke mobs,” including those who are neither woke nor mobbish. Meanwhile the hard left sees everyone it disagrees with as white supremacists, transphobes, and so on, seeing no daylight between, say, those who call for the “eradication” of transgenderism and those who would limit the participation of trans-men in women’s sports but at the same time believe that transgenderism is natural and that trans people should have full civil rights. Both the hard right and the hard left are intolerant of pluralism and diversity; both are incapable of grappling with nuance and complexity; both are dehumanizing and inhumane. That dehumanization encourages violations of rules, because why bother respecting due process for someone less than fully human. On the other hand, equally across the political spectrum, there is a growing willingness to break the rules. The ur-example, of course, remains the January 6 assault on the Capitol. But there are plenty of more mundane examples, such as attempts to abolish the filibuster and to pass huge spending bills by abusing reconciliation. A nice illustration of the politically protean nature of the rule-breaking impulse was supplied by The New York Times’ publication of a plea from two law professors on the left “to reclaim America from constitutionalism” — “why justify our politics by the Constitution?” they impatiently asked — and its publication two weeks later of an article about interest on the right in calling a new constitutional convention. Not following the rules makes it easier to dehumanize people, because we no longer have to slow down and try to understand them in all their complex subjectivity.
This mental laziness is excused by a sort of fatalism about the possibility and the effects of empathy. We differ so fundamentally from our opponents, the epistemologists of extremism claim, that we cannot possibly understand them, and we pollute ourselves by trying. Were the historical profession today not itself so fatalistic, it would stand as a stinging rebuke to this fatalism. It is ludicrous to think that the imaginative distance between a Trump supporter and a Biden supporter is greater than the imaginative distance between either of them and a medieval peasant. The historical profession is premised on the idea that, through imagination disciplined by historical evidence, it is possible for a historian in the twenty-first century, who almost certainly believes that the condition of one’s birth should not determine one’s station in life, to understand how the world looked to someone in the thirteenth century, who saw a society of ranks and privileges as a natural order. It is equally ludicrous to think that there is anyone more evil today than Hitler, Stalin, and the other monsters with whom historians routinely empathize without turning into mass murderers themselves. Historians who deny the possibility and desirability of inter-subjective understanding not only fly in the face of this professional premise but also set a terrible example for all Americans.
The effects of historians’ failure to insist on the possibility and importance of inter-subjective understanding are particularly clear in the realm of fiscal and environmental policy. As historians’ confidence in this understanding has weakened, so too has their confidence in its possibility across generations. This weakening affects cuts in multiple temporal directions. With no sense of obligation to preserve an inheritance from the past, the present has no sense of obligation to pass on an inheritance to the future. Can its voracious consumption of fiscal and environmental resources, both of which will perilously reduce the freedom of action for future generations, be unconnected to the presentism of the profession most obliged to be anti-presentist?
It is vital for historians to reckon with the flaws of their profession as an institution, not only for their own sake but for the sake of the nation that supports their institution, and to reflect on the ways that they have fed and been fed by the most inhumane and dehumanizing impulses in American life today. It is true that there are forces outside the historical profession that want to destroy it, for reasons that I vigorously disagree with — for instance, for the reason that studying the past is not “useful,” with “usefulness” defined in a narrow market-based sense. In reality, there is not much that is more “useful” when it comes to educating free citizens in a liberal democracy than studying the past. Its “utility” is overwhelming. Yet it is also the case that the historical profession has not cared for this “utility” and has not been doing the job properly, and so it has sacrificed the moral high ground to resist the misguided and sometimes malicious calls to defund it.
The historical profession cannot survive without honesty, and it cannot have honesty if it engages in “enemy thinking,” to borrow Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrase, about everyone who criticizes it, especially from the right. Put differently, the profession may be in the process of being murdered, but it is also in the process of committing suicide — a characterization true of a number of important institutions in American life.
Scholarly standards, like liberal-democratic standards, exist to protect us from our worst instincts and to encourage us to live up to our highest potential as human beings. As historians and as Americans, we can justify breaking the rules and violating the standards however we wish, but the justification can only ever be a variation on what Milton called the tyrant’s plea of necessity, that the ends justify the means. In historical scholarship and in liberal democracy, the means justify the ends. When we forget this, we imperil not only the humanities but humaneness itself.
It is a pathology of the modern United States that Americans require a national-security justification to do almost anything; they clothe everything they do, from the war on poverty to the war on drugs, in militarized language. Obviously they should renew their commitment to rigorous humanism and a liberal democracy because it is the right thing to do, not because it is a national security issue. But it is also a national security issue.
The loss of capacity for methodologically rigorous humanistic thought has implications not only for liberal democracy in the United States but also for its position in the world. It is ironic and tragic that the United States has experienced this loss even as it has become de rigueur to narrate the turn of the century as a transition from the “end of history” to the “return of history.” History has certainly returned (or rather never went away). Yet a sense of history has not returned with it.
It isn’t the 1950s anymore. The United States no longer bestrides a world digging out of the rubble of World War II. The Soviet Union no longer exists, but the United States faces a much more potent challenger to its position atop the global power rankings in China, which has not only the military prowess of the Soviet Union but also far greater economic strength. The United States cannot fritter away its national unity without geopolitical consequence. The principal beneficiary of socio-political dysfunction in the United States and in the Western alliance is, of course, China. By neglecting the humanities, which play a crucial role in nurturing a sense of liberal-democratic unity in a pluralistic nation and alliance, the United States is giving a strategic gift to China.
