Thursday, July 22, 2004
Haven't we travelled down this road once before?
| Haven't we travelled down this road once before? Huw Richards The Times Higher Education Supplement: 16 July 2004 | |
| As Britain anticipates a possible withdrawal from Iraq, Huw Richards experiences a nagging sense of deja vu. "British casualties in Irak have practically ceased, and a really settled and stable civil government is actually being set up. Once internecine tribal quarrels and bloodshed can be abolished, there is the prospect of a well-established civil government, conducted by the Irak people and the final retirement of the British armed forces altogether." So wrote a Labour minister in a newspaper dated July 15. Only the spelling of "Iraq" and the attribution of bloodshed to tribalism rather than terrorism give away that it was 1924 rather than yesterday. Tony Blair's is not the first Labour government to find Iraq troublesome. The minister in question was William Leach, Under-secretary for Air in the first Labour government of all, led by Ramsay MacDonald. The paper was Labour's own Daily Herald. The circumstances were not, of course, exactly those of today. The Americans were nowhere to be seen. This was exclusively Britain's show. Far from being a disgruntled bystander, the League of Nations (forerunner of the United Nations) was highly implicated, with Britain's presence in Iraq legitimised by a League mandate. Rather than overthrowing an Iraqi regime, Britain was sustaining King Faisal, its choice as monarch. There are, though, distinct parallels. A Labour administration was determined to prove that it could be trusted in office, and to do so it was prepared to rule in a manner much closer to its predecessors than to the cherished hopes of many followers. The best remembered example is MacDonald's insistence on his ministers wearing court dress, a measure aimed at reassuring a wary King George V but one that angered many Labour supporters. There were eight hostile resolutions at the 1924 party conference, expressed through symbolic deference to aristocratic flummery. But, as in the early 21st century, it was on Iraq that the Government acted in a way that critics felt went beyond the compromises inherent in office to outright betrayal. The Herald - jointly owned since 1922 by the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress - reserved the right to act as a candid friend of the Government rather than a slavish follower. But on most issues it was unreservedly supportive, and only mildly critical on court dress. Only on "Irak" did it subject the Government to the ferocious invective it routinely fired at the Liberals and Conservatives. The objection was not so much to the occupation as to the means used to underpin it - bombing recalcitrant tribes. It was less than six years since the end of the First World War, whose horrors generated revulsion felt particularly strongly on the Left. MacDonald and Leach had both been war resisters. Hamilton Fyfe, editor of the Herald, had been converted to socialism by his experiences as a war correspondent. Elsewhere, the Government, in which MacDonald was also Foreign Secretary, pursued what might have been termed an ethical foreign policy - working hard at the League of Nations for disarmament and a settlement to the dispute that had led to French troops occupying the Ruhr area of Germany in 1923. Bombing, Leach pointed out, was an inherited policy, adopted as an alternative to using land forces against "border tribes who live by loot and fighting", leading to "loss of British lives and unsatisfactory results". Labour had examined the issue on taking office. "Could we drop the use of the air methods? Yes, but it meant a dreadful cost of British lives and the lengthening of our stay. It meant a vast increase of ground forces and of cost to the British taxpayer." Ground fighting, he argued, would lead to greater loss of life on both sides and force was used only "for stern necessity". Royal Air Force officers were "invariably the model of chivalry, patience and goodwill... they dislike this work as much as a judge dislikes sentencing a prisoner to death". Left unspoken were other factors. The Government had fallen out with the Navy over plans for a Singapore base and had no wish to tangle with a second service. David Edgerton points out in England and the Aeroplane that action in Middle East mandates was vital to the RAF's survival as an independent service, showing the uses of strategic air power and a "relatively cheap means of imperial control". Iraq's oil was certainly a factor, although as historian Peter Sluglett noted in 1976 "it has always been bad manners to say so". Labour's leaders did not necessarily regard all races as equal. In early September 1924, Jimmy Thomas, the Colonial Secretary, told a meeting in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, that, in a world divided into groups, the white man was "a small minority, dominating and directing, who is - and must remain - the dominant influence". Leach's article responded to critical resolutions from local Labour parties - the Central London Independent Labour Party had called for "immediate stoppage of these weapons of barbarism". In Parliament he had become an early example of the Labour minister cheered from the Conservative benches while under attack from his own side - in this case, Herald columnist and former editor-proprietor George Lansbury. Lansbury asked him to substantiate claims that there had been no casualties, and argued that tribal atrocities cited by Leach to justify the policy had happened hundreds of miles from where bombing had taken place. The controversy ran through July and August. The Herald received "a flood of letters... filled with indignation, astonishment, pity, disappointment and alarm". Some defended the Government. A. G. Cartwright of West Hockley argued that ending the bombing would "certainly save the lives of a few oppressors, and also hand back the power to those who would continue bombing for a further indefinite period". They were vastly outnumbered by the critics, among whom one Ewart Lander argued: "Before Mr Leach says carry on with the bombing, he should consider the hideous results of aerial bombardment. As an ex-flying officer of the Air Force, who has seen from the ground the results of aerial bombing I do not hesitate to say that this method of warfare is damnable." The row peaked in a Herald leader written in response to an Air Ministry circular defending the policy. Fyfe, who had earlier confessed that placed in Leach's position, "I might be behaving exactly as he behaves", launched ferociously into the Government. "What would be said if they enforced private claims by throwing explosives into neighbours' homes? How could they defend themselves against national indignation by saying that their neighbours were imperfectly civilised and that it saved trouble to throw hand grenades among them? Yet that is exactly the attitude of Lord Thomson and Mr Leach, and with them the whole of the Cabinet, in a matter not affecting themselves personally, but the whole country ... This will not do. The Labour Movement did not make General Thomson a peer and put him into an official position in order that he might officially repudiate one of the principles upon which the Movement is founded. As for Mr Leach, his conversion to the Creed of Militarism can only be explained by Shelley's lines: 'Power, like a desolating pestilence/ Pollutes whate'er it touches'. Is he or any of the Cabinet, going to speak at the No-More War meeting this month ? If so, what are they going to say?" MacDonald was never criticised directly. But Air Ministers Thomson and Leach were among his few personal friends. It was not long after the Iraq controversy that MacDonald wrote to Fyfe asking why the Herald did not come out "honestly in the open as an organ hostile to the Government, or at any rate to me"? By the autumn, the Iraq row was overtaken by events, particularly the Government's ham-fisted handling of incitement to mutiny charges against the Communist editor J. R. Campbell, leading to a lost vote of confidence in the Commons and the fall of MacDonald's minority government. Ranks closed ahead of the general election and Iraq was raised at the party conference only by that same J. R. Campbell, perhaps the last person likely to win much of a hearing for complaints of "hypocritical imperialist arguments" on the very day that the Government fell. Thomson, having returned from a visit to Iraq, told the conference that, "a great deal too much of a song has been made about it". It is unlikely that the row made much difference at the 1924 general election, which returned Labour to the opposition benches and Leach to private life in Bradford. But it left its mark on the hyper-sensitive MacDonald, who confided to another Labour leader in early 1925: "Nothing contributed more to our defeat than the Herald and the way it handled our case" - ascribing to a paper with daily sales of less than 400,000 influence it could only dream of possessing. The RAF was still in Iraq in 1929 when Labour returned to office and Leach to the Commons (although he was never again a minister), and would stay for many years more. Sluglett's analysis suggests the critics had a point, arguing that bombing had "developed into an instrument of repression". Damage done may have gone beyond the deaths of a few recalcitrant tribesmen and fractious relations within the Labour movement: "The speed and simplicity of air attack was preferred to the more time-consuming and painstaking investigation of grievances and disputes. With such power at its disposal, the Iraq government was not encouraged to develop less violent methods of extending its support over the country." Huw Richards is author of The Bloody Circus: The Daily Herald and the Left . | |
