Today there are culture wars in the British settler societies of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand over a host of issues including abortion, smoking cigarettes in pubs, immigration, multiculturalism, and the academic curriculum, just to note a few examples. These cultural wars are fought out in similar ideological languages not only because of the similar political and ideological histories of these settler societies but because of globalisation and its attendant cultural globalisation thanks at least in part to the brave new digital technologies which link these societies and their ideological identity groups together.
Stuart Mcintyre and Anna Clark explore the history culture war primarily in one part of the world, Australia (though they also make limited excursions into the history culture wars in the United States, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent Canada) in their book The History Wars (Melbourne, Victoria: University of Melbourne Press, updated edition, 2004). After exploring how professional historians do history in chapter two, Mcintyre and Clark take a largely chronological approach to the Australian cultural history war. In chapter three Mcintyre explores how British imperial and later Australian historians wrote the history of Australia. In chapters four and five Mcintyre explores how two of Australia's most noted historians, Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey found themselves drawn into the Australian history wars on two different sides, the less mythhistory one in the case of Clark and the more mythhistory one in the case of Blainey. In chapter six Mcintyre looks at the culture history war battles over the Australian bicentenary in 1988, a battle that was reflective of the wider battles over Australian history. In chapter seven Mcintyre explores how the more mythhistorical Australian discourse on the history culture war changed thanks to their adoption and adaptation of the American language of political correctness. In chapter eight Mcintyre looks at how conservative and right wing historical warriors in Australia developed a discourse which accused the less mythhistorical historians of fabricating evidence of European violence against the Aboriginals thanks to a culture of guilt and the romanticisation of the "primitive". In chapter nine Anna Clark explores the strategies of conservative and right wing mythhistory warriors as they battled to gain control of the secondary school curriculum in Australia. In chapter nine Mcintyre explores the museum front in the culture war over history. In a conclusion Mcintyre's sums up his argument over the Australian historical culture war and in an afterward looks at the responses to his and Clark's book in the year between the initial publication of the book and the publication of an updated edition of the book.
In The History Wars Mcintyre argues that there have essentially been several paradigm shifts in the dominant perception and writing of Australian history since the early 20th century. Initially most historians saw Australian history as a species of British imperial history. As Australia became more independent from the "mother country" many historians, particularly those of the radical nationalist school of Australian history, developed a more independent from Britain version of Australian history. The effervescence of the 1960s saw the rise of new approaches to history in general and to Australian history in particular as social history, often quantitative in form, and cultural history, generally qualitative in form, in the Australian historical profession. Both of these, Mcintyre argues, replaced the radical nationalist school of historiography as dominant or hegemonic.
At around the same time, Macintyre argues, there were reactions to these new histories, rending the consensus that characterised the writing of Australian history asunder, both within the academy and beyond it in intellectual and populist culture. The new social and cultural histories often focused on British imperialism and the impact of British imperialism on Australia and its indigenous population. They also focused on minorities like women and Asian immigration into Australia after the demise of the White Australia policy in the 1960s and 1970s (something that is paralleled in the US and Canada). These new social and cultural histories of imperialism, violence against Aborigines, women, and immigrants touched a boosterist nerve among some historians and in the conservative and right wing press. As a consequence the traditional reliance on evidence and reasoned debate in history and in Australian intellectual culture was sometimes replaced by a politically and ideologically correct culture (something the populist right shares with many liberals and many leftists) in far too often the language of ad hominems, Needless to say, this ad hominem approach was found not only in Australia but also in the post-Thatcher England, the post-Reagan United States, the post-Harper Canada, and in the New Zealand of the late 20th century and early 21st century.
Critics of Mcintyre have accused him of being a history warrior himself and of, as a consequence, being emotionally attached to one side of the history culture war in Australia, the black or black armband approach to Australian history as right wing mythhistorians have come to call it. That said a lot of the current invariably politically debate over the impact of European and particularly British imperialism on indigenous Australians is, not surprisingly, inherently emotional and and one can't help but reflect on the moral aspects of British imperialism and its impact on Australia's indigenous population if one has a modicum of humanity left. Given this fact it is not a surprise that the debate has touched humanitarian and boosterist nerves. I suppose one can debate, and academics do continue to debate, whether what happened in Australia after 1788 was genocide. That debate aside there was certainly a policy, unofficial or official (including of the nudge, nudge, wink, wink variety), of extermination, extinction, and extirpation against Aboriginals. Smallpox certainly impacted the indigenous population in deadly ways but it is also true that generations of Aboriginals were stolen or taken supposedly for their own good so they could be more integrated, at least rhetorically, into the population. It is also true that land was taken from hunter-gatherer peoples with little understanding, on the part of the Europeans, of the differences in conception of land "ownership" between hunter-gatherer and modern societies and was not always done legally (though we should never forget that power often makes the illegal legal). All this happened in the United States and Canada as well, of course. Should contemporary generations feel guilty for this? Gee I would hope so. On the other hand, subsequent history suggests little was learned of lasting value from the Holocaust except about how genocide could be leveraged morally and politically.
Let me conclude by coming clean. I regard myself as a secular Calvinist. In my many years of observation and study I have become convinced that history is not teleological and that humans are, to put it nicely, fallible (one of Mcintyre's great realisations in the book is that the Cold War realist right traded in its pessimistic Calvinism for a best of all possible worlds optimism in the post-Cold War era, a best of all possible worldism in which free market capitalism became the utopian motor of end of history). At the same time, I think the scientific method with its emphasis on empirical evidence, allows for humans to make valid and reasonable generalisations about human society and culture, overcoming in the process, to some extent, the realities of human fallibility, since such an approach allows for verification or falsification.
The application of such a method has shown me again and again that it is the right wing populists with their optimistic, some might say, given the evidence, overly optimistic version of history (something they paradoxically share with the best of all possible world liberals and leftists not to mention Hollywood) that is problematic. These right wing populists tend to prefer mythhistory (yeah rah ethnic, nationalist, civilisational history) to more empirical history and often replace rational and reasonable debate over the interpretation of evidence with ad hominem "zingers". They tend to engage in such obfuscation and such childishness because they seem to want to obtain power at any cost and will use any means to achieve it because they think that they and only they are right (something again they share with some liberals and some on the left not to mention a host of theocrats around the globe) and they know that playing up myths and using mythic and celebratory discourse plays well with a significant segment of the public. The fact, however, is that imperialism, for example, in all its forms is real and indigenous peoples suffered not only from the diseases but at the hands of these imperialists. Anyone with even a basic understanding of real history knows this and no amount of happy faced ain't we wonderful or at least some kind of wonderful rhetoric will change this reality. All this is some of the reason why I find Mcintyre's and Clark's dispassionate analysis of the history war in Australia much more compelling than that of their critics.
No comments:
Post a Comment