The Flight From Reality: 8. The Deactiviation of History; C. Carson

- HARRY ELMER BARNES, 1925 MANY OBSTACLES barred the way of those who were attempting to institute melioristic reforms. The most formidable obstacle was re ality itself. As a matter of fact, since reality has not demonstrably changed, it still is an insurmount able obstacle to the success of many kinds of reforms. However, reformers have been able to at tempt many of their innovations. Dr. Carson is Professor of American History at Grove City College, Pennsylvania. Among his earlier writings in THE FREEMAN were his series on The Fateful Turn and The American Tradition, both of which are now available as books. 20 This means that they have been able to alter generally held concep tions of reality. This was accom plished by embarking upon an ex tended flight from reality. Thus far, the story of the ad vance of reformist ideas has been told within a framework of an en during reality, and the departure of reformist conceptions from it.

In order for large-scale attempts to make over man and society to appear feasible, men had to cease to believe in an underlying struc tured and ordered reality. Many 1965 THE DEACTIVATION OF HISTORY 21 intellectuals made this step in their thought. It does not follow, of course, tha t the reason why they ceased to believe in an or dered reality was so that reforms could be instituted. On the con trary, many who contributed to this development in thought were not apparently interested in ex tensive reforms. Many· nineteenth century thinkers who had ceased to believe in a metaphysical reality . which endures did not, on the other hand, believe consciously directed reform to be possible. Nonetheless, by dispensing with the metaphysical framework, they set the stage for reform. If man has a nature, if all things have a nature, if there is an underlying order which endures, it follows that there are great limits to the kinds of change that can be made.

These conceptions are, however, metaphysical in character regard less of how obvious and demon strable they may appear to some people who have not been trained in metaphysics. The metaphysical underpinnings of these concep tions were swept away by David Hume and Immanuel Kant, or, to be more precise, these philos ophers held that they could not be directly validated by reason and sensual evidence. The house of philosophy collapsed in the early nineteenth century, and thinkers went off in every direction, erecting ideologies out of the bits and pieces that remained from the wreckage of philosophy. Reason cut loose from reality, and the imagination freed from the discipline of philosophy were used to draw up plans for new heavens on new earths. Even Americans began to feel the at traction of utopia by the latter part of the nineteenth century. When the enduring was cut away, time and change were all that was left. New pseudo philosophies Hegelianism, Marxism, Darwin ism - arose to offer accounts for changes in time. These were or iented, however, to the discovery and exposition of the laws of change and were not favorable to consciously initiated reforms.

Pragmatists offered a way out of this dilemlna by setting forth a radical new freedom, freedom from any underlying laws. John Dewey readily wrenched this pseudo philosophy into the orbit of reformism, calling his variant of the philosophy Instrumental ism. An Obstacle to Reform Some of the ground must be re traveled at this point, however. By moving all of reality into time, thinkers did not remove the con ceptual obstacles to the triumph of reformism. They only succeeded in making reality the subject mat22 THE FREEMAN May ter of history. The traditional role of history was inspirational and cautionary. Men studied history to be inspired by examples of noble actions, to enrich their limited experience by that of others, to draw sustenance for their lives from the lives of others. There was a negative side to this study of history, too: one could find there indications of the limits of what should be attempted, be re minded of the consequences of pre cipitate action, discover anew what was beyond his power to alter, be chastened by the records of the failure of others. In. short, history has usually played a conservative role in society. It was. a maj or obstacle to reform, as men cus tomarily thought of it and util ized it.

Some reformists, who were also historians, realized this. James Harvey Robinson, writing in the early twentieth century, declared: HHistory has been regularly in voked, to substantiate the claims of the conservative, but has hitherto usually been neglected by the radical. ... It is his weapon by right, and he should wrest it from the hand of the conserva tive."! In short, Robinson, as a would-be reformer, perceived that history must be reconstructed in order to make it an instrument of 1 James H. Robinson, The New History (New York: Macmillan, 1912), p. 252. reform. The older history must be deactivated; it must be replaced by a "new history." Traditional Use of History Before describing how this de activation and "instrumentation" of history took place, however, some examples of the traditional use of history are in order. In an earlier America, history was con ceived of as a depository of experi ence which might be examined for guidance in the affairs of men.