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Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Cue the praying hands and ill-informed bow
| Cue the praying hands and ill-informed bow Ayako Yoshino The Times Higher Education Supplement: 16 July 2004 | |
 Well-intentioned ignorance characterises British attitudes to foreign students, says Ayako Yoshino. About two years ago, while researching my PhD, I spent a few days at a provincial library. Every time I entered and left the building, I noticed that a white-haired librarian on the front desk would raise her hands in front of a broad, friendly smile and, holding them as if praying, slightly dip her head. At first, I vaguely imagined that this might be a general, if rather eccentric, greeting to all her customers, but, as the days went by, it became clear that none of my fellow readers merited such treatment. They just got the librarian's lovely smile, unadorned. The praying, it seemed, was my own special welcome and it began to grate on my nerves. I suspected it had something to do with my slitty eyes. On the morning of the last day of my research, I turned to the librarian as I entered the library and, copying the praying bow, snapped: "Is this an English custom?" The smile immediately dropped and was replaced by wounded innocence. "Well, I thought it was Oriental," she said. I told her I had never seen it in my own country. I have often guiltily relived my behaviour that morning. The librarian was clearly just trying to be welcoming to a foreign guest, and I repaid her with a put-down. On the other hand, while I do feel Japanese, I have never felt particularly "Oriental". Where I come from, we bow and we shake hands sometimes, but I have never seen people holding their hands in front of their face when greeting each other. I have since been told by English friends that the librarian was probably inspired by the Hollywood film The King and I, set in Southeast Asia, nearly 3,000 miles from my homeland. Imagine travelling to China and visiting a library where your host insists on spitting on his hand and then shaking yours in a phlegm-flecked fist every morning because he once saw Jimmy Stewart do it in a Western and thinks it is a "Caucasian" custom. Between joining my first language course back in 1994 and submitting my PhD this summer, I have got used to some rather eccentric behaviour in the British university system. I am accustomed to professors sitting next to me at formal hall dinners and exhibiting their knowledge of China - a bit like sitting with a Spaniard and reliving your time in the Ukraine. One old gentleman began reciting every word he knew in the Japanese language in the middle of hors d'oeuvres, progressing from "one, two, three" to a laboriously pronounced string of obscenities not exactly calculated to enhance the appetite. But the more I think of my time in Britain, the more the librarian's friendly but ill-informed bow seems to sum up an important aspect of my experience. In Britain, I have encountered some of the most inspiring teachers I have ever worked with; individuals - both academics and university support staff - have gone to extraordinary lengths to help me; and the British system's relative lack of bureaucracy has made me feel as though I am a person rather than a number on an admissions roll. If and when I return to Japan, I will have positive experiences to relate to other Japanese people thinking of coming to study in England. And yet I would hesitate before offering them an unqualified recommendation to study here. This is because the key strength of British universities - their reliance on individual rather than systematic and concerted efforts - is also their main weakness when dealing with foreign students. All too often, individuals seem to be left to their own devices, with little back-up or systematic information, when dealing with students from fundamentally different cultural and academic backgrounds from their own. The result is much well-intentioned ignorance. I have grown used to reading of sophisticated recruitment and expansion efforts by British universities in non-English speaking countries. Nottingham University, amid much fanfare, recently announced a new offshoot in Ningbo, China. It is usual for professors to go on long recruiting trips in the darkest Orient, and extensive contacts in rich foreign countries have helped more than one vice-chancellor into their job. And yet I sometimes wonder whether even half as much systematic effort is spent on ensuring that the prized foreign students receive the education and experience they are promised when they reach these shores. In my ten years in Britain, I have never received specifically targeted instruction in academic writing in English. In the US, it is common not only for foreign but for domestic students to be offered workshops in academic writing. Academic writing courses do exist in Britain - at Oxford University, overseas students are offered up to three terms of free academic writing courses - but such provision is sporadic across the university system, and there does not seem to be much sharing of good practice. Where such courses are provided, some have been in place for more than 20 years. On the other hand, institutions that do not provide support seem blissfully ignorant of the whole concept. In Britain, the mentality often seems to be that tuition in English as a second language exists to address inadequacies on the part of the student. In fact, the problems many overseas students experience with academic writing often have more to do with a shift of academic environment and the need to learn new rhetorical structures than with normal English ability. Students often find themselves with fluent English but without adequate grounding in the ways of expression rooted in the English-speaking academic tradition. They will first encounter such difficulties in the British university environment, which is the only place they can be addressed, but the courses on offer will often be designed to address much more basic English problems. It is particularly infuriating to hear problems with such rhetorical styles attributed to imagined inadequacies in the student's education in their home country. I have often had conversations in which it has been suggested to me that Oriental students come from backgrounds in which originality and critical thinking are valued less than acceptance of orthodoxy. Apart from the lack of critical thinking apparent in any use of the category Oriental, such analysis is misleading because it confuses differences in style of expression with a lack of academic rigour. What it fails to understand is that a prizewinning English academic essay translated word for word into Japanese is likely to be received as clumsy and ill thought out. Of course, the challenges that non-English speaking students face are not limited to the academic sphere. Many will be tens of thousands of miles from home and trying to survive in a very unfamiliar world. If something goes wrong, they cannot simply get on the train back to mummy for a bit of tender loving care. Instead, it is vitally important for them to establish supportive social networks in the university environment, and they may initially rely heavily on organised, university-facilitated social events to establish such links. Yet such "fresher" events are sometimes set up with very little thought for the needs and sensitivities of outsiders. Indeed, some social events inadvertently emphasise difference. Would you go to Japanese folk song karaoke and all-you-can-eat eel-eating party on your first night in Tokyo? When students really get into difficulties, the support from universities is often haphazard. You might expect foreign students to rely more than domestic students on university counselling services, since they often have less access to personal networks, yet uptake of counselling among foreign students is low. Counsellors, when they are consulted, often seem inadequately trained to deal with foreign students' problems. Early in my time in England, a Japanese friend complained that her attempts to sort out a problem with sexual issues were being met by a constant vague insistence from her counsellor that it had something to do with her "cultural background". In fact, she had a psychological problem common in the West and problematising her homeland did nothing to help her deal with it. Eight years later, I attended a group-counselling session and encountered a similar scenario. The final straw came when everyone in the group had been asked to draw a picture of a tree. The counsellor's only comment on mine was: "Now, this tree looks very Japanese to me." Over the past five years, the number of overseas students in British higher education has risen 30 per cent and could triple by 2020, according to the British Council. This increasingly strategically important group for British universities contains individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds. While my mother in Japan can clog up my email inbox with minute-by-minute messages sent from her mobile phone, a Vietnamese friend of mine at Cambridge cannot afford to contact his parents directly, and instead must relay messages to his parents through his sister's university email account. When I am invited to the cinema by English friends, I can unthinkingly accept, whereas he has to calculate carefully whether he can afford it. And yet I suspect we are both lumped together in the minds of many people in British higher education simply as eastern Asian students. If British higher education is to compete with Australasian, North American and other European universities in attracting foreign students over the next decade, it will need to devote more time and money to understanding and systematically addressing our diverse needs.
The United Kingdom and I 'Imagine travelling to China and visiting a library where your host spits on his hand and shakes yours because he saw it in a Western' 'One old gentleman began reciting every word he knew in the Japanese language in the middle of hors d'oeuvres, progressing from "one, two, three" to a laboriously pronounced string of obscenities' 'In my ten years in Britain, I have never received specifically targeted instruction in academic writing in English' | |
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Thursday, July 08, 2004
Fiddling while education burns 3
| Letters Fiddling while education burns 3 | |
We have just survived exam time again. Lecturers waded through mountains of scripts, wielding their red pens in despair or, occasionally, delight. But, for them, grading exams and assignments is no longer a simple matter of awarding marks for answers given, adding them up and submitting the totals. This is only the beginning, not the end, of the arcane, academic assessment process that is the norm in universities today. Before the official exam boards, a whole series of processes take place to ensure that students at the lower end of the attainment range "are not disadvantaged". Modules with pass rates or grade means that are considered too low can have the marks scaled, for instance. Or course leaders may be asked to reconsider favourably all borderline marks. By the time the final exam boards come round, the results have been homogenised and harmonised or hacked and hijacked, depending on your point of view. This is the Nero time of year. It's when lots of fiddling goes on and education burns. Many universities are no longer educational establishments enshrining high academic standards. They are degree factories, whose raison d'etre is to churn out as many graduates as possible, and whose rules ensure that being idle or stupid won't stop you from getting a degree. Annette Marshall | |
Hazem Azmy
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Engaged on every front
| Engaged on every front John Higgins The Times Higher Education Supplement: 09 July 2004 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Of course, I'm the last Jewish intellectual... the only true follower of Adorno." The words would be unremarkable save that they came from the man whom the Jewish Defence League liked to call the Professor of Terror - scholar and Palestinian activist Edward Said. Said died from leukaemia in September last year, just before his 67th birthday. Throughout his life, he combined a deep commitment to political activism with a scholarly yet enthusiastic devotion to the landmarks of high culture. He will be remembered inside and outside the academy for his many engaged and engaging works. Within the academy, works such as Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism are widely recognised for helping to create the sub-discipline of post-colonial studies. Outside it, Said is remembered for the passion and precision he brought to the analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in studies such as The Question of Palestine and The End of the Peace Process. The two sides of his thinking, academic and activist, came together in the advocacy of engaged intellectual life. This formed the topic of the Reith lectures he gave in 1994, Representations of the Intellectual, and this same advocacy provides the central theme for his final work, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Said's words were a response to an Israeli interviewer's slightly stunned characterisation of him as sounding "very Jewish". This admission on Ari Shavit's part, who began his interview by describing Said as "cunning", more or less enacts the shock of finding common ground with someone you imagined would be your absolute antagonist. It is a shock that many of Said's interlocutors must have experienced, as the stereotype of the wild-eyed Palestinian activist was countered by a meeting with the urbane and cultured professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. Said had an uncommon talent for finding common ground. While this was undoubtedly a matter of charm and personality, it is also important to recognise the intellectual effort that goes into this at the deepest level. Identifying and occupying such common ground are not easy tasks because they are activities that can involve a questioning rather than a fortifying of the self, and usually mean giving up the sense of security that comes with the absolute denigration of your opponent. Finding common ground became, for Said, the expression of a fundamental moral and political principle, one everywhere apparent in the interviews that make up Power, Politics and Culture as well as in the final lectures that constitute Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Power, Politics and Culture provides an invigorating introduction to the totality of Said's work. The interviews range from in-depth discussions of major literary critical works such as Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975) - which helped to introduce the new French theory of Derrida, Foucault and Barthes to North American students - to what are at times highly charged exchanges around the politics of the Middle East. As such, they record Said's reactions, and formative contributions to, the changing shape of literary and cultural studies, and document his growing frustration with the ever-growing gap between the global reach of US imperial power and the parochialism of its institutions of public opinion. There are interesting variations in the texture and density of the interviews, as Said responds differently to different interlocutors. Confronted with the political hostility of one interviewer ("Why don't you, once and for all, renounce terror?"), Said answers with admirable calm that both state and individual terrorism are to be abhorred, while he takes obvious delight in the chance to talk about music with the editorial collective of the Performing Arts Journal. In discussions inter pares (such as those with Paul Bové of boundary 2 or Bruce Robbins of Social Text), the interview becomes a genuine exchange of ideas. Here the discussion enjoys a depth of sophistication and common reference that brings the verbal exchange close to the density