Since the pertinence of humanistic scholarship to American foreign policy is not obvious, let me explain. Strategy requires a particular kind of thinking. Such thinking will be a condition of American strength in the era of great power rivalry that has now begun. Yet the neglect of intellectual rigor, the decline of its prestige in our culture, will inevitably damage the United States’ ability to formulate its strategy amid all the danger and competition. Michael Ignatieff’s recent warning in these pages about the importance of understanding what thinking is applies powerfully to strategy:
We are confused about what thinking is. To think is not to process information. We have impoverished our understanding of thinking by analogizing it to what our machines do. What we do is not processing. It is not computation. It is not data analysis. It is a distinctively, incorrigibly human activity that is a complex combination of conscious and unconscious, rational and intuitive, logical and emotional reflection. It is so complex that neither neurologists nor philosophers have found a way to model it, and the engineers of artificial intelligence are still struggling to replicate some of the simplest forms of pattern recognition that human cognition does so effortlessly. We must beware that in our attempt to make computers think like us we do not end up thinking like them.
American policymakers — particularly in the US Navy, which would play the lead role in any conflict with China — think too much like computers. When all you have is STEM, everything looks like an engineering problem with a technical or technological solution. The Navy has reduced the competition with China to a combat problem and is searching for a technological silver bullet with sufficient “lethality” (an insipid term that is to the Pentagon what “disruption” is to Silicon Valley). How else to explain the Navy’s failure to articulate how victory in combat (“kinetic”) operations against the PLA Navy would advance the strategic end of compelling China to change its behavior? How else to explain its asinine expectation, as noted by Matthew Suarez, that it can leave the tasks of trade protection and interdiction, which have preoccupied the navies of great powers in virtually every maritime war in history, to the tiny navies of “allies and partners”? A war with China would massively disrupt the global economy, and the US Navy will not operate in a hermetically sealed cocoon of combat operations. The American people and neutral stakeholders will besiege it with demands for protection.
The impulse to turn human beings into engineering problems also manifests itself in the instrumentalization of the humanities in the fields of war studies and strategic studies. “Scholars” in these fields, unlike actual scholars in the humanities, are more interested in using findings from the humanities to identify “lessons,” discover “principles,” and build models abstracted from the particular human (usually historical) contexts to which they belong. In effect, this approach turns the humanities into an instrumental technology. Since the emphasis is on instrumentalization rather than on understanding, the bar for expertise in these fields is low; today’s “experts” on economic warfare are yesterday’s experts on cyberwar, who were the previous day’s experts on Islamic terrorism, who before that were Kremlinologists. (There are exceptions, of course, but they prove rather than disprove the rule.) Human beings are not engineering problems. As John Lewis Gaddis put it, they are molecules with minds of their own. In war, as Clausewitz observed, the will is directed at an animate object that reacts. Hence the formulation of strategy requires the ability to interpret the behavior of other human beings. Data alone won’t cut it.
Shortages of manpower and material may be excused. Not so shortages of brainpower. The historian Marc Bloch, in reflecting on the reasons for France’s shocking fall to the Nazis in 1940, wrote that “the German triumph was, essentially, a triumph of intellect — and it is that which makes it so peculiarly serious.” Instead of studying history rigorously, with as much interest in change as in continuity, the French studied it selectively. Bloch recalled a lecture on Napoleonic tactics given in 1910 by Ferdinand Foch, the future Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in World War I, in which Foch “exhibited them as models to be followed irrespective of any changes that might have taken place in the world since Napoleon’s time.” And this type of intellectual shallowness was not limited to the military. “As a nation,” Bloch wrote, “we had been content with incomplete knowledge and imperfectly thought-out ideas,” adding that “such an attitude is not a good preparation for military success.” Rather, “this mental laziness” led to “a gloomy mood of self-satisfaction.” Bloch, who in World War II joined the French resistance and was tortured and executed by the Gestapo in 1944 (Strange Defeat was published posthumously), castigated the government for having abdicated its ultimate responsibility for French security: “nothing shed a cruder light on the spinelessness of Government than its capitulation to the technicians.”
The great historian’s analysis was correct. Those who seek the causes of the French defeat in the technical realm — especially in the realm of armor — merely capitulate again to the technicians. The French actually had more and better tanks than the Germans. What they did not have was an effective way of using them: they made decisions more slowly than the tanks could move. The reason for this slowness was that French command-and-control was highly centralized. As the historian Eugenia Kiesling has shown, the reason for the centralization was that the French army’s reserves lacked the training to be entrusted with decision-making responsibility. The reason for this lack of training was mutual distrust between the army and the political left. At the same time, French businesses, on the grounds of liberal property rights, resisted government attempts to prepare the economy for war in time of peace. In short, the proximate cause of the French defeat was that their military could not match the speed of German decision-making; the ultimate cause was the nation’s failure to overcome its bitter divisions in the face of an existential threat. This is a social, political, psychological, and economic story, which is the stuff of the humanities. It is not the stuff of STEM, which can get us no farther than the technical nuts-and-bolts of French and German tanks, or of our own missiles.
Bloch’s heroism is itself a testimony to the role of historical and humanistic understanding in determining the fate of a society. His post-mortem of a gloomily self-satisfied nation riven by internal tensions in the face of a determined competitor should serve as a warning today. The United States is so self-absorbed that it forgets about the outside world. Steadily we make ourselves weak and irrelevant. The threat of China is growing larger while Americans fantasize about national divorce. If we are broken, it is because we broke ourselves. Yet the sciences cannot fix social and political dysfunction. Only the humanities can; but first they must fix or be fixed themselves.