Nowhere is this usage better ex emplified than in the debates over the adoption of the Constitution. In some of the state conventions there were veri table outpourings of historical erudition to buttress one position or another. Americans were fearful at this time of entrusting overmuch power to governments. They found numerous instances in history of the working out of the dangers that they feared. For example, those attending the Massachusetts convention were treated to the fol lowing discourse on the· matter: Dr. Willard entered largely into the field of ancient history, and deduced therefrom arguments to prove that where power has been trusted to men, whether in great or small bodies, they had always abused it, and that thus republics had soon degenerated into aristocracies. He instanced Sparta, Athens, and Rome. The Amphictyonic 1965 THE DEACTIVATION OF HISTORY 23 league, he said, resembled the Confederation of the United States· while thus united, they defeated Xer: xes, but were subdued by the gold of Philip .... 2 A Mr. Nason in the same con vention points out the dangers of a standing army: A standing army ! Was it not with this that Caesar passed the Rubicon and laid prostrate the. liberties of hi~ country? By this have seven-eighths of the once free nations of the globe been brought into bondage! Time would fail me, were I to attempt to recapitulate the havoc made in the world by standing armies. 3 A Major Kingsley cites even more specific historical references, as he argues for better control by the people over their government: Let us look into ancient history.

The .Romans, after a war, thought themselves safe in a government of ten men, called the decemviri; these ten men were invested with all power, and were chosen for three years. By their arts and designs, they secured their second election; but, finding, from the manner in which they had exercised their power, they were not able to secure their third election, they declared themselves masters of Rome, impoverished the city, and de prived the people of their rights. 4 2 Elliot's Debates, Bk. I, vol. 2, p. 68. 3 Ibid., p. 136. 4 Ibid., p. 62. The Virginia convention was the scene of even more vigorous debate founded in historical al lusions than was that of Massa chusetts. James Madison was one of the most learned of these de baters. In the following citations, he is arguing from history that loose confederations are not ade quate to the exigencies of govern ment: The Amphictyonic league resem bled our Confederation in its nominal powers. . . . But, though its powers were more considerable in many re spects than those of our present sys tem, yet it had the same radical de feet ....

The Achaean league, though better constructed than the Amphictyonic, ... was continually agitated with do mestic dissensions, and driven to the necessity of calling in foreign aid; this, also, eventuated in the demoli tion of their confederacy .... The Germanic system is neither adequate to the external defence nor internal felicity of the people .... 5 By historical references, Edmund Randolph argues for the desira bility of union: If you wish to know the extent of such a scene, look at the· history of England and Scotland before the un ion; you will see their borderers con tinually committing depredations and cruelties of the most calamitous and deplorable nature, on one another .... 6 5 Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 129-3l. 6 Ibid., p. 75.

24 THE FREEMAN May The manner in which they were employing history was not left in doubt. They were reaching back into history for lessons ap propriate to actions they were considering. John Marshall makes this clear in the following pas sage: We may derive from Holland lessons very beneficial to ourselves. Happy that country which can avail itself of the misfortunes of others which can gain knowledge from that source without fatal experience!7 J ames Madison adds : "We may be warned by their example, and shun their fate, by removing the causes which produced their mis fortunes."8 Common Sense and Philosophy The didactic use of history rests upon both a common sense and a philosophical foundation. At the common sense level, it is only an extension of everyday practice. If we slip and fall on an icy street, we proceed with cau tion on icy streets thereafter, realizing that the same thing can happen again. By analogy, we reason that a street is not even necessary to recurrence, that it can happen anywhere on ice.

