Exploring Ancient World Cultures
General Essays
A Response to Tyler 100 Years Late
Bill Hemminger
This essay is a response to The Educational Value of the Study of History by Moses Coit Tyler written in 1897.
Professor Tyler's discussion of the benefits of historical study
articulates many of the values that proponents of the concerted study of
the liberal arts cherish yet today. He notes that while the subject
matter of history (and I will extend his argument to include much of what
today we call liberal arts) is neither exact nor absolute, the careful
study of such material demands that students weigh arguments and make
choices, that they recognize and acknowledge limits of facts and factual
presentations, and that they conscientiously make judgements about what
they read based not only on classroom learning or professional training
but on a lifetime of personal reflection and worldly experience. Put in
this context, the study of history demands the fairest and most informed
of minds whose study concerns the complex scope of human involvement in
the world. Such study is of great importance today; Professor Tyler could
be writing about the end of this century as well as his own.
Likewise, Tyler acknowledges that history is not so much a singular
discipline as it is a part of a network of approaches gathered under the
rubric of the humanities. Thus, the good student of literature or art is
also somewhat of a historian, and the serious historian shares a focus and
a methodology with many other fields, the gathering and analyzing of often
conflicting bits of data caught in the shifting cultural sand called
language. Tyler's generous depiction of the historian predates the
contemporary (if idealized!) description of the liberal arts student.
Professor Tyler speaks convincingly of the benefits of study and hard
work; the cultivation of tolerance and fair-mindedness remains an
important aim of the serious student.
At the same time, Professor Tyler remains curiously partisan to the
nationalizing ethos of his time, the end of the nineteenth century, when
America was establishing itself as major contender for world recognition
and world power. Tyler praises the "robust patriotic ardor" that he sees
within the United States; earlier, he endorses nationalistic pride as an
antidote to provincialism. This seems an odd proclamation for someone who
condemns "intellectual partisanship". Interestingly, it appears that
Tyler may have been very accurate in his assessment of the national spirit
of his time. For within a year of the writing of Tyler's essay, the
United States had authored and prosecuted a war with Spain, later
inheriting the overseas possessions of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and
Guam and joining ranks with the imperialist powers of Europe (who had just
years before carved up the African continent to suit their own national
interests). The United States was able to undertake its colonial
activities under the justificatory banner of "manifest destiny." To what a
degree, you might ask, does national sentiment direct our understanding of
events? (For a recent response, look at the nationally-organized pep
rally for the "victors" of the Gulf War and the sanitized accounts of
activities from the front.)
You might well wonder how approval of the public clamor for national greatness and the claims for national interest (at others' expense) might coexist with the supposedly disinterested study of the historian. Yet Tyler makes no bones about aligning himself with American greatness. You might well wonder how the lining-up of nations in the grab for world wealth and world markets informs the flow of historical events, creating a history of the colonized and of those who impose themselves upon others. Surely the conscientious study of history demands that the competition among nations be described as such, the deliberately aggressive imposition of the will of a few upon others. Pride of country raised to the level of jingoism (think of the incessant "We Are Number One" incantations of TV commercials and Olympics spots) surely compromises any caring consideration of other cultures or nations.
Ironically, Professor Tyler's endorsement of nationalistic fervor may
point to the most significant weakness in his argument that history seeks
to get at "the very truth of the human race." He is readily able to
sanction American interests while claiming that he is an "objective
investigator," surely a conflict of interests. There appears to be a
relativity to the truth, for surely the historical account of American
greatness cannot be read by people in Vietnam or Iraq (not to mention many
American blacks or women) without grimace or pain, or the feeling that
many chapters are excised from this account.
In fact, thinkers of the twentieth century have made strong, prevailing
arguments against any sort of absolutism or universalism at all. It has
been argued that there can be no single, "objective" truth.
Anthropologists now acknowledge that much of the drive of that field of
study has been a reductive effort aimed at describing others, usually poor
and non-white, in terms of a western ideal of physical comfort and
material well-being. At the same time, psychologists tell us that we may
never be able to arrive at an objective statement, even about ourselves.
Human behavior responds to deep-seated dreams or phobias as much as it
does to measurable stimuli from the world. We may model bad behaviors and
eschew good ones. Further, our self-interest runs so deep that human
behavior constantly thwarts researchers' efforts to depict or predict that
behavior. It follows that the historian would be subject to similar
self-interests (in this case, national self-interests) and thus always
prone to making generalizations that are motivated by self-interest and
self-preservation.
