Looking over the program of the annual AHA conference, or over the titles of articles in the historical journals, or even over the list of history books published, I am distressed by the irrelevance of their topics. The academic history industry has transformed the past into a vast mosaic of meaninglessness. Here and there one can perhaps detect a few familiar patterns or some self-contained miniatures of sense. But the overall impression is one of confusion and bewilderment. Looking at each separate offering, one is tempted to ask: so what? And beholding the whole, one wonders about the irresponsibility of wasted time and energy.
Let us for once consider the basic responsibility of historians. It is their duty to explain to the living generation their place in time, their location in the stream of social, political, and cultural change. History is for the living who urgently need greater control over their destiny through constructive perspectives tying the past to the foreseeable future.
The first requirement for good historians, therefore, is to have a sound grasp of the present, so that they can draw from the past those lessons that fit the present need to shape an acceptable future. Given our inevitable limits of time and energy, we cannot take our entire past with us into the future; we must rigorously select from the past what helps us here and now, and forget the rest. Any historical work that could claim rational justification has always produced an interpreted and trimmed down past—or else it turned into antiquarianism, the luxury of the rich.
My question now is: do the busy operators of the academic history industry have an adequate sense of the present and the foreseeable future, so that they can ask sensible questions of the past and interpret it responsibly? Do they realize that all of us live in an entirely unprecedented age? For the first time in all human experience all peoples of the world, regardless of their prior cultural experiences, regardless of the profound differences of their languages, religions, and ways of life, are compressed into inescapable interaction and interdependence. The age of the global confluence is different from all previous ages. The perspectives of previous times are outdated; the insights of people living in separate cultural islands are insufficient for guiding life in the global common. Furthermore, no historical event in the past 150 years can be understood except in global perspective; modern history properly understood must be global history. National history considered only within a nation’s framework makes no sense. Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, or past American presidents, operated in a worldwide context, whether they were aware of that fact or not. As for the present and the future, global interdependence determines our lives and those of the other 5 billion human beings. Sensible history must be global history, sharpening people’s wits about their dependence on others around the world. We can survive only by having a better sense of control over that unprecedented novel reality.
That, briefly, is the world in which our students and fellow citizens must find their way. Does that reality reach into our history class rooms and into our historical research? Does that reality furnish the contexts in which we try to make history meaningful? And more: do we set time aside in our professional work to comprehend the world in which we live? Or do we busy ourselves in our specialties, creating little bailiwicks of pseudo-security to guard ourselves against the meaninglessness of the unmastered openness produced by the global confluence? It seems that the great majority of historians—as of the run of people generally—take the smooth functioning of society for grant ed (what else can we do, having no command over the course of events in a world that has grown over our heads?). Yet we live at a time of precipitous and uncomprehended change. Look at the news.
Considered in this setting, the present production of the academic history industry makes little sense. It is premised on outdated perspectives and priorities, caught in an arch-conservative, if not outright reactionary, mindset. We need new perspectives based on current priorities; we need new sensibilities capable of transcending the profound differences of cultural conditioning that produce ever escalating hostility and violence. We must help to transform the present tenuous global interdependence into a working community capable of coping with the avalanche of problems looming ahead of all humanity.
How much time and energy under these circumstances must we responsibly give to the common present? How much time is left for the separate histories of the past? And how adequate are our perceptions of both past and present conditioned in restricted cultural envelopes? Do we perhaps practice “cognitive imperialism” when we look at peoples reared under different conditions.
These are huge problems, all urgently pressing upon thinking people. Who in the historical profession dares to address them? Who even will face them? Maybe the chairperson of the Program Committee for some future AHA annual convention will put the subject on the agenda. It would be high time.
Theodore H. Von Laue is Frances and Jacob Hiatt Professor of European History, emeritus, at Clark University, Worchester, Massachusetts.
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