Written history - that is, what is ordinarily thought of as history is the formalized memory of a 7 Ibid., p. 225. 8 Ibid., p. 311. people, the record of their experi ence. History is the public mem ory of a people, and may serve in more general affairs in much the way that an individual's memor ies of experience serve him-i. e., as a compendium of dangers to be avoided, a depository of success ful methods, a storehouse of what the world is like and how one may operate within it. At the philosophical level, the didactic use of history was based upon the existence of an under lying order. It assumes that even ts, in essence, can recur and that the reason for this is an order in which a given cause will produce a given effect. To return to the example used above, a man walking requires traction to pro ceed. When he loses traction, his forward motion will continue him downward to the earth, and since he will usually try to brake him self, he will usually fall backward.

The occurrence of such events can be stated as laws; they recur and are even predictable. In the same fashion, there are larger developments that can be expected to recur under certain circumstances. For example, if political power is concentrated, and not strictly limited, tyranny may be expected to result. The explanation is to be found in the nature of man. The didactic use of history rests, then, upon the 1965 THE DEACTIVATION OF HISTORY 25 view that beneath the surface upon which changes occur there is a substratum which endures. This enduring substratum-this meta physical realm - makes it possible for men to discover from the study of history what is apt to happen when a particular course is fol lowed. In everyday affairs, men have continued to recur to and use their experience very much as they al ways have. One suspects that even the most determined reformist in tellectual wears his rubbers, or puts snow tires on his automobile, when he ventures out upon icy streets. He knows, as do we all, that "history" repeats itself many times over. But at the level of large and complex matters, his tory has been deactivated, the past has been cut off, and men have been disjoined from the com mon fund of experience. A new history has emerged which is not a useful record of experience but a herald of the future and an in strument for rebuilding society.

Defaming the Past One of the culminating steps in the deactivation of history was the defamation of the older his tory. Just as the older philosophy had been defamed, just as the older education, religion, and eco nomics would be defamed, just so history would be denigrated. The work of undermining the older history was mainly the work of historians. Many contributed, but three men who mounted the as sault in the first half of the twentieth century will provide us with sufficient illustrative mater ial. These men were: James Har vey Robinson, Harry Elmer Barnes, and Charles A. Beard. Robinson launched the attack upon the older history first. His position is made clear in the fol lowing: It is true that it has long been held that certain lessons could be derived from the past But there is a growing suspicion that this type of usefulness is purely illusory. The present writer is anxious to avoid any risk of being regarded as an advocate of these supposed advantages of histori cal study. Their value rests on the as sumption that conditions remain suf ficiently uniform to give precedents a perpetual value, while, as a matter of fact, conditions ... are so rapidly al tering that for the most part it would be dangerous indeed to attempt to ap ply past experience to the solution of current problems. 9 Writing some years later, Barnes much more vehemently denounced the reliance upon past experience. He declared that "the past has no direct lesson for the present in the way of analogies and forecasts." He goes on to 9 Robinson, op. cit., pp. 17-18.

26 THE FREEMAN May cast doubt upon the "wisdom of the Fathers," that is, the wisdom of leaders in past times. "The fact that every civilization prior to our own has ended up in a hope less wreck should be fairly proof of the frailty of patristic ""visdom in all ages of men." In short, "we are grotesquely wrong in assum ing that there has been any great amount of true wisdom in the past .... "10 But even if there had been wisdom in the past, he pointed out, it would not be rele vant to contemporary problems. Conditions have changed. Therefore, in our efforts to solve contemporary problems on the basis of the "wisdom of the past," we are somewhat more absurd in our atti tude and conduct than the animal trainer who would strap his pet an thropoid in the seat of an aeroplane on the ground of his prior mastery of the technique of the tricycle. Not even a Texas Methodist Kleagle would think of taking his car to Moses, Joshua, Luther or George Washing ton to have the carburetor adjusted or the valves ground, yet we assure ourselves and our fellowmen that we ought to continue to attempt to solve our contemporary problems of soci ety, economics, politics and conduct on the basis of methods, attitudes and' information which in many cases far antedates Moses)1 10 Harry E. Barnes, The New History and the Social Studies (New York: The Century Co., 1925), p. 588.

