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Wars And Rumours Of Wars

The years after September 11 have seen a welcome surge in the number of faculty positions and courses devoted to Islam and the Middle East, without producing any charges of a distorted intellectual agenda. ~David Bell Well, yes and no.  There have not usually been charges of a “distorted intellectual agenda” from people who have something […]

The years after September 11 have seen a welcome surge in the number of faculty positions and courses devoted to Islam and the Middle East, without producing any charges of a distorted intellectual agenda. ~David Bell

Well, yes and no.  There have not usually been charges of a “distorted intellectual agenda” from people who have something to do with these areas of study, but there are routinely accusations of a “distorted intellectual agenda” aimed at Middle Eastern Studies departments around the country.  The accusers both do and do not have a point.  They do have a point that scholars of the Middle East do not actively ridicule and belittle most of the peoples they study, and they have a point that people who know rather more about the region–and who have actually been to the region–tend be surprisingly less reflexively pro-Israel than many of their fellow citizens who do not even possess a passport.  On a more grave note, they have something of a point when it comes to Islamic studies, where scholars of Islam enjoy the luxury of studying something both supremely interesting to the public at the present time and something about which relatively few non-experts can effectively challenge their interpretations, however misleading or simplistic some of them might be.  This gives them a flexibility and level of control over the public debate that is less possible in other areas of study.  Most of the accusers are not concerned about the influence of Turkish denialist policy on Middle Eastern studies, since the Armenians and other such peoples do not interest them very much, but it is true that most Turcologists tend to be very tight-lipped or agnostic about the Armenian genocide because they cannot afford to be publicly associated with something that is illegal to talk about in the country where they must do their research.  This is very unfortunate.  This is not principally what Mr. Bell is talking about (he is writing about the decline of military history), but inasmuch as it does pertain to the history of WWI it is an interesting aspect of another part of the historical record that suffers for both obvious political reasons and reasons of shifts within the discipline.

When I studied alongside other social science students who were not historians, I was impressed by how they wanted to reduce history to nothing but a story of “kings and wars,” as they dismissively put it, so that they probably assume on the basis with their acquaintance with the History Channel (a.k.a., The Nazis We Have Known And Killed Channel) that the only kind of history that exists is political and military!  How disappointed they would be to find that there are so few classes that fit their idea of what history is.  It is interesting that they assume that history was nothing but talking about “kings and wars” and it is also interesting that it was because of this that they had decided years ago that they didn’t like it.  How many sociologists now pester the world because they became convinced of the uselessness of history because of this perceived preoccupation with nothing but political and military history?  This loss of interest in history (which is obviously the most interesting subject anyone could ever study), as I have said repeatedly over the years, is proof that they had poor or unimaginative history teachers. 

History for these social science students was literature done up with a scientific apparatus.  Indeed, I would not argue strongly for the scientific quality of history in the way that this word is applied to the hard sciences or even something like sociology.  For me, contingency and unrepeatability define historical experience and so make the study of history decidedly unscientific by design, but I do understand the impulse of historians who wish to use social scientific methods to advance their craft because they are very much concerned to establish history as a reputable discipline that can match up with any of the social sciences.  History requires rigour, evidence and accuracy, but it obviously cannot involve experimentation.  Even though there are plenty of historians who understand that you have to have a grasp on chronology, narrative and the “kings and wars” to make sense of anything else, they also want to make clear that history is not “just” a story of “kings and wars” (even though it is inevitable that enrollements for classes about “kings and wars” are always much higher than they are for Gender in Renaissance Florence or what-have-you).  Consequently, while every amateur historian wants to talk about Valmy, Gettysburg, Verdun and Kursk, among others, the professionals want to show you how much more there is to the craft of history by talking about things like “Meaning And Identity In The Romanian Fin-De-Siecle” or “The Construction Of Community In Early Modern Tuebingen” or, more obscurely, “The Implications Of Demetrios Of Lampe For Armenian Church Union.”  Most people look at these things and think, “How boring.”  Many of us working in this or that field of history look at the same things and think, “Why didn’t I think of that title?”  (These may not be the best titles, by the way, but they will do for now.)  This isn’t because we don’t think wars are important (they are supremely important as engines of social, cultural and political transformation; they define entire epochs, they change the “course” of history in dramatic ways) or even that battles are unimportant (the fate of entire regions has sometimes turned on the outcome of a battle), but because we are, I think, attempting to fill out the rest of the story that is not comprehended by the dismissive description of “kings and wars.”

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