and coherence of written prose. But there is also the pleasure of reading unbuttoned, off-the-cuff opinions delivered with a refreshingly unacademic directness. The literary canon? "(P)olemics on both sides in this stupid debate... are so basically ill-informed." Academic jargon? "It is much more important to me that people write to be understood rather than write to be misunderstood." The reception of his own work in the Arab world? "'Occidentosis': all the evils of the world come from the West. It's a well-known genre that I find on the whole extremely tiresome and boring." Most of the exchanges follow the unspoken rules of the interview form where a range of prepared questions allows interviewees to improvise on themes in their work and encourages interviewer and reader to connect these to the specifics of a life. The tactic works well with Said, whose critical stance is deeply and interestingly rooted in the early contrasting experiences of privilege, exile and alienation of someone brought up as an Anglican Palestinian, who was born in Jerusalem but grew up in Egypt, and then was educated and worked in the US. A story about being chased off the grounds of a Cairo golf club ("Boy, you are not allowed here. You are an Arab boy. Get out.") nourishes and gives experiential depth to Said's mature insistence that humanism should not be "thought of as something very restricted and difficult, like a rather austere club with rules that keep most people out". Keeping people out was never Said's idea of how literary and cultural studies should advance, as Humanism and Democratic Criticism argues. Here Said challenges the too-comfortable opposition that nourishes damaging debates about the canon and undermines the project in the eyes of the larger world. He describes the central aim of this book as seeking to escape the "impoverishing dichotomy" presented to students in literature and the humanities: to make a choice to become a slave to system, to offer yourself in the market of ideas under the brand name of a particular approach (such as technocratic deconstructionism or discourse analysis), or to retreat, in the manner of Blooms both Harold and Alan, "into a nostalgic celebration of some past state of glory associated with what is sentimentally evoked as humanism". Rejecting these "either-or" options, Said underlines the need to find the common ground of "some intellectual, as opposed to merely technical, component to humanist practice". In a general cultural and political context largely inimical to the humanities, only a sustained effort to connect the concerns of the academy with the wider world might restore humanism "to a place of relevance in our time". For Said, the central task of "humanist reflection" must be to shuttle between word and world, and to seek to "break the hold on us of the short, headline soundbite format and try to induce instead a longer, more deliberate process of reflection, research and enquiring argument". At a moment when The New York Times has publicly apologised for its biased and unsubstantiated reporting on Iraq, Said's call for a common grounding of the literary humanities in the philological activity of critique is timely. Such "Nietzschean philology", with its relentless "resistance to idées reçues" and its "opposition to every kind of cliche and unthinking language", may well offer a way forwards for a practical redefinition of literary studies in the new century. In the end, a slight rephrasing of Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach may well serve as the summary slogan for Said's intellectual legacy. "Literary criticism has only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." Said never saw himself as a Marxist of any kind. He was temperamentally disinclined, as well as in principle opposed, to subordinate independent critical inquiry of the demands of any system of thought or political affiliation. But the rephrase does capture the particular urgency and seriousness with which he treated literary criticism. No one argued more passionately than he the public case for the wider social force and relevance of literary and cultural studies; no one's work exemplified that case with more authority. His combination of the formal skills of literary and theoretical analysis with political commitment was what made Said one of the outstanding public intellectuals of his time. The corpus of his work showed the ways in which the possibilities of changing the world meant paying more attention than is often given to the dynamics of representing and interpreting it. The British publication of Power, Politics and Culture (first issued in the US in 2001) and Said's final lectures give a welcome opportunity for the reader to reconsider some of the key aspects of this notable attempt to make literature matter. John Higgins is visiting professor, Columbia University, New York, US, and fellow of the University of Cape Town, South Africa. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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We'd like to be America
| We'd like to be America Colin Bundy The Times Higher Education Supplement - 09 July 2004 | |
Emulating US university funding schemes could cost UK academia dear, warns Colin Bundy. "I like to be in America! OK by me in America!" sang wide-eyed Anita in West Side Story. Similar enthusiasm for the American model - and an equivalent absence of critical distance - has marked recent government pronouncements on higher education. Take last year's White Paper, The Future of Higher Education. Blending envy and emulation, many of its recommendations amount to ardent mimicry. On research, the first figure in its first chapter compares scientific citations across countries. The US (at 75,000) dwarfs all-comers, with the UK coming in a valiant second (at 15,000). In the US, notes the White Paper, research is concentrated in "relatively few institutions", ergo it proposes "focusing resources more effectively on the best research performers" in "larger, more concentrated units". The White Paper's determination to concentrate research funding, remark two US commentators, "is explicitly laid out in the shadow of the 800lb American gorilla". And if the corollary is teaching-only - or "non-research-intensive" - institutions, well