GUEST SHOT

Two Reviews
by Jack B. Moore

Of Love & Marketing Strategies

Keith Windschuttle: The Killing of History
New York: The Free Press, 1997; 304 pages.

MOST OF THE COUNTRY OUTSIDE ACADEMIA, and the publications that service and are serviced by it, are probably indifferent to or unaware of the fierce culture wars that have been fought by academics for the past thirty years or so in the United States. Occasionally a book surfaces such as Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind that captures the attention of anxious non academicians -- particularly politicians both local and Washingtonian -- who fear foreign intellectuals with scary theories are taking over the minds of cerebrally comatose American students the way those terrible pods insinuated themselves into control in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

At first, these occasionally popular books generally reflected or were most staunchly supported by a politically right-wing ideology resentful of entrenched scholars' fairly consistent swipes at the concept of America as a Celebration of Democratic Values. It was as though we were experiencing The Attack of the Amazingly Colossal Tenured Radicals.

More recently, old line, slightly left-of-center scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger in The Disuniting of America have joined the fight against social analysts who appear hell-bent to upset the old melting pot dream of America in their emphasis upon empowering ethnic fragments of the body politic rather than seeking a praiseworthy national identity. People like Schlesinger fear that what used to be called liberal studies are now becoming illiberal studies.

Keith Windschuttle's The Killing of History specifically contests cultural and historical relativism, which he claims is advanced by "the newly dominant theorists within the humanities and social sciences [who] assert that it is impossible to tell the truth about the past or to use history to produce knowledge in any objective sense at all. They claim we can only see the past through the perspective of our own culture, and, hence, what we see in history are our own interests and concerns reflected back at us."

Through examining some of the chief new (since 1960) theorists and their latter-day followers, he shows that the claim of these people holds true far more for them than for the other more traditional historians and cultural analysts they attack -- that the new theorists are greatly controlled by their present-day biases, which are generally anti-liberal and anti-Western. He claims that the historical investigations and cultural critiques these people write, are inaccurate and distorted; in other words, bad history, bad analysis.

Not only are the theories of these socio-historical (and literary) critics wrong-headed, according to Windschuttle, but their facts are wrong. Their language is pretentious and badly written, often employing expressions that twist words into bizarre, cryptic meanings that are strange or incomprehensible to the uninitiated but comforting to the egos of the falsely informing and informed.

He writes about Michel Foucault, for example, that he "makes it difficult for the reader to understand what is going on, and what is going wrong, in [his] books by insisting on his own 'private' version of words in ways that are often at variance with their 'public' uses."

Windschuttle's onslaught is not particularly new, but it is clear, enjoyably succinct, highly articulate, and frequently witty. An outsider to the culture wars would find in The Killing of History a substantial, lucidly restated sampling of the kind of exasperating modern analysis that Windschuttle finds dangerous.

Is he fair? He's about as fair with the historians and critics he attacks as they are with antagonists such as he. The intellectual dispute is important, since control of the way people look at the past or the present can lead to the way the future is shaped. That we see in his pages "the killing of history," or learn "how literary critics and social theorists are murdering our past" is, however, problematic, more terminology dictated by marketing strategies than something determined by, well, accurate social-historical analysis.

  Jack Moore's Review of The Actual,
   A Novel by Saul Bellow

Jack Moore teaches at The University of South Florida, where he is affiliated with the departments of English and of American Studies and with The Institute on Black Life. He is a frequent contributor to print magazines, newspapers and journals, and is the author of books on, among others, W.E.B. Du Bois and Joe Di Maggio. This is his first appearance here, but not his last.

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The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past

Cloth, 304 pages; 1st Free Press Edition published October 1, 1997.
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Alternate Title: The Killing of History: How a Discipline Is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists

Cloth; published by Access Pub. Network on June 1, 1996.
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