I'm a Simpleton. Are You a Simpleton?

In Walter Miller's tale, A Canticle for Leibowitz, there is a "great simplification" unleashed after a nuclear holocaust akin to Pol Pot's attack on the learned in Cambodia but world-wide in scope.

As I set sail for the year 1493 (that would be Chapter 2 in Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me), I feared I was headed for one of Miller's (in)famous Simple Towns where learning has stopped and simple explanations reign. In this I was disappointed that this was the case, but not surprised.

What was surprising was reading Loewen's unconscious mimicking of a the worst approaches to any subject: simplification to the point of distortion. One would think that Loewen would be astute enough to remove the lumber from his own self before railing against the textbooks but it was not to be.

The big question for people like Loewen who congratulate themselves for happening to have been born after the unenlightened hoardes who proceeded them is along these lines: So, are you suggesting that it would be better that you did not exist? According to your narrative, the world would have been better off if Columbus never set sail and history did not unfold as it did. Had it not, I dare say that none of us would be here opining about the crimes of others that we distance ourselves from.

Loewen would prefer a world where the weak are not trampled on by the strong and that is understandable, but that world does not exist. That does not mean sugar-coating the sins of our fathers, but it does mean recognizing that every group of people have done evil. Do you think the Aztecs would have shied away from slaughtering the Spaniards if they had the means to do so? Does a group of people achieve sinless status simply because they get exploited?

C'mon, virtue does follow simple because one has been victimized. Yes, high school history textbooks over-simplify and are vapid, but great books are not created by simply inverting the historical narrative.

How to be critical of the past

The Guys Who Started It

Negativity is Not Enough

Reflecting on the nature of being an historian, John Lukacs writes the following: "The purpose of historical knowledge is more than accuracy; it is understanding" (The Hitler of History, p. 2). Understanding requires some degree of sympathy for the person, period or phenomenon one is investigating or it will remain a sterile (at best) inquiry or something borne aloft by negativity (see the "masters" above).

It was truly this lack of sympathy in James Loewen's Lies that made it unreadable - sensationalism has never appealed to me and he takes that tack not so much by what he writes, but what he fails to write.

Refutation for refutation's sake is sterile. Deconstruction alone never leads to construction. As Stephanie Mackler observes: "Although something new might arise after destruction, destruction itself does not aim toward anything but negation of what is (Learning for Meaning's Sake, p. 11). Since the past is all we know (Lukacs), we ought to treat it well and seek to understand it, not merely criticize it and thereby save ourselves from real self-scrutiny. 

Bad Book, Good Effects

Even a bad book can be useful. Sometimes I read a book and think, "I wish I had written that" or "This author was spot-on." Other books elicit a negative reaction such as "What a waste of paper and ink" or "There goes several nights of reading I'll never get back."

Then there is a third category: books that provoke thought but the book itself is neither admirable nor even readable. Such it is with James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me. The unreadability stems from Loewen's approach which is to mock how one-sided and superficial history textbooks are then wade in with his own one-sided, mean-spirited, and [sigh], superficial approach to the same topic. So, while he does a good show illustrating the failings of hagiography-as-history, he falls prey to demonizing historical figures with a sense of moral superiority complex that self-assuredly suggests, "We know better, are better and will be better in the future... As long as you, Dear Reader, understand that by 'we' I mean 'me.'"  There is no moral drama in Columbus or the Spanairds. They are bad, but then so was everyone else back then. What?! 

Spanish Male, ca. 15-16th Century

A note on what history can and cannot be. This comes from John Lukacs' The Hitler of History but is something that I wish Loewen had considered in his book. Lukacs good. Loewen baaaaad! 

Contrary to the "scientific" illusion, in the research and writing of history there are no final results. And the purpose of history is often not so much the definite accounting of the events of a period as it is the historical description and understanding of problems: description, rather than definition; understanding, rather than completeness -- because while a perfect completion of our knowledge of the past is not possible, a reasonable and proper understanding of it is within our powers (xii).

Grasping the limits of our knowledge and the nature of historical truth would have helped Loewen and his book.

I think I can...

The book that needs to be written. Loewen's book did get me thinking seriously about how history is taught and/or should be taught. That could have been the subject of his book, but it is the textbooks themselves that he focuses on. Here are some thoughts after reading several chapters by Loewen.

