Another thing my mentors taught me since they taught in a variety of academic disciplines was the importance of interdisciplinarity, something far too often lost in the specialised study of trees that has been central to academic intellectual life since the twentieth-century. I came to realise that the boundaries marking off disciplinary borders in academe and particularly in the academic social sciences, disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, economics, and psychology, were and are artificial, arbitrary, and socially constructed fetishes or reifications. Over time I came to see that the artificial intellectual borders that marked off one academic discipline from another inhibited rather than helped one understand, in an integrated way, that all human beings are economic, political, cultural, geographic, and biological-demographic animals and that by looking at humans through these ideal types we could understand human life in all of its better angel and less better angel forms. The wholistic approach to the study of humanity was something that appealed greatly to me since I quickly came to identity myself primarily as a cultural anthropologist, as someone, in other words, who saw himself as part of a discipline which, at least in North America, was grounded in the assumption that to understand humanity one needed to study human biology, human language, human society, human culture, and human prehistory. Lastly, my mentors taught me that the study of humankind must be comparative if one was to truly and fully understand humankind.
Initially, I was only limitedly interested in history, a discipline that studied humans across time. I, was of course, forced to take history classes in high school. I was, however, only limitedly stimulated by them. When I got to college I tended to focus my attention instead on the social sciences, disciplines which were not taught in the high school I attended. Now don't get me wrong, I was interested in history but history as a methodology rather than as an academic course of reading or study. So while I was not particularly interested in history as an academic discipline I did understand that the study of human beings must not only be reflexive, comparative, and social scientific but it must also be historical. Given this I, over time, became more and more interested in history as a discipline in addition to history as a method though I would still maintain that history is more of a methodology than an academic discipline.
Despite my limited interest in the discipline of history in my early academic years there were a few historians who had an immense impact on my subsequent intellectual development. I can still recall some forty years later, for instance, reading Keith Thomas's magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic in Robert Janelli's class on folklore and religion at Indiana University. Its integration of theory, method, and anthropologically sensitive history had an immense impact on how I approached both theoretically and methodologically the study of humankind. Another historian who also had an immense impact on my intellectual development was George Mosse. I read Mosse's book Toward the Final Solution for a class on the Holocaust that I took with Todd Edelman who, at the time, taught at Indiana. I was gobsmacked by Mosse's exploration of the cultures that led to the Shoah in the 1930s and 1940s in Western Europe. Both Thomas and Mosse made me see that for cultural anthropology, sociology, and social psychology to have any validity at all they all, in addition, had to be historical, must explore humankind in time as well as space, in some way, shape, or form. It was for that reason that I eventually matriculated in a history faculty in my postgraduate years, though I continued to find the discipline of history too theoretically and methodologically anemic and hence too parochial.
Though I am now retired I continue to read extensively in the social sciences and in history. Recently I read Mosse's (University of Wisconsin, Hebrew University) brilliant The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Chicago: Rand McNally, second edition, 1974). As in Toward the Final Solution Mosse superbly traces, if in greater detail, the cultures and ideologies that impacted Western Europe (and the Western settler societies beyond Europe including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States) that dominated those two centuries in the The Culture of Western Europe. In the book Mosse explores what he argues is central to the cultural history of nineteenth and twentieth centuries Western Europe, namely, the separation of culture. the "real", from civilisation, the "artificial".
Mosse's book takes readers on an excursion through the several -isms that dominated the epoch: romanticism, nationalism, racism, liberalism, conservatism, idealism, socialism, marxism, scientism or positivism, and fascism. These ideal type -isms, as they interacted with the historical dynamics of the era, argues Mosse, particularly modernity with its scientism, industrialisation, bureaucratisation, and mass society, have taken various hybridic forms, Despite taking various forms over these years, contends Mosse, all of these cultures or ideologies tended to emphasise, as Mosse makes clear, culture over civilisation. This distinction, argues Mosse, eventually led to the genocidal mania of the 1930s and 1940s, a genocide in which romanticism, with its notion of the organic real, culture, became affixed to mass racial nationalism (the culture collective blood and collective soil), mass culture, mass industrialisation, and mass modern technology. Together these led to genocide on a modern mass scale, the Holocaust.
The ideal type cultures or ideologies Mosse delineates, of course, as anyone who has been paying attention to increasing autocracy in Eastern Europe and the United States, are still with us today in the core nation West, a fact that adds an eerie been there done that quality to the historical tale Mosse tells. Though many after World War Ii, a war many thought of as a war against tyrannical fascism, argued that romantic, nationalist, and racist fascism had been tossed onto the rubbish bin of history once and for all, Mosse rightly notes in the conclusion to The Culture of Western Europe, that the culture and ideology of fascism will never fade away. In the United States, for instance, romanticism has been integrated with nationalism and industrial capitalism to give us the most recent version of intolerant, nativist, and theocratic (my way of the highway) right wing Christian fascism. As Mosse notes, this combination of romanticism, nationalism, racism, and intolerance is a very effective meaning system, an effective meaning system that provides, particularly in times of economic, political, and cultural stress, simplistic answers to complex realities, all wrapped up in a simple minded manichean tale of us good and them evil, a manichean tale in which the "true Americans" must save America from devious liberal/Marxist/socialist/fascist enemies who are sapping America's very essence or soul.
Mosse's books, including The Culture of Western Europe, remain, in my opinion, among the most important and revelatory books published in the post-World War II era. It was a wonderful experience revisiting the work of someone I regard as one of the twentieth century's greatest historians some forty years or so after I read Toward the Final Solution in a class on the Holocaust. The Culture of Western Europe should, in my opinion, be read by anyone interested in history, particularly Western history, Western cultural history, and cultural studies. Very strongly recommended.
There is, by the way, a third edition of The Culture of Western Europe which was published in 1988. I have not seen the third edition of the book though I am interested in taking a look at the recent University of Wisconsin Press reprint of the book, an edition which apparently restores the maps and illustrated material from the first edition of the book that had been taken out in the second. I am interested in taking a look at the new edition of the book because I have a sneaking suspicion that it may be yet another example of the dumbing down of university textbooks in the wake of the demographic revolution in American universities after the 1960s, the decline in student cultural capital, a decline so immense that one can no longer assume that all students have a basic understanding of history of Europe since the Enlightenment let alone of the Christian Bible, a book that has had an immense impact on the culture of Western society, and the ever increasing corporate businessification of universities throughout the West. If I recall correctly, I first noticed this dumbing down of university textbooks while I was preparing to teach a course on American religion. I intended to use Catherine Albanese's excellent America: Religions
and Religion for the course, a book I had read in its 1998 edition. But when I compared the 1998 edition with the 2006 edition I was horrified to discover that over two hundred pages of Albanese's book had simply vanished from the book between the third and fourth editions. This cleansing of pages from the book, a cleansing I increasingly suspected was a response to the decline in student cultural capital and the retail model of education that dominates the culture of American administrators who run American research universities these days. After all American universities have become more and more like a glorified high school since the 1970s, an era that has not only seen the adoption of a retail model by the increasingly corporate capitalist administrators who dream of moving up the corporate status ladder by making their administrative mark on American colleges and universities, and an era which has been characterised by the difficulties in getting students to read even a short book of approximately 100 to 200 pages.
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