Engaged or Enraged?

The History Wars
by Stuart Macintyre & Anna Clark
(MUP, 274 pages, 2003)

Stuart Macintyre, in The History Wars, argues that historians, to be true to their discipline, must abide by the so-called "rules" that govern its practice.  Chief amongst these rules are that:

... the inquiry has to be conducted by the procedures of historical scholarship:  the relevant evidence has to be assembled, assessed and set in context, its interpretations justified.  They make it possible for other historians to test the validity of the conclusions, to distinguish history that has warrant from accounts of the past that lack it.  (p.11)

The fact that such an old-fashioned commitment to objectivity and truth runs counter to the host of nihilistic and subjective post-modern fads that have overtaken the Academy is not the point.  The fact is that Macintyre sets the standard by which he should be judged and, on reading The History Wars, one has to conclude that he fails his own test.

The first criticism is that while Macintyre attacks the so-called "History Warriors" for resorting to "personal abuse" and, by implication, suggesting that he adopts a morally superior position, there is much in his book that is vindictive and abusive.

As a result of Peter Ryan's criticisms of Manning Clark, Macintyre is happy to admit that he described Ryan as being guilty of an act of "personal cowardice" (p.65).  The Prime Minister, John Howard, is sarcastically compared to Joh Bjelke-Petersen (p.16) and to Caligula (p.195) and Peter Howson is attacked for being vain and egotistical (p.147).

Indeed, those who dare to question the received orthodoxy represented by Macintyre's view of history (especially if they commit the sin of writing for the popular press) are variously described as "fundamentalists", acting as "bullies", being "intensely political" and obeying "Rafferty's rules".

The second weakness in Macintyre's portrayal of the history wars is that it is both superficial and lacking in balance.  According to Macintyre, those "insurgents" who advocate a view of Australian history different to his own, since the demise of the Keating Government and the start of the Howard ascendancy, have received official patronage.

Whether being appointed to the ABC, the National Museum or writing school curricula, in the "them and us" world of simplified political debate much loved by Macintyre, he bemoans the fact that the "good guys" appear to have lost and that the reactionary History Warriors have won the day.

Thus, figures such as Michael Kroger, Ron Brunton and Liberal activists such as myself are attacked for being appointed to positions of influence, while Macintyre conveniently ignores to tell his readers that, over the course of the Howard years, he has also taken the King's shilling.

Not only has Macintyre, a past member of the Communist Party, been appointed and re-appointed to the Howard Government's civics and citizenship curriculum project entitled Discovering Democracy, but other friends of the ALP, such as Susan Pascoe and Ken Boston, have helped produce politically sensitive materials directed at the "hearts and minds" of Australia's schoolchildren.

That Macintyre's view of the history wars lacks proper balance is most evident in his scarcely disguised adoration of the Keating years and the role of Don Watson as court historian.  The Keating "Big Picture" is praised as embracing "diversity and tolerance with an egalitarian generosity" (p.3).

Prime Minister Howard, on the other hand, is attacked for practising "wedge politics", pandering to "public opinion and careful political management" (p.2) and committing the grievous sin of forsaking reconciliation, multiculturalism, the republic and the environment.

Forgotten is the fact that the Australian people have voted on a number of occasions and that no amount of analysis from distraught and unsettled leftist academics can change the fact that the Left's social and cultural agenda was found wanting.

A third criticism of The History Wars is that it appears somewhat dated and Macintyre fails to register or understand fully how the history wars have been fought out in the Australian education system.

Those familiar with the culture wars in the USA will know that the debate reached its climax in the early to middle 1990s.  As noted by Macintyre, books such as Dinish D'Souza's Illiberal Education and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind portrayed the way the Academy was besieged by so-called "theory" associated with neo-Marxism, deconstruction and the post-modern.

The more liberal/ humanist approach to subjects like history was condemned as "eurocentric, patriarchal and bourgeois" and the belief that education could be impartial or disinterested was attacked as simply a method by which the ruling class reproduced itself.

Within Australia, writers such as Geoffrey Partington and Alan Barcan also spent much of the 1990s outlining how the Left was taking the "long march through institutions" in its attempt to create the brave new world of the politically correct.

That the PC movement, to use Ross Fitzgerald's phrase, "was suppressing research, hijacking free speech and being enforced in a dangerously virulent way" was also noted in Pierre Ryckman's 1996 Boyer lecture when he stated:

A true university is (and has always been) anchored in values.  Deprived of this holding ground, it can only drift at the caprice of all the winds and currents of fashion and, in the end, is doomed to founder in the shallows of farce and incoherence.

