There is no Future in History

Forty years ago I got a laugh when I explained why I was not continuing my graduate studies in history by saying “There is no future in history.” There also is no future for history as a field of study. While George Santayana famously wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, young people today know nothing about history. For my undergraduate students Ronald Reagan, George Washington and Julius Caesar existed vaguely at the same time, back in “ancient times”. Ancient times being whatever occurred before what they remember.

Young people do not merely not know historical facts, they do not even have a concept of what history is

About a year ago I was trying to explain to my statistics classes that statistics is difficult for students to understand because it is counter to how people think. As an example I said that during the early days of the cold war, amidst fears that the United States would fall behind the Soviet Union scientifically, Eisenhower (allegedly) expressed dismay upon being informed that half of Americans were of below average intelligence. I noticed the blank looks on students’ faces at my mentioning the name “Eisenhower”, and asked by a show of hands how many students had heard of him. The result was four out of the just over 80 students attending knew who he was! It is hard to believe it has been just over eight years since Bernie Madoff hit the news. I demonstrate to classes that it is easier to find an effect with large than with small samples. I show them data that is not significant, then I increase subject number by coping and pasting data, and suddenly the result is significant. I remind students that in real research you can not increase subjects by copying and pasting. At least not ethically, some researchers have done just that. I jokingly call this the “Bernie Madoff school of statistics”. I always would get a laugh with that line, this year blank stares. Again by a show of hands it turned out that only about one in 20 students had heard of Bernie Madoff. Eighteen or nineteen year olds now would have only been ten, eleven when Madoff was arrested, too young to be concerned with him at the time. Two years ago my then 18-19 year old students would have been 12 or 13, and not only had heard about Madoff in 2008, but probably considered him “cool” at the time. Jay Leno used to do a “Jaywalking” routine where he’d stop ordinary people, ask them about American history or government and get hilariously wrong answers to questions seemingly every American should know. He was at a college graduation, and asked a young graduate still in cap and gown “What was the Gettysburg Address?” No answer. “Have you heard of it?” he continued. Her response was “Yes, I’ve heard of it of it (in angry mocking tone) but I don’t know the exact address.” This is not an outlier, but typical for historic knowledge today in the United States. We can make fun of young people for saying things like that, but why should we expect anyone to waste their time studying, and take seriously, the whims of leftist “elites”. For that is what history has been reduced to. Young people do not merely not know historical facts, they do not even have a concept of what history is. Or rather what history was, no pun intended.

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What History was and what it has become: Definitions of History

History is defined by dictionary.com as “A continuous, systematic narrative of past events as relating to a particular people, country, period, person, etc., usually written as a account”. The assumption is that these events existed in empirical reality in an objective manner, and the accounts of these events can differ in accuracy. History is a sequence of these objective/empiric events, the function of the historian is to discover and write the most factual version possible. However history can also be defined as follows: ”History is a narrative composed by a historian in service to a political-social agenda”. Post-modernism sees history as somethings historians invent for political-social agendas. Marxist history is a tool to enable the “oppressed” to “liberate” themselves by forming a classes society under the principles set forth by Marx and Lenin. The left does not believe in an empirical reality independent of ideology. The purposes of “politically correct” history are indistinguishable from those of religious history, differing only in the God and theology they serve. And one must be very careful not to commit heresy in both cases, as even good leftists have found themselves shouted down, disinvited, and banned as deviationists. People today know of history as a narrative to propagate “progressive” dogma on how society, the collective, should be organized. It is the theology of a secular religion. But like in traditional religions, there is no need to study theology too much as long as you can mouth the correct dogma- down with the Zionist entity, Trump and capitalism, burn the American flag. Shout down all who disagree. Demonstrate “tolerance” by banning, burning and boycotting. Thats all the theology the progressive needs to know.

Modern History, A Product of the Enlightenment

Voltaire wrote “History is nothing but a pack of tricks we play on the dead.” But he is one of the creators of the modern view of history as an objective account which attempts to portray events as closely to how they actually occurred as the historian’s ability allows. History like science, was a product of the enlightenment. Previously there was a theology to uphold, and events, real or mythological, no substantive distinction between the two existed, were portrayed to promote that theology, It was the enlightenment which invented a new concept of history, a “scientific” history of events that unfolded in a certain away independent of historian or ideology. Men like Voltaire based their histories on skeptically examined documents. One of Voltaire’s mottos was “au fait”, to the facts., in history as well as science. Voltaire, David Hume, William Robertson and Edward Gibbon gave birth to a new concept of history. A concept that still existed when I was an undergraduate majoring in history. But the cracks were starting to be visible as the counterculture was becoming the culture. “Postmodernism” is actually pre-modernism, a brutal medieval worldview camouflaged in indecipherable academic-speak, that reverts history back to before the enlightenment.

