The many failings of post-modernism

Samuel Brittan

IN DEFENCE OF HISTORY by Richard J. Evans Granta, f15.99, pp. 307 Historians should stop behaving as if they are researching into things that actual- ly happened. They should just tell 'stories' without bothering whether or not they are true. As we can never know anything at all about the past, we might as well confine ourselves to studying rival historians. Alter- natively, we may dismiss all history as just naked ideology designed to provide histori- ans with power and money in big university institutions run by the bourgeoisie. In any case, all the world is a text and time is a fictional construct.

Is it really worth refuting such views from the more extreme of the historians who call themselves post-modernists or occasionally deconstructionists? The professor-elect of modern history at Cambridge, Richard Evans, evidently believes the effort necessary, so entrenched have such people become in universities.

Those of us fortunate enough to be dis- tant from the scene of battle must respect his verdict. Evans certainly hammers the post-modernists into the ground by detailed consideration of their specific arguments and demolition of their logic. He is, however, willing to give them some due, saying that they have emphasised the importance of looking critically at texts for hidden or unintended meanings. Maybe he is even too generous, for some of the best historians have always employed such scep- ticism and been self-conscious about their own interests and political bias.

Most of the post-modernists regard themselves as being on the Left. So too does Professor Evans, who castigates them for being so concerned with the decon- struction of texts that they ignore the reali- ty of much suffering and oppression. He also points out how extreme deconstruction can provide comfort for the racialist Right, as in various attempts to deny the reality of the Nazi Holocaust. I doubt, however, whether he will convince confirmed practi- tioners of the new ways.

For the rest of us his destruction of post- modernism may be a little wearying, with chapter after chapter and example after example. Indeed the author can do the job in a few lines. For, as he points out, if there is no such thing as truth and we are free to tell what stories we like, then there is no particular reason to believe the deconstruc- tionists, who are thus contradicted by their own doctrines.

Perhaps Evans is too much of a historian and not enough of a speculative thinker to ask about the basis of the absurdities which he condemns. They have at least three separate roots. The first is philosophical scepticism which reflects itself in tradition- al concerns about our knowledge of other minds, doubts about whether the world exists outside our sensations, and so on. Such scepticism is not as easily debunked as the postwar Oxford linguistic analysts supposed. But it exists on a different plane of discourse from history or the social sciences.

To talk about the Napoleonic wars or the Great Depression or the career of Freder- ick the Great assumes that there were such things. To investigate history, we have to suspend metaphysical doubt, just as we do in daily life. Nobody recognised this more clearly than the Scottish 18th-century philosopher David Hume, the greatest sceptic of all. But he set aside his doubts not merely when he wandered into society but when he went on to write a classic history of England which he believed to be something other than a work of his imagi- nation.

A second root of post-modernism is the desire to continue the Marxist critique of western society by other means. Most of the empirical claims of Marxism had been falsified well before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Intellectuals who half realised this had to find fresh structures of oppression, whether of race or gender, to replace the old typologies. (Hence pejorative expres- sions such as 'dead white males'). But they also needed to immunise themselves against empirical criticism. Whereas the most endearing feature of old-fashioned Marxism was its belief in a happy ending, many post-modernists are mired in a per- manent pessimism which will always give them something to deconstruct and under- mine.

A third element is the retreat from reason, discernible also in New Age fash- ions, the indulgence given to medical quacks and the contemporary kind of reli- giosity stretching from revived fundamen- talism to the more fantastic Californian cults. Alas, we do not have any good gener- al theory explaining these periodic revolts against enlightenment and telling us in which conditions they flourish or wither.

Fortunately Evans does not confine him- self to post-modernism. The most interest- ing part of his book is the first third, in which he outlines the history of history as a discipline. The rival historical schools of the last generation were represented by E. H. Carr and Sir Geoffrey Elton. At this distance they seem beyond caricature. Carr, the historian of the USSR, believed that history must be governed by a vision of the future, which he took to mean that of Soviet-style collectivism. But he also prided himself on his realism and did not consider the activities of ordinary people merited investigation until the last century or two, when organised socialist movements appeared.

Elton, by contrast, was a refugee from central Europe who admired not so much English democracy as English order and became a great fan of Thomas Cromwell, the ruthless agent of Henry VIII. Elton asserted, however, that the political views of historians were irrelevant and that the study of sources could be as objective as the analysis of chemical elements.

The author holds the more balanced view that the interests and beliefs of the historian inevitably affect the story he or she tells. Thus, many interpretations are possible, but the honest historian cannot say just what he likes and is confined by evidence.

Evans touches on, but does not fully explore, the relationship between history and the social sciences. He mentions the early ambitions of the cliometricians, who wanted to make history a science by apply- ing a mixture of economic theory and mod- ern statistical methods. One notable example was Time on the Cross, which its authors believed demonstrated that slavery was an economically viable way of life in the American South, although that could not in the least excuse it morally. But other qualified investigators believe that they have torn the whole edifice to pieces. Modern techniques have thus in no way banished old-fashioned controversies but reinstated them in more complex form.

The most perplexing problem raised in In Defence of History has little to do with post-modernism. Conventional political and diplomatic history is now only a small fraction of the vast amount being written. History may be breaking up into thousands of different specialities, which no one person can hope to grasp. The most he or she can learn to do is to tap into selected parts on the Internet. A historian of epidemics is likely to have more in common with a medical scientist interested in this subject than with a student of politics at the time of the accession of George III.

We can say that there is still a common historical core based on political events in one's own country, to which a selection from other specialities can be added. Or we can say that there is no longer a single subject, history, but a historical aspect to many different disciplines. The choice is a semantic one, but will inevitably be influenced by contemporary politics, whether of the academic variety or the hubris of Ministers of Education who purport to lay down common curricula.