Not only does Macintyre, in his somewhat nostalgic defence of history -- one where "Historians reach judgements by consideration of the issues, examination of the evidence, weighing of the arguments" (p.11) -- show a surprising ignorance of the impact of theory, but he also seems to be blissfully unaware of what has happened in his own university department.

With courses such as "The Body:  History, Sex and Gender", "Towards the 21st Century" and "Gender, Globalisation and Development" (including tourism and sexual politics), it appears that Melbourne University has long since moved on from a study of history as it might normally be defined.

That Macintyre is a late arrival in the debates about the culture wars is most evident by his failure to understand how, since the late 1970s, the curricula across Australia's schools has been affected by the thought police of the Left.

The one-time Education Minister in Victoria, Joan Kirner, was happy to admit in a Fabian conference in 1983 that the school system had to be transformed to make it "part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change, rather than an instrument of the capitalist system".

Influential academics responsible for teacher education, such as Doug White, Dean Ashenden, Simon Marginson, Bob Connell and Alan Luke, made no secret of the fact that theirs was a political war to overthrow the status quo, based on the belief that:

Education has a fundamental connection with the idea of human emancipation, though it is constantly in danger of being captured for other interests.  In a society disfigured by class exploitation, sexual and racial oppression, and in chronic danger of war and environmental destruction, the only education worth the name is one that forms people capable of taking part in their own liberation ... (Connell et al., 1982, page 208)

As part of Paul Keating's so-called Big Picture, his government sought to introduce a national curriculum for Australian schools.  One of those responsible for the task was Bill Hannan, an avowed Marxist who freely admitted that the education system should be used to bring about the socialist utopia:

We should try to achieve equality throughout society ... I believe that income, status, privileges and so forth should be levelled as quickly as we can ... We don't have to wait for society to change before education can change.  Education is part of society.  By changing it, we help to change society.  (1985, page 61)

Those responsible for writing the new courses, where history disappeared to be replaced by the hybrid "Studies of Society and Environment (SOSE), made little attempt to disguise the fact that theirs was an intensely political agenda.

The national SOSE statement argues that any curriculum must embrace the values of "democratic process", "social justice" and "ecological sustainability".  As expected, such values are interpreted in the light of what is politically correct and students are urged to adopt the following perspectives:  Gender, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Multicultural, Global and Futures.

In relation to Australian history, the national curriculum document describes European settlement as an "invasion" and belittles Australia's Anglo/ Celtic tradition.  On reading the document one is left with the impression that European settlement represents nothing but death, despair and destruction.

Indigenous culture, on the other hand, is presented in a heroic fashion that uncritically celebrates the customs and lifestyle of Aboriginal people, conveniently ignoring the patriarchal and violent aspects of Aboriginal culture.

A more recent example of the impact of the history wars can be found in the Queensland SOSE curriculum that was released in the year 2000.  In line with a socially critical, post-modern view of education, students are taught:

• that "knowledge is always tentative";
• that they should "deconstruct dominant views of society" and "critique the socially constructed elements of text";
• "how privilege and marginalisation are created and sustained in society";  and
• how "the consumer of a text is positioned and the possibility of who may have been marginalised by authors".

Whereas education was once based on the assumption that there are some absolutes (truth telling and being objective), in the brave new world of the Queensland curriculum, students are told that everything is "tentative" and "shifting" and that the purpose of education is to criticise mainstream society in terms of what has become the new trinity of "gender, ethnicity and class".

On the back page of The History Wars the reader is told that the book's authors present "an unashamedly engaged account".  On finishing the book, one is left with a strong sense that "enraged" is a better description.

Not only does Macintyre appear incapable of accepting that others, especially in the media and the public arena more generally, have the right to question the orthodoxy of the Left.  There is also a strong impression that nothing enrages cloistered, tax-funded academics more than an independently minded public that refuses to think as it is told.

REFERENCES

Dinish D'Souza (1992) Illiberal Education, Vintage Books, New York.

Allan Bloom (1987) The Closing of the American Mind, Simon and Shuster, New York.

Joan Kirner (1983) "Choice, Privilege and Equality - The Socialist Dilemma" in Education -- Where from?  Where To?, Victorian Fabian Society Pamphlet Number 41.

Connell, RW, Ashenden, DJ, Kessler,S, Dowsett, GW (1982) Making the Difference:  Schools, Families and Social Division, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney.

Bill Hannan (1985) Democratic Curriculum:  Essays in Schooling and Society, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney.

Pierre Ryckman (1996) Boyer Lecture, ABC, Sydney.