Then there is the problem of language. Already the objective quality
of some of Tyler's statements has been called into question. But
Professor Tyler implies that there exists an impartial and objective
statement of the world that can be made. Theorists like Foucault and the
claims of deconstructionists suggest that, to a large extent, language is
never an objective tool and that it regularly betrays the hidden aims of
its practitioners. Does Tyler's use of language display prejudices that
do not belong in the fair treatment of historical material?
At the beginning of his essay, Tyler announces that, as knowledge,
history is power, despite the claim that the study of history is fair and
objective. So much for academic study as its own goal and reward. In
several places in the essay, Tyler notes that the study of history
redounds to "noble" instincts and attitudes. The implication is that to
be educated and open-minded is to be noble. It is ironic that the
champion of democracy (who uses the United States as avatar of democratic
well-being) would see the great virtue of his professional work in a
tradition against which his nation rebelled: his essay associates, albeit
indirectly, learned open-mindedness with class (social) distinction. You
have only to glance for a short time at the scarred history of European
nobility to conclude that its constituent members scarcely had a corner on
the liberality market, even if they were more educated that any of their
subjects. You might also wonder about the effectiveness of all that
education, if education is supposed to "elevate" the student. If
anything, etymology shows how strongly and effectively the nobility waged
a propaganda offensive (that equates noble with good, to borrow from
Nietzsche) that creeps into the language of the supposedly objective
academic.
Also in the first paragraph of his essay, Tyler locates his discipline,
history, within the "Republic of Science," thus placing its aims and
procedures (at least in part) within the empirical enterprise of the
sciences. Later in the essay, he links the avid study of history with the
pursuit of progress. These two associations suggest a number of
interesting and unchallenged assumptions. Looking back, we can guess that
"progress," for Tyler, implied the general availability of certain
material goods and that "science" implied a faith in the potential of
technology to satisfy human needs by providing these goods. You need not
look far into the events of the century that succeeded Tyler's to see
that, despite its promises, technology has introduced, not redressed,
anomie and feelings of meaninglessness in human life. The pursuit of
progress makes no reckoning, for instance, of the spiritual needs of
people, or of the relative importance of intimacy and fellowfeeling in
people's lives. And, it must also be recalled that fascists have too
readily availed themselves of technology as a systematic means of
destroying opposition to their certain viewpoints; for others, technology
(always bearing the standard of progress) has become an end in itself. An
uncritical history of progress is surely not the stuff of the cautious and
demanding chronicler.
There are other problems with the glib prescription for "Universal
History" that Tyler makes towards the end of his essay. One benefit of
humanistic research in the last years of this century has been the light
that has been shed on the lives of people and places rarely if ever
mentioned in studies of Universal History. It is not only from works of
literature now that we can read of slaves' accounts of their treatment at
the hands of their owners, or descriptions of the marginalization of
women, or the colonized populations of Africa telling their histories.
One obvious effect of this pluralism is the de-centralizing and the
de-valuation of a single, authorial point of view on any issue relating to
human populations. Humanists and historians must now take into account
the possibility of other understandings of the same set of facts and
analysis, each account motivated automatically by circumstances relating
to the background and biases of the author but each account, fairly
presented, adding to the insights of all the others. Humanists and
historians must now acknowledge that there are indeed other histories and
other accounts of the canonical, "universalized" history that many of us
have accepted as complete fact.
Readers of the Tao te Ching or phenomenologists will take issue with
Tyler's unstated assumption that an objective world, describable or not,
exists at all. Following Descartes, Tyler posits that a human subject can
sit, detached from self and surrounding physical world, and think,
disengaged and disinterested, about events in that world. This paradigm
(and it is a paradigm, of pointed and controlling importance) allows that
there can be a clear separation of human and world, individual and body,
and that mind is somehow distinct from matter, reason universal and
transcendent. It is, as I have stated, the same paradigm that holds that
language is the limpid medium of thought, not a trickster or a traitor.
It is the same paradigm that allowed for the conscientious association of
the qualities good and noble and the rationalization of all forms of
slavery. Is it surprising that Universal History (as we can surely see it
in many history texts currently used) is the history of those who conceive
of history as the triumph of mind over matter or as the confrontation of
the forces of reason versus the threat of chaos? Where are the accounts
of opposing points of view?
At this point you might fear that relativism will supplant critical insight and reasoned analysis. I would argue that there is all the more need for such analysis and insight, with the proviso that we acknowledge that our point of view is always somewhat compromised and our language fraught with all kinds of cultural baggage. Rather than stand mute at the noisy multiplicity of cultures, historians today need to add their voice to the chorus, but recognize that it is but a single voice. Thus, the task of the historian is today even more challenging than Professor Tyler acknowledged at the conclusion of the nineteenth century. The historian might proceed with equal vigor but with the constraints that come with a fairer, less prescriptive approach to the vast world and its various peoples.