The Politics of History. Howard Boone's Zinn
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narrative as opposed to theoretical history? What is history for, anyway, and what is the responsibility of the historian? One of these essays suggests some criteria for a radical history.
The middle part of the book—the essays in history—represents an attempt to begin to meet those criteria for a radical history. These essays do not have the usual connective tissue of standard historical works; they do not deal with a specific period, or with all periods, or with one problem of the American past. What ties each to the others is a common purpose—to participate a bit in the social combat of our time. Whether or not the essays actually fulfill this aim, I leave to the reader to judge. I have my own doubts. My chief hope is to provoke more historical writing which is consciously activist on behalf of the kind of world which history has not yet disclosed, but perhaps hinted at.
Is it not time that we scholars began to earn our keep in this world? Thanks to a gullible public, we have been honored, flattered, even paid, for producing the largest number of inconsequential studies in the history of civilization: tens of thousands of articles, books, monographs; millions of term papers; enough lectures to deafen the gods. Like politicians, we have thrived on public innocence.
Occasionally, we emerge from the library stacks to sign a petition or deliver a speech, then return to produce even more of inconsequence. We are accustomed to keeping our social commitment extracurricular and our scholarly work safely neutral. We were quick to understand that awe and honor greet those who have flown off into space while people suffer on earth.
If this accusation seems harsh, read the titles of doctoral dissertations published in the past twenty years, and the pages of the leading scholarly journals for the same period, alongside the lists of war dead, the figures on per capita income in Latin America, the autobiography of Malcolm X. We publish while others perish.
The gap between the products of scholarly activity and the needs of a troubled world could be borne with some equanimity so long as the nation seemed to be solving its problems. And for most of our history, this seemed to be the case. We had a race question, but we “solved” it: by a war to end slavery, and by papering over the continued degradation of the black population with laws and rhetoric. Wealth was not distributed equitably; but the New Deal, and then war orders, kept that problem under control—or at least, out of sight. There was turmoil in the world, but we were always at the periphery; the European imperial powers did the nasty work while we nibbled at the edges of their empires (except in Latin America where our firm control was disguised by a fatherly sounding Monroe Doctrine, and the pose of a Good Neighbor).
None of those “solutions” is working anymore. The Black Power revolt, the festering of the cities beyond our control, the rebellion of students against the Vietnam war and the draft—all indicate that the United States has run out of time, space, and rhetoric. The liberal artifacts which represented our farthest reaches toward reform—the Fourteenth Amendment, New Deal welfare legislation, and the U.N. Charter—are not enough. Revolutionary changes are required in social policy.
The trouble is, we don’t know how to make such a revolution. There is no precedent for it in an advanced industrial society where power and wealth are highly concentrated in government, corporations, and the military, while the rest of us have pieces of that fragmented power which political scientists are pleased to call “pluralism.” We have voices, and even votes, but not the means—more crassly, the power—to turn either domestic or foreign policy in completely new directions.
That is why the knowledge industry (the universities, colleges, schools, representing directly fifty billions of the national spending each year) is so important. Knowledge is a form of power. True, force is the most direct form of power, and government has a monopoly of that (as Max Weber once pointed out). But in modern times, when social control rests on “the consent of the governed,” force is kept in abeyance for emergencies, and everyday control is exercised by a set of rules, a fabric of values passed on from one generation to another by the priests and the teachers of the society. What we call the rise of democracy in the world means that force is replaced by deception (a blunt way of saying “education”) as the chief method for keeping society as it is.
This makes knowledge important, because although it cannot confront force directly, it can counteract the deception that makes the government’s force legitimate. And the knowledge industry, which directly reaches seven million young people in colleges and universities, thus becomes a vital and sensitive locus of power. That power can be used, as traditionally, to maintain the status quo, or (as is being demanded by the student rebels) to change it.
Those who command more obvious forms of power (political control and wealth) try also to commandeer knowledge. Industry entices some of the most agile minds for executive posts in business. Government lures others for more glamorous special jobs: physicists to work on H-bombs; biologists to work on what we might call for want of a better name, the field of communicable disease; chemists to work on nerve gas (like that which killed those six thousand sheep in Utah); political scientists to work on counter-insurgency warfare; historians to sit in a room in the White House and wait for a phone call to let them know when history is being made so they can record it. And sometimes one’s field doesn’t matter. War is interdisciplinary.
Most knowledge is not directly bought, however. It can also serve the purpose of social stability in another way—by being squandered on trivia. Thus, the university becomes a playpen in which the society invites its favored children to play—and gives them toys and prizes, to keep them out of trouble. For instance, we might note an article in the leading journal in political science not long ago, dealing with the effects of Hurricane Betsy on the mayoralty election in New Orleans. Or, a team of social psychologists (armed with a fat government grant) may move right into the ghetto (surely the scholar is getting relevant here) and discover two important facts from its extensive, sophisticated research: that black people in the ghetto are poor; and that they have family difficulties.
I am touching a sensitive nerve in the academy now: Am I trying to obliterate all scholarship except the immediately relevant? No—it is a matter of proportion. The erection of new skyscraper office buildings is not offensive in itself, but it becomes lamentable alongside the continued existence of ghetto slums. It was not wrong for the Association of Asian Studies at its 1969 meeting to discuss some problems of the Ming dynasty and a battery of similar remote topics, but no session of the dozens at the meeting dealt with Vietnam.
Aside from trivial or esoteric inquiry, knowledge is also dissipated on pretentious conceptualizing in the social sciences. A catch-phrase can become a stimulus for endless academic discussion, and for the proliferation of debates which go nowhere into the real world, only round and round in ever smaller circles of scholarly discourse. Schemes and models and systems are invented which have the air of profundity and which advance careers, but hardly anything else.
We should not be surprised then at the volatile demonstrations for black studies programs which began around 1967–68, or for the creation of new student-run courses based on radical critiques of American society. Students demanding relevance in scholarship began to be joined in 1968–69 by professors dissenting at the annual ceremonials called Scholarly Meetings: at the American Philosophical Association a resolution denouncing U. S. policy in Vietnam; at the American Political Science Association a new caucus making radical changes in the program; at the American Historical Association, a successful campaign removing the 1968 meeting from Chicago to protest Mayor Daley’s hooliganism; at the Modern Language Association the election of a young radical English teacher to the presidential succession.
Still we remain troubled, because