The Politics of History. Howard Boone's Zinn
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Rule 5. A scholar must, in order to be “rational,” avoid “emotionalism.” True, emotion can distort. But it can also enhance. If one of the functions of the scholar is accurate description, then it is impossible to describe a war both unemotionally and accurately at the same time. And if the special competence of the mind is in enabling us to perceive what is outside our own limited experience, that competence is furthered, that perception sharpened, by emotion. A large dose of “emotionalism” in the description of slavery would merely begin to convey accurately to a white college student what slavery was like for the black man.
Thus, exactly from the standpoint of what intellect is supposed to do for us—extend the boundaries of our understanding—the “cool, rational, unemotional” approach fails. For too long, white Americans were emotionally separated from what the Negro suffered in this country by cold, and therefore inadequate, historical description. War and violence, divested of their brutality by the prosaic quality of the printed page, became tolerable to the young. (True, the poem and the novel were read in the English classes; but these were neatly separated from the history and government classes.) Reason, to be accurate, must be supplemented by emotion, as Reinhold Niebuhr once reminded us.
Refusing, then, to let ourselves be bound by traditional notions of disinterestedness, objectivity, scientific procedure, rationality—what kinds of work can scholars do, in deliberate unneutral pursuit of a more livable world? Am I urging Orwellian control of scholarly activities? Not at all. I am, rather suggesting that scholars, on their own, reconsider the rules by which they have worked, and begin to turn their intellectual energies to the urgent problems of our time. The true task of education, Alfred North Whitehead cautioned, is to abjure stale knowledge. “Knowledge does not keep any better than fish,” he said. We need to keep it alive, vital, potent.
Specifically, we might use our scholarly time and energy to sharpen the perceptions of the complacent by exposing those facts that any society tends to hide about itself: the facts about wealth and poverty; about tyranny in both communist and capitalist states; about lies told by politicians, by the mass media, by the church, by popular leaders. We need to expose fallacious logic, spurious analogies, deceptive slogans, and those intoxicating symbols and concepts which drive people to murder (the flag, communism, capitalism, freedom). We need to dig beneath the abstractions so that our fellow citizens can make judgments on the particular realities beneath political rhetoric. We need to expose inconsistencies and double standards. In short, we need to become the critics of the culture rather than its apologists and perpetuators.
We who are fortunate in having the resources of knowledge are especially equipped for such a task. Although obviously not remote from the pressures of business, military needs, and politics, we have just that margin of leeway, just that tradition of truth-telling (however violated in practice) which can allow us to become spokesmen for change.
This will require holding up before society forgotten visions, lost Utopias, unfulfilled dreams—badly needed in this age of cynicism. Along with such visions, we will need specific schemes for accomplishing important purposes, which can then be laid before the groups that can use them. Let the economists work out a plan for free food, instead of advising the Federal Reserve Board on interest rates. Let the political scientists work out insurgency tactics for the poor, rather than counter-insurgency tactics for the military. Let the historians instruct us or inspire us, from the data of the past, rather than amusing us, boring us, or deceiving us. Let the scientists figure out and lay before the public plans on how to make autos safe, cities beautiful, air pure. Let all social scientists work on modes of change instead of merely describing the world that is, so that we can make the necessary revolutionary alterations with the least pain.
I am not sure what a revolution among scholars will look like, any more than I know what a revolution in the society will look like. I doubt that it will take the form of some great cataclysmic event. More likely, it will be a process, with periods of tumult and of quiet, in which we will, here and there, by ones and twos and tens, create pockets of concern inside old institutions, transforming them from within. There is no great day of reckoning to work toward. Rather, we must begin now to liberate those patches of ground on which we stand—in our classrooms, in our studies, in our writing—to “vote” for a new world (as Thoreau suggested) with our whole selves all the time, rather than in moments carefully selected by others.
Thus, we will be acting out the beliefs that always moved us as humans but rarely as scholars. To do that, we will need to defy the professional mythology which has kept us on the tracks of custom, our eyes averted (except for moments of charity) from the cruelty on all sides. We will be taking seriously for the first time the words of the great poets and philosophers whom we love to quote but not to emulate. We will be doing this, not in the interest of the rich and powerful, or in behalf of our own careers, but for those who have never had a chance to read poetry or study philosophy, who so far have had to strive alone just to stay warm in winter, to stay alive through the calls for war. Ultimately, we will be acting for ourselves and our children.
Let us turn now from scholars in general to historians in particular. For a long time, the historian has been embarrassed by his own humanity. Touched by the sight of poverty, horrified by war, revolted by racism, indignant at the strangling of dissent, he has nevertheless tried his best to keep his tie straight, his voice unruffled, and his emotions to himself. True, he has often slyly attuned his research to his feelings, but so slyly, and with such scholarly skill, that only close friends and investigators for congressional committees might suspect him of compassion.
Historians worry that a deep concern with current affairs may lead to twisting the truth about the past. And indeed, it may, under conditions which I will discuss below. But nonconcern results in another kind of distortion, in which the ore of history is beaten neither into plowshare nor sword, but is melted down and sold. For the historian is a specialist who makes his living by writing and teaching, and his need to maintain his position in the profession tends to pull him away from controversy (except the polite controversy of academic disputation) and out of trouble.*
The tension between human drives and professional mores leads many to a schizophrenic separation of scholarly work from other activities; thus, research on Carolingian relations with the Papacy is interrupted momentarily to sign a petition on civil rights. Sometimes the separation is harder to maintain, and so the specialist on Asia scrupulously stays away from teach-ins on Vietnam, and seeks to keep his work unsullied by application to the current situation. One overall result is that common American phenomenon—the secret radical.
There is more than a fifty-fifty chance that the academic historian will lose what vital organs of social concern he has in the process of acquiring a doctorate, where the primary requirement of finding an untouched decade or person or topic almost assures that several years of intense labor will end in some monstrous irrelevancy. And after that, the considerations of rank, tenure, and salary, while not absolutely excluding either personal activism or socially pertinent scholarship, tend to discourage either.
We find, of course, oddities of academic behavior: Henry Steele Commager writing letters to the Times defending Communists; Martin Duberman putting the nation’s shame on stage; Staughton Lynd flying to Hanoi. And to the rule of scholarly caution, the exceptions have been glorious:
Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution was muckraking history, not because it splattered mud on past heroes, but because it made several generations of readers worry about the working of economic interest in the politics of their own time. The senior Arthur Schlesinger, in an essay in New Viewpoints in American History, so flattened pretensions of “states’ rights” that no reader could hear that phrase again without smiling. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction was as close as a scholar could get to a demonstration, in the deepest sense of that term, puncturing a long and destructive