As I wade through the waters of my second semester of grad school, I’ve grown acutely conscious of the fact that I’m preparing to enter a field where I will be something of a professional and intellectual outsider. For one thing, academia is a second career for me. A good portion of my young adult life, which could be charitably described as “eclectic”, was spent trying to figure out what a career actually was. Then the U.S. Air Force gave me one, explained what to do with it, and ordered me to like it (which I would have done anyway; it was a cool gig). After the time came to hang up my boots, I was obliged to figure out a second act for my professional life. History appealed to me for a number of reasons, not least of which was the prospect of professionalizing my lifelong investigation of the heritage of my own family and people.
I’m not overly concerned about coming into the field as a newcomer of a certain vintage. If it proves difficult after graduation to find a niche in the rapidly shrinking academic job market, all that independent research will stand me in good stead, and I’ll carry on with my intellectual pursuits outside of my day job. Really, it is a feeling of intellectual isolation that gives me pause. After two semesters of graduate study, I have the distinct impression that the field of history (or at least my university’s history department) is dominated by a historical materialism that is antithetical to my own worldview.
This troubles me because it is proving to be a source of continual friction with the deeper reasons that I chose history as a field. I think of history as a process of transmitting a vital and precious living heritage from one generation to the next. I see it as a trust that we as scholars willingly accept on behalf of our community; therefore we have an obligation to preserve, enrich, and share that trust, and to do so with skill, integrity, and determination, for all our sakes.
However, a good deal of the historical scholarship that I’ve encountered so far seems to me to be a history that is self-consciously attempting to eschew heritage, if heritage means the historical sum of those experiences, insights, values, and relationships that define our sense of self and community. In place of heritage, historical scholarship often presents us with purely instrumental accounts of social evolution that subsume all personal and social attributes and relationships within a reductive framework of power relations. In a theoretic stroke, repositories of legacy and lineage are transformed into markers of political and economic status, and history is presumed to reduce to a perpetual struggle between dominant and marginalized populations.
I find this tendency bizarre, and deeply worrying, not only because a history shorn of heritage strikes me as a rational contradiction in terms, but because the lessons of history make it quite obvious that it is a short, easy, and logical step from treating personal identity as a means to an end to treating humans themselves as a means to an end. If the history of racism in America teaches us nothing else, it’s that capitulating to the logic of treating human beings as economic objects of greater or lesser worth is in itself a form of oppression. How often and how naturally was the question of the inherent right to personal freedom reduced to a question of the slaveholder’s property rights? If justice reduces to equitable pricing within a system that commodifies human identity, as I perceive many class-theory based works of history to be implicitly arguing, I think I’m better off avoiding enlistment in the struggle altogether, and muddling through as best I can on my own.
And this brings us to the rub of the matter. History is in many ways a driving force of the struggle for justice. This is what motivates many people, including myself, to become historians in the first place. But there seems to be a deep conceptual confusion about the kind of justice that we’re striving for. For all of the reasons stated above, I think that political and economic instrumentalism is an insecure foundation for any kind of enduring justice. Again, take the case of racial justice: consider how easily the gains made in one generation have been swept aside in the next over the course of American history. I think this pattern is a reflection of the transactionalism that pervades our political thought and institutions. Our country was birthed from systems and philosophies that tend to reduce all things (and all people) to their utility economic value. It is unsurprising then that our commitments to social justice seem to wax and wane in tandem with shifts in the market value attached to it. And yet we ignore the lessons of history. We continue to prove to ourselves, generation after generation, that the marketplace is no place to seek the moral goods that can alone provide a secure basis for human freedom and flourishing, if for no other reason than that proprietary justice can be repossessed by the system that granted title to it.
What is needed then is a reorientation away from habitually evaluating the struggle for justice in terms of competing systems for the distribution of commodified moral goods, and toward a conception of justice that inheres in human existence itself, a justice that exists prior to, and is transcendent above, all social, political and economic categories and affiliations.
This does not mean abandoning our identities and affiliations. It simply means recognizing that our claims for justice encompass them, but do not originate from them. If my black life matters, it is not merely because I am black. It is because it is unacceptable to visit injustice on anyone merely because they are black. In functional terms, this may seem like a difference without a distinction, but in moral terms, the difference could not be more stark.
And the question of moral distinctions is precisely what is at issue here. Do we still have the capacity to make them? The distressing ease with which we reflexively reduce matters of legacy and lineage to matters of factional alignment and thereby package up our human heritage for political barter argues to me that we are losing that capacity.
How, then, do we recover and revitalize that capacity? I think it begins with recognizing that human beings are more than aggregates of appetites and impulses, that communities are more than aggregates of individuals with convergent interests, and that history is more than an analytic recounting of the political and economic clash of competing interest groups. Such things are merely the context of human existence, not its sum, and it is our inherent yearning to transcend these incidentals of survival, to rise above the struggle for subsistence, that defines us. We know, intuitively, that we are not made merely to seek selfish advantage and to indulge our transient cravings, that we are instead structurally fashioned to express our moral potentialities: to love, to nurture, to honor, to do justice, and if need be, to sacrifice. The cynicism, the bitterness, the rage that pervades our collective lives is in a way symptomatic of our instinctive moral revulsion at the theories and systems that attempt to compel us to do otherwise, which makes it both keenly ironic and deeply tragic that our moral revolt is so often and so easily subsumed by political revolts that ultimately reinforce and reproduce the very things that we claim to oppose.
All of this is to say that there are deeper questions to be asked, not just about the nature of historical scholarship, but about the nature of the justice that it seeks to uphold. If our evaluative assessments are confined to distributive mechanisms, if they never regard human beings in terms of a whole self, then we are effectively abandoning personal significance to the vagaries of the marketplace.
With regard to history in particular, why are we so insistent on using measures of analytic value that stand apart from moral purpose? Why do we contend that systematically stripping history of its moral properties, of its human meaning and heritage, is the only properly scientific approach to producing historical scholarship? That strikes me as neither rational nor just. Perhaps it is time to recognize that no accurate account of human society can be morally neutral, not because we are intrinsically selfish and partial, but because we are intrinsically moral beings, and it is vain to pretend otherwise. After all, history is not just an account of what we have done, but an analysis of who we have been, and an assessment of who we are becoming. Recognizing that this “who” is someone who is not an object, someone who is not disposable, someone who merits moral regard simply by virtue of being human, seems to me to be the minimum amount of dignity that we can grant to the subjects of our scholarly analysis.