11 Ibid., p. 589. It is not necessary to disentangle all the ideas which Barnes mis takenly or dubiously associated and confused. The point is that he denied the relevance of historical lessons to the present, and, in the same passages, rejected all that may have been learned in the past. Charles A. Beard, a somewhat more disciplined thinker than Barnes, denied that cause and ef fect can be isolated in history. He maintained that no group of com plications can "be isolated from surrounding and preceding com plications. Even 'simple' events are complex when examined close ly. 'George Washington accepted the command of the American troops.' What 'caused' that ac tion ?"12 He goes on to conclude that it is impossible to draw a conclusion with certainty about the answer to the question he poses. In so complex a matter as the American Revolution, he con tinues, the attempt to assign causes is futile.

To apply the physical analogy of "cause and effect" we should be com pelled to think of the American Revo lution as an entity, like a ball, set in motion by impact of other entities. The latter are the "causes" and the motion of the ball is the "effect." The impossibility of making such analogy 12 Charles A. Beard, The Discussion of Human Affairs (New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 90.

1965 THE DEACTIVATION OF HISTORY 27 conform to the recorded. facts of the Revolution is apparent to anybody who employs historical knowledge in the effort. We know that thousands of events took place in time, and that thousands of personalities were en gaged in them, but we cannot find chains of causes and effects in them.l 3 Questions Without Answers However obtusely he had done so, Beard had put his finger on the nerve that goes to the center of the didactic use of history. If it is impossible to discover cause and effect, it is not possible to know what action produced what results. Without this information there is little to be learned from the past. Beard's examples do not prove his case; instead, they show that it is possible to pose ques tions in such a way that no an swers can be found for them. In the first example, he asked what George Washington's motives were. He was quite right in point ing out that we cannot discover the answer to this question with any certainty. He was wrong, how ever, if he supposed that the an swer to the question would matter if it could be known. The effects of actions, once they have taken place, are not altered by motives.

Suppose he had asked another sort of question, a "simple" one involv ing George Washington. For ex ample, Continental troops were so 13 Ibid., p. 91. disposed on Long Island that they could have been cut off by General Howe. Why did this occur? Wash ington had issued an order that they be situated in this manner. He had caused them to be so dis posed. If the army had been cap tured, Washington could have been held responsible. If this had happened, there would have been instruction in it for future mili tary commanders. The case of the "cause (s)" of the "American Revolution," as Beard poses the problem, is even more instructive. It leads us to ward an understanding of the po sition from which historians de nied the relevance of the past-for the present. Beard started with a dubious assumption, i. e., that there was some occurrence which could properly be called the "American Revolution." This is highly dou btful. At best, this phrase is a convenient designation for a considerable number of events and developments - e.g., the break from England, the war, the drawirrg of constitutions, the making of reforms, and so forth.

Moreover, the question as posed may embrace motives, purposes, incentives, desires, accidents, in fluences, decisions, reasons, as well as cause and effect relation ships, in its answer. "American Revolution," when used as a phrase to designate a large number of de28 THE FREEMAN May velopments, is a fictional device, not a reality. The real question in volving causation concerning a convenient designation should con cern who invented it. To treat it as something that actually oc curred, to ask what caused it to oc cur, is bound to lead to confusion. To fail to distinguish among all that an historian might offer as explanation - to lump everything together as "causes" -compounds the confusion. The question of causation is important for the didactic use of history as it con cerns the results of human action. Beard had posed no question that brought the problem into focus. Actually, then, the arguments were irrelevant to the positions taken. Beard had not disproved the existence of cause and effect relationships. Barnes had not shown that there was nothing to be learned from the past, nor that men in the past had no wisdom.