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Lies to teach the only Truth, Dialectical Materialism

“Progressives” write history as it ought to be. Not history as it, was but as it ought to have been. Outright lies are fine, for particulars do not matter as long as they illustrate a “greater truth.” The famous Rolling Stone article “A Rape on Campus” was a hoax, but it lead to groups and a play celebrating the “victim” as it “exposed” the greater truth of “the oppressive white male patriarchy which approves of rape”. It has become politically correct to teach that Muslims invented algebra, zero and Arabic numerals. Muslims invented none of these, though they introduced or reintroduced these to the western world, after the first dark ages.  Muslims did not invent algebra. This misconception is fueled by that the word “algebra” does indeed come from Arabic. The ancient Babylonians developed algebra in the first millennium B.C.,  a mere 15 centuries before Islam. Zero too dates to the ancient Babylonians, who were quite mathematically sophisticated. Brahmagupta, Indian mathematician, was the first to formulate the mathematical rules regarding zero in a 628  A.D. in a book the title of which translates to “correctly established doctrine of Brahma”.  “Arabic” numerals were invented in India around 700 A.D.  But “objective reality” is an western patriarchal notion, and must not interfere with Islamic self-esteem.  An October 8, 2015 an article in the New York Times expressed doubt that the Jewish temple once stood in Jerusalem. Recently Unesco made quite clear it thinks one never did. For close to 2000 years the outermost Western Wall of the temple in Jerusalem, all that remained of the temple after the Roman destruction, has been the holiest spot on earth for Jews. But according to Unesco, the western wall was built as part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It is très chic among the cultural elites to maintain that there were no Jews in “Palestine” until the Zionist occupier came in the 20th century. Certainly the above view would not be out of character for the New York Times, a Marxist postmodernist publication. The paper published an oped article by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that stated the Arabs accepted the UN partition plan of 1947. Michael Oren wrote in “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide.” that protesting to Andrew Rosenthal, then Times editorial page editor, lead to the following exchange:

“Did anybody check whether Abbas has his facts exactly backwards?” “That’s your opinion,” Rosenthal replied. “I’m an historian, Andy, and there are opinions and there are facts. That the Arabs rejected partition and the Jews accepted it is an irrefutable fact.” “In your view.” “Tell me, on June 6, 1944, did Allied forces land or did they not land on Normandy Beach.” Rosenthal, the son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning Times reporter and famed executive editor, replied, “Some might say so.”

Michael Oren, an accomplished historian, adheres to the enlightenment definition of history. But then again he is an imperialist Zionist occupier. “There are facts”? How reactionary can one be? Leftist Andrew Rosenthal naturally adheres to the postmodern definition of history. Maybe the allies never landed on Normandy beach. After all, I’ve heard at “humanist” meetings not only admiration for the courage of Palestinian suicide bombers, but that the Soviet Union alone defeated Germany, with the United States having nothing to do with it.

The Death of Knowledge

Like it did with the study of literature,, the left has murdered history by exerting control over it. The left is now murdering science. We just saw how how left used polling, which relies on inferential statistics, as just spin to promote a candidate. “You can prove anything with statistics” many have cynically said. But a greater truth is that you can not prove anything without statistics. Statistics are the only acceptable currency of proof in science, and both are imperiled by “progressives”. As far back as 1998, while interviewing in the south for a college position (which I did not get, being from New York City did not exactly help) I remember being told by a historian that he now goes only to local southern history conferences rather that national ones, as he got sick of dealing with marxist historians and post-modernists who insist history is something historians make up. The left decades ago ravaged history to the point where it has no credibility. For all practical purposes there is no longer a “past that occurred” . The very notion of an objective past is foreign to today’s sensibilities. By subjugating everything to a political agenda, the left is now bringing disrepute to science. There is a full-scale left wing rewriting of science to eliminate deviationism. People are rightly doubting that man-made global warming is the greatest threat facing us. As marxist.com explains in “Global warming a Marxist perspective”, “The dialectical nature of climate change is a striking confirmation of the philosophy of dialectical materialism developed by the founders of scientific socialism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.” But people are now also doubting all of science. From now on he purpose of polling will be seen as propaganda for a candidate, not to discover and predict reality. If people can not trust what scientists tell them, science and all knowledge is in danger. What will the world look like in 25 years? A new dark ages is starting. Under the leadership of the left, western civilization and all its achievement, is dying and leaving the corpse for ISIS to infest.

Epilogue

Politically correct intellectuals have reduced history to nothing more than leftist-fascist supporting fabrications. So have a little sympathy for the 20 something year old who never heard of Bull Run or Antietam, but knows the Confederate flag should be banned from battle recreations, and if has heard of General Lee, thinks its just the car on the Dukes of Hazard, also to be banned. And guess what, science is fast going down the same path. Thanks to “progressives” there is no past. And if there is no past, there is no future.