Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (Simon & Schuster: 1996)
Literary Theory and its Attack on Historical Objectivity
This is another book I’ve just finished reading, and it’s been fascinating. Windschuttle was a lecturer in history, social policy and media studies at the University of New South Wales, among other Ozzie institutions. Although it was published in the 1990s, many of the issues Windschuttle attacks are still present in our universities in Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand. When I was doing my MA in history at UWE in the first decade of this century, Postmodernism, one of the ideologies attacked in this book, was already passe. But the central ideas of Postmodernism and its cousins are still very much present. The notion that modern science is really only a western form on knowledge no better than other, non-Western forms, and is somehow oppressive to indigenous people, and does not present any objective knowledge about the world. The doctrine that indigenous peoples have their own, radically different form of rationality which we cannot understand nor criticise. And that traditional history can never present objective truth about the past, and so most be regarded as fiction, ‘although this does not mean it is fantasy’. And that far from being humane and progressive, modern society’s treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill is worse than it was in the Middle Ages.
The usual leading thinkers of French literary theory, postmodernism and now Critical Theory are here: de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, as well as the philosophers of science Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper and Lakatos. Windschuttle demonstrates in the book that not only are they wrong on the theoretical level, but that their theories and attitudes have resulted in an appallingly bad history and have caused immense harm to the historical profession as a whole. Universities across Australia and the rest of the English-speaking world are laying off historians and the number of students taking history has gone down radically. Some of this is due to other factors – I’d say that now one of them was the government’s insistence that schoolchildren study STEM subjects rather than the humanities – but much of this, in Winschuttle’s view, has been due to the impact of these radical ideologies and the push to incorporate them into history from literary criticism. This is radically altering the nature of history itself, and destroying the idea of historical objectivity.
The Roots of Radical Scepticism in Heidegger and Nietzsche
Structuralism and Poststructuralism are two of these ideologies that emerged from literary criticism and linguistic theory. In short, these theories consider that human experience is constructed by language and culture, and so do not represent objective reality about the external world. The Postmodernists were particularly influenced by Heidegger, a university philosopher who supported the Nazis and their coordination of the German universities, and who continued to support the ‘truth’ of the Nazi regime even after the fall of the Third Reich; and Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God and the absence of any objective values or knowledge of the real world. This was a chaos outside our comprehension and language was unable to give any kind of objective picture of it. The result of this is a radical scepticism towards any claims towards objective truth and those disciplines that make and rely on such claims, such as science and history. Indeed, he cites the radical British sociologist Anthony Giddens as stating that neither sociology nor history now represent objective knowledge about society and human affairs, but should be merged together in a new academic discipline. Heidegger’s continued support for the Nazi regime acutely embarrassed some of the Postmodernists and radical literary theorists, but despite this setback, they still carried on.
Cortes and the Conquest of the Aztec Empire
After discussing these ideologies, Windschuttle goes to show how these theories have led to some bad, and sometimes appallingly terrible, historical writing, beginning with the Aztecs. The argument made by the literary theorists is that the Aztec Empire fell because they were so locked into their culture and its view of the world, that they could not adapt to the new tactics and weaponry used against them by the Spanish conquistadors. Against this are the arguments of empirical historians: the Aztecs fell because Montezuma was vacillating and indecisive; Hernan Cortez and the Spanish possessed superior military technology against the Neolithic weaponry of the Aztecs; the subject peoples of the Empire were sick to their back teeth of Aztec oppression. The Aztecs could inspire fear, but not loyalty. And hence the other nations were willing to ally themselves with the conquistadors. Their hatred ran to genocidal levels, with Cortes told by his Amerindian allies that he should exterminate them all, right down to children and the elderly. When massacres of the Aztecs occurred, they were frequently carried out not by the conquistadors by their indigenous allies.