1. Textbooks are and aren't the problem. Textbooks are the problem in ways that Loewen points out: they're too massive and aim at comprehensiveness instead of understanding. They over-simplify and create an atmosphere of thinking of history as being about brute facts instead of the human drama. But I would suggest that even if the textbooks were "good," they'd still be bad. The nature of the market for these boat anchors is such that they will be the way they are until teachers stop using them. At one point in the book Loewen mentions that there are slimmer and trimmer textbooks that survey much less history. This combined with a rich use of primary sources could make for an interesting class.

Perhaps Loewen is too polite to say it, but there is probably more things wrong with the teachers of history than anyone would like to admit. Loewen does mention that there do seem to be a disproportionate amount of coaches out there who also "teach history." Can you imagine your brain surgeon being a golfer who also "practices surgery"?! The priority of schools is surely to blame here and the lack of historians who teach history. A good teacher can do without a good textbook but a great textbook will never compensate for an incompetent teacher (except for those self-starting students who learn no matter what).

2. History is the story of persons, not mechanical processes. One of the most interesting things about history is how in any major event (and all kinds of minor ones), things could have been different. I don't think it's necessary to stress contingency with an excess of "what if" scenarios, but just because it did happen the way it did happen, we can sometimes fall into the trap of thinking it had to happen that way. Textbooks would be useless in bringing this out, but take a book like Lukacs' Five Days in London: May 1940 and it is evident that what may be seen as chains of events linked by specific causes may also be viewed as being shaped by persons with all the range of virtues and vices imaginable. This is something worth communicating to students

3. Ideas have consequences especially when we never heard of the ideas (or ideologies, more often). This points directly to the need for philosophy in the high school. Why on earth one can find psychology and sociology on offer but no philosophy course in the dozen high schools I've subbed at is beyond me. Religion? Forget about it. Never mind that religion and philosophy existed for millennia while the other two are recent inventions.

Well, that's enough for now. The book to be written could be titled How to teach history even if you're stuck with a lousy anchor masquerading as a textbook or something similar. 

Loewen's LIES

Name Calling Saves Time 

I really thought I could systematically trudge through Jimmie Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me for the greater good of humanity and history as it is taught in our high schools, but I just couldn't do it. I felt like I was faced with one of those Jack Chick tracts. Oh, unfamiliar, well, then see below:

Where does one begin? Jack or Jimmie, one is at a loss. "Holy Faulty Premises!" the Boy Wonder never said. Chick has the advantage of having MORE salacious images which is not exactly a compliment, but Chick is more fun.

In any event, the best I can do for now is to point out the following.

Loewen's Lack of Curiosity 

What seems to be missing from the chapter "1493" (and perhaps other chapters but my gag reflex prevented further exploration), is his disinterest in the transformation from slavery as "acceptable" to an "abominable" practice. How did we get here from there? At one point Loewen points out that "everyone was doing it" so to speak so Columbus and friends were not heinous when judged by the mores of their time, but this is one sentence after a catalog of cherry-picked quotations and sources that lead inexorably to the conclusion that most every Spaniard was guilty of malice aforethought and were gleefully committed to rape, pillage and destruction. 

And naturally this was in no small part attributable to their "pious orthodox Catholic" views. Eek! 

When he's not trashing Catholic Christianity, Loewen bleats "racism" to a degree that is reminscient of Orwell's Animal Farm: "White guys bad, brown guys gooood!" 

One reviewer noted that it wasn't worthwhile to catalog all of Loewen's errors and I must concur. Some authors aren't worth refuting. This is one of them. 

Over-correcting Does Not Set the Record Straight

Trust Me...

Well, I really enjoyed the Introduction to James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me but it has failed to enlighten much after a pretty stellar beginning. In the first chapter (Handicapped by History: The Process of Hero-making) it becomes clear that Loewen is one of those authors who has this super-mystical ability to see through everyone and everything to see the "true" motives and either discover the manifold darkness that lurks in the hearts of men (especially of the dead white dude variety) or that kids aren't being mean (i.e., just being kids) when they mock but are really enlightened critics of traditional pieties: 

Students poke fun at the goody-goodiest of them all by passing by passing on Helen Keller jokes. In so doing, schoolchildren are not poking cruel fun at a disabled person, they are deflating a pretentious symbol that is too good to be real (36). 

Concerning the authors prioritization of ideology over truthfulness, I should have been tipped-off by the "lies" in the title. Errors or even omissions or mistakes would suggest a possibility of goodwill in one's adversaries, whereas lies ensures that one's opponents are not merely sloppy or mistaken or naive, but wicked, wicked, bad people. 

We'll see if Loewen suffers from selective outrage. I suspect that while he speaks in glowing terms about Helen Keller's socialism, he'll have little praise for Elizabeth Cady Stanton's opposition to abortion.