Robinson had not shown that past experience is irrelevant in present circumstances. They, along with others, did succeed in discrediting didactic history, but what did the work was not the validity of their direct arguments against it but their assumptions. These men were historicists, and if one ac cepts the historicist position, he must, logically, reject the rele vance of the past to action in the future. A Hodgepodge of Details In essence, historicism has been defined - or described - in the fol lowing way by one historian: "The subject matter of history is human life in its totality and multiplicity. It is the historian's aim to portray the bewildering, unsystematic variety of historical forms ... in their unique, living expressions and in the process of continuous growth and transfor mation." In brief, "the special quality of history does not con sist in the statement of general laws or principles, but in the grasp, so far as possible, of the infinite variety of particular his torical forms immersed in the passage of time."14 Historicism was developed by German historians in the nine teenth century; it stemmed from Herder and was shaped by von Ranke, Dilthey, and Meinecke. It arose as a protest against the sci entific emphasis of eighteenth century thought and partook of the romantic concentration upon the concrete and the unique. 15 It was, in its inception, a definition of the limits and extent of their craft by historians. They were saying something such as this: Each event when viewed as a 14 Hans Meyerhoff, ed., The Philosophy of History in Our Time (Garden City: Doubleday, an Anchor book, 1959), p. 10.

15 See ibid., pp. 9-18.

1965 THE DEACTIVATION OF HISTORY 29 whole is unique. That is how we propose to view every happening, occurrence, and development. Per chance, there may be common fea tures to them, there may be laws and principles, but this is not our concern as historians. Well and good, one might say, let other disciplines explore re ality from their vantage points and discover such laws and princi ples as there are. But there was a catch. In the course of the nine teenth century, all of reality was being thrust into the domain of history by thinkers, by Hegel, by Marx, by the Darwinians. Every thing was conceived of as chang ing, and the historicists them selves were among the first to claim every aspect of life as grist for their mills. This brought them into conflict with the various "sci entific" schools (Hegelian, Marx ian, Darwinian), for these sought for and expounded "laws" of his torical change. On the whole, in the West, the .historicists appear to have won.

In the main, however, it was an empty victory. Most of the ideas that were denied entrance at the front door by historicists came in at the back by way of assump tions. Thus, scientism, progres sivism, determinism, and a host of other isms have pervaded his torical work in the twentieth century. Historicism is particularly vulnerable to determinism, and the historicist has no vantage point from which to resist the in tellectual currents of his day. This is so because historicism is in eluctably relativistic. Each event is unique; each happening must be understood in terms of the con text within which it occurs. To put it another way, everything is rel ative to its context. Rigorous his toricists (some of whom were romantic individualists) have tried to avoid the implicit deter minism in this view by insisting upon the uniqueness and individ uality of each thing. But most historians are not troubled by such philosophical scruples; thus, they allow the implicit assump tion of determinism free play in their work.

No Guide for the Future The main point, however, is that historicism makes history useless so far as instruction for future action is concerned. Regardless of how luxurious the detail with which events are described - or because of it in part - these events contain no lessons. They are unique, self-contained, or, in the case of the way in which most practition ers handle them, prelude to the future. Future happenings will be unique also, perhaps shaped, even determined, by the past, but un like anything in it. The reIativism 30 THE FREEMAN May in historicism can be utilized to reach yet another conclusion that the past is unknowable. This is roughly the conclusion which Charles A. Beard had reached by the mid-1930's,1H The reasoning follows this line. Both men and events are conditioned by the con text within which they occur, are relative to their "times." If this is so, it follows that the historian writes from his own unique posi tion and can never be certain that he is making truthful statements about the past. It is much more likely that he is revealing much more about himself and his times than he is about the past. The idea was already current -that each generation rewrites history in its own image, and Beard's position reinforced it.

The thought may well arise at this point, why bother with his tory, anyhow? It appears to be useless, meaningless, and in any case, .probably unknowable. Some historians have indeed drawn such a conclusion. But the most vigor ous defamers of the older history quite often had new uses in mind. They were what may be called historicist-progressives. From his toricism they took the idea that history does not repeat itself, that 16 His most famous statement of it is in "Written History as an Act of Faith," American Historical Review, XXXIX (January, 1934) 219-29. ideas .and events are relative to the context within which they oc cur, and that it is the business of the historian to reconstruct the whole of the past, in all its luxurious detail. From progres sivism came their idea that all of later history is a product of ear lier history - that the past is pro logue. If one could delineate all the trends at any present moment, they thought, he could discern the shape of the future .. This was a watered down version of the vari ous historical determinisms of the nineteenth century.