The book shows clearly that, although the Spanish employed tactics, such as siege warfare, that had been unknown in the New World, the Aztecs quickly recognised and adapted to them. They also knew very well that the new, White-skinned incomers and their horses were not gods. It also discusses the horrors of Aztec human sacrifice, which included cannibalism. Children, as well as warriors, were killed. In one four-day ceremony about 20,000 people were slaughtered, although the original Spanish estimate was 80,000. And the sacrifices had a Hannibal Lecter dimension of horror to them. After killing and beheading their victims were flayed and the priests wore their skins. In one of the ceremonies in November the sacrifice was a woman, whose skin was worn by a naked male priest. This is Ed Gein and The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill on an institutional level. The book also points out that relatively few people were actually killed by the Spanish themselves. What annihilated the Amerindian population was the smallpox which entered their country thanks to a sick emissary from the governor of Cuba, who wanted to know what Cortes was doing in Mexico. The indigenous peoples had no immunity to the disease, and so died in their millions. Windschuttle is scathing of attempts to normalise or present a sympathetic view of Aztec human sacrifice by comparing it to the Roman Catholic mass, in which the bread and wine of Holy Communion are mystically transformed into Christ’s flesh and blood. He also states that if these writers had any genuine sympathy for Mexico’s indigenous peoples, it should be not with the brutal Aztecs themselves, but with the subject peoples they oppressed.
The Death of Cook on Hawaii
There’s a similar controversy over the death of Captain Cook in Hawaii. When Cook first landed, he was welcomed and went through a ceremony in which he was robed in red cloth. It was therefore claimed that this marked his recognition by the Hawaiians as an incarnation of the god Lono, who represented sports, peace and fertility. When he was forced to return to escape a storm, the mood had changed. They were insolent and became aggressive when Cook tried to arrest their chief to hold hostage for the return of a boat that had been stolen. This led to a battle in which Cook and a number of marines were killed. Cook’s body was taken back to the Hawaiian temple, where it was dismembered and his bones subsequently used in religious ceremonies. This is supposed to have been done in accordance with the Hawaiian religion. Cook had supposedly arrived during the Mahakiki festival for the god Lono. When he returned, it was the season of Ku, the god of war, and Cook was duly sacrificed accordingly.
Against this is the theory of the Sri Lankan anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, that the Hawaiians knew very well Cook was no god. He didn’t speak their language and knew nothing of their culture or religion. And many of the events were the actual reverse of the conflict between Lono and the Hawaiian chief in their religion. Cook was most probably invested as a chief, not a god. The Hawaiians were still friendly to him after he returned, and the elderly chief went quietly with him as a hostage. What changed the mood was a skirmish elsewhere between the Hawaiians and the British, during which some warriors were killed. The chief’s wife was filled with fear and ran to help her husband. Rather than this being the re-enactment of a mythical conflict, Cook was killed because his wife and warriors were afraid that the old chief would be maltreated and killed by the British.
There is a similar discussion of Captain Wallis’ contact with the Tahitians nearly thirty years earlier. Wallis was met with a very hostile reception during which his ship and men were pelted with stones to the extent that they retaliated with guns and cannons. However, once again it is claimed that the indigenous peoples weren’t responding to what they regarded as an outside threat, but responding to Wallis as a god from their religion. This god would have demanded human sacrifice, and so the Tahitians would have been ‘well satisfied’ with his killing of their friends and relatives. This boggles belief, and commonsense says very clearly that the Tahitians were no different to anybody else, and so would definitely have not regarded Wallis as a god, nor been pleased to see their people killed. But the response to Obeyesekere from the proposers of these views is that, despite being Sri Lankan, he has been captured by western imperial and colonial ideology and does not understand how non-western peoples think. Which comes across the me as sheer hubris.
Paul Carter’s Spatial History, Convict Literature and Indigenous Australian History
The Aussie writer Paul Carter also gets it for a book he wrote about the country’s convicts and aboriginal people. Carter wanted to write a new kind of history, one that would be open-ended as the events were experienced by the people themselves, rather than as it is traditionally written where the ending is already known. It was hailed as a classic by novelists and literary critics, winning the Victoria President’s award for literature in any genre. It also made some glaring, howling mistakes. First of all, he claimed that the settlers only stopped and settled down as brief pause before moving on again. But this can hardly be true of people, who were the younger children of the British aristocracy, who built mansions more impressive than some of their relatives back home, and who spent years clearing the land to raise livestock and crops.
He also claims that the voices of the convicts are lost to us, and we can only reconstruct their story from the accounts of the officials and warders guarding them. But Windschuttle goes on to show that the opposite is very much the case. There was an acute skills shortage in Oz, which saw convicts performing very middle class jobs as bank clerks, lawyers and other professionals. They weren’t all illiterate bogans. Many of them were transported for political crimes, such as British trade unionists and Irish nationalists. These men were also literate. The cons wrote poetry, plays and novels. The first novel published in Australia in 1830 was written by a convict. One of them also wrote a critique of the prison system in which he had served. One historian collected an anthology of convict writing in the 1950s and it’s been in print since it was published in 1958. There’s also abundant evidence from the British and Australian trial and prison records, which recorded their testimony verbatim. So much so that historians can’t get through it all. And there are more Ph.Ds, lectureships and chairs awarded in convict studies than in any other subject Down Under. Literary types may have been impressed, but historians were devastating in their remarks. With all this information about Australians convicts around, why didn’t Carter just walk into his local library or branch of the Ozzie version of Waterstone’s?
He gets worse when it comes to indigenous Australians. They’re absolutely unknowable and so outside western ability to capture their historical presence. Indeed, he says that it could be possible to write a book about their history without mentioning them at all. But people have written excellent books about them. The first was C.D. Rowley’s ’70s book, which revealed the extent of the persistent genocide against them. This has been succeeded by other writers, who have included the voices and art of aboriginal people themselves. But Carter sneers at these works, because they have been written according to the conventions of western narrative history, and so are imperialist, colonialist etc. Again, you’re astonished at his hubris and sheer arrogance.
Michel Foucault, Power, Prisons and Lunatic Asylums
Then comes Michel Foucault and his books on prisons and mental institutions. Foucault was part of the radical prisoners’ movement in the 1970s, and wanted to show in his book that modern prisons and mental institutions in their way were more intolerant and brutal than those of the Middle Ages. Foucault has been highly influential, not least because he spoke directly to university students. They didn’t have to do anything really radical like joining a protest march or trade union. No, they could just talk about the injustice of it all at university. He also believed that oppression came not from the centre, as in Marxism, but from the periphery, from the people and officials actually involved in administering the system. As such he provided an alternative explanation for social injustice contrary to that of Marx, who was already being abandoned by many on the New Left. He also believed that knowledge wasn’t accumulated, but that there were various stages of history he called epistemes which were completely separate from each other, although he had to admit that some institutions, attitudes and doctrines, such as those of the church, continued across epistemes. This rightly comes in for criticism, as does his contention that the modern treatment of prisoners and the mad is no more humane than the barbarities perpetuated in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Central to Foucault’s thinking is the idea that prisons and lunatic asylums were instruments of oppression built by regimes and their rulers to incarcerate the undesirables who challenged their rule and system. But as Windschuttle shows, Foucault alwo too makes glaring errors of fact. The treatment of prisoners and the insane in mental hospitals is definitely more humane than it ever was in previous centuries, and if the mad had greater freedom in the Middle Ages, it was the result of society being much more hierarchical. This allowed them to roam the country and enjoy personal freedom without incarceration, but only because they were at the bottom of the social pile. It does not mean they were more respected, as Foucault claims, or better treated. And the ships of fools that supposedly carried them up and down the Rhine in search of their lost reason may be entirely mythical.
Anti-Science Scepticism and the attack on Historical Objectivity
Kuhn, Popper and Lakatos are attacked for undermining scientific rationality and the efficacy of the scientific method in favour of a form of social constructivism. Scientific truth is supposedly defined by the attitudes of the scientific community, rather than whether they actually describe an objective reality. Kuhn’s ideas that scientific progress comes in a series of paradigm shifts, as theories are replaced by different theories, which may not initially provide much of a better explanation, as laid down in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is compared with Foucault’s notion of epistemes, though Foucault himself was moving away from this idea as his thinking progressed. These theories are duly criticised, not least because science clearly has advanced and for a theory to be accepted at all, it must correspond at some level to reality. This concentration on the philosophy of science is rather odd in a book about history. It’s a separate, but related issue. But Windschuttle tackles it because he believes that history straddles the humanities and the sciences, and proper empirical history, done in archives, has something of the scientific endeavour. It is also similar to some of the natural sciences like evolutionary biology and geology, as discussed by Philip Jay Gould, the late palaeontologist and rival of Richard Dawkins. Historians have their own views, are frequently mistaken and engaged in arguments with their colleagues, but their writings must correspond to fact, even if their interpretations of those facts differ. And facts are important: history isn’t just about interpretation, as some of the literary theory crowd claim. Historians also find that despite their initial ideas about where their research will lead, they find that quite often it takes them in a different direction and they are forced to modify and alter their opinions. History, like science, is about finding and revealing truth. It is certainly not about fiction.
Cultural Relativism and the Different Rationality of the Non-Western ‘Other’
The final chapter and afterward revisit some of these topics, such as the continuing arguments over the death of Cook. The postmodernist has had the last word, publishing a response to Obeyesekere to which the Sri Lankan anthropologist had not responded. This contains information about the radically different ways some indigenous peoples divide up the world as a demonstration of their different rationality. This includes a Papuan tribe that categorises things according to smell from ‘smelly’ to ‘decaying’. But some of these distinctions are those we also make in the West, such as the Chewa’s separation of wild and domestic ducks. We also distinguish between wild and domesticated animals at the practical level of farming, although we have another level of distinction in their scientific categorisation. And apart from this, these peoples still show the same kind of rationality found in peoples throughout the world, including the West.
It then goes on to attack the cultural relativism, including the demands from aboriginal Australians and the Maori that the evolutionary theories of the origin of humanity taught in schools demean them by ignoring their own origin stories of how they are native to the land. They wished this changed so that their stories are also taught in school as equally valid. This is dangerous. Science is a form of rationality that transcends the West. Although it first arose there, there were elements that could have led to it arising elsewhere in the world and it has been of immense practical benefit to humanity. And if we went back to the various cultural divisions demanded by the postmodernists and their relatives, it would mean a return to the attitudes of hunter-gatherer peoples, in which you can only be a member of the tribe by birth. With contemporary, modern states like Australia, you membership is open to anyone who wants it. There is an especial danger to aboriginal Australians and Maoris if the scientific explanation of their evolutionary descent were replaced by the teaching of their origin myths. It would mean that they didn’t share the common descent of all humans through emigration out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. They would constitute separate species, and so could be the human rights extended to and enjoyed by the rest of humanity.
The Problems of History from Maori Point of View
The afterword discusses the devastating effects these doctrines have had on history, as well as the fightback from professional historians. As a response to these doctrines, the American Historical Association was founded. This includes historians of all views, from Marxists to Conservatives, all united by a desire to fight the pernicious influence of the literary theorists, postmodernists and the Critical Theory mob as they were emerging. Much of it is also a response to the book’s critics following the publication of the first edition. He also discusses the attempt to present an even-handed history of the discovery of New Zealand from the British and Maori viewpoints. This has maps showing how European states were also at war with each other, just as the various Maori tribes were with each other. It discusses the barbarous punishments and treatment visited upon criminals and others transgressors alongside the brutal practices of the Maori. But this book is also flawed. At the time the Maori had no idea of the radical changes these encounters would mean for them. They were of little apparent importance. The ships, or floating islands filled with goblins, as the Maori saw them, sporadically appeared. Sometimes Brits and Maori fought and killed each other. Sometimes the British landed and offered strange gifts. But then they went away again and life carried on the same. Except that the British knew very well what these encounters meant and the great, calamitous changes that would overcome indigenous New Zealanders. To leave this element of the story out because it wasn’t realised by the Maori omits the disastrous changes which occurred to them and deprives the Maori of the historical knowledge they need to fight back against past injustice.
The Continuation of These Doctrines Today in Critical Theory
Postmodernism may be passe now in history, but its doctrines and attitudes have been taken up and repackaged by the Critical Theory crowd, which is increasingly being taught in universities. The radical scepticism about scientific truth led to the ‘Science Must Fall’ movement c. 2004, which had Black African students in South African universities demanding that science should include their indigenous beliefs. It’s now part of the demands for decolonisation and the inclusion of non-western modes of knowledge in science teaching. The book notes that in 1994 history teaching in American schools was going to replace the standard narrative about the American Revolution and the founding of America, the Civil War and then the movement west with accounts of the oppression of women, ethnic minorities and the disabled and how they were able to challenge and overcome oppression. Only the intervention of a conservative administration prevented this from being enacted. This is history as social activism, which is still very much a demand of the social justice crowd, who reject the idea of history for its own sake as the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. This is something that they claim doesn’t exist, and if you are a traditional historian, you are, whatever your political views, somehow still a supporter of the system of oppression. These doctrines are spreading out from the humanities into science and mathematics as part of a campaign to turn them into vehicles for social activism. And the quality of education is being damaged as a result. James Lindsay, a former mathematician and member of a team of anti-Critical Social Justice academics with the philosopher Peter Bogossian and feminist historian Helen Pluckrose, has shown how much this doctrine is based on the Marxist pedagogy devised by the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freyre. And the standard response of the literary theory crowd is still present in Critical Race Theory’s doctrine of standpoint criticism. This holds that people’s views are determined by their social position. The literary theorists’ response to any attack on their facts and arguments is not to respond to them, but instead to attack the social status of those advancing them. If the argument comes from someone with a privileged social position, their arguments are ignored or rebutted as self-serving and no more time need be spent on them. Standpoint criticism in Critical Race Theory does exactly the same, although it is specifically directed at Whites, whose attitudes and views are also considered to be attempts to justify their privileged social position regardless of their content.
Intellectual Life – the Other Side of Ozzie Culture
This is a fascinating book. Although it was written nearly thirty years ago, it shows how old these literary theories are and the danger they represented to history, just as they are threatening the wider academy in the form of Critical Social Justice theories. It’s also eye-opening seeing these issues discussed from an Australian, antipodean perspective. For most Brits, at least those of a certain age, the dominant image of Australia is one of the Outback with rugged men and women on the cattle stations and sheep farms making their lives in the immensity of the continent. This includes the ocker redneck culture with hard-drinking men in hats decorated with dangling corks. The caricature Australian satirised by Private Eye in the strip and Bruce Beresford’s film Barry McKenzie. Or else it was the suburban philistinism against which Beresford, Clive James, Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries rebelled when they emerged in Britain in the 60s and 70s. This shows that Australia had a genuine intellectual culture at variance to the national stereotype. And what I found particularly fascinating was how much this culture had been built by the convicts transported there. I wondered if this helped contribute to the optimism that existed at one point in Australia. Skills and labour were desperately needed, and so wages were higher. It really was a land of opportunity, and so many people emigrated because, in Oz, the slogan ‘I bloody can!’ was a reality. At least before the economy developed so that immigration was not needed quite so much.
Conclusion: A Great Introduction to these Ideological Issues and the Debates They Affect
It is also amazing what the book says about the Aztec Empire itself. Its capital, Tenochtitlan, had a population of 200,000 people, nearly three times as much as the largest city in contemporary Spain, Seville, which had 70,000. Apart from its huge temples, it had a vast like divided into islands on which the Aztecs grew their crops, reached by a causeway and with an aquaduct bringing the city’s water supply. It is astonishing how a sophisticated civilisation like the Aztecs could commit the horrendous atrocities they did. I can also remember hearing that the Aztecs were conquered because they believed Cortes and his crew were gods, and that Cook was killed for the same reason. This presents the persuasive counterarguments.
In reading this book, you’ll not just get a grasp of the fundamental doctrines of French literary theory and its successors, and how they threaten genuine history, whether of left or right, but you will also learn something about the historical debates over topics like the Spanish conquest of Mexico, British contact with Hawaii, Tahiti and the Maori and the Australia’s literary heritage from the convicts. As well as the beginning of research into the institutional genocide of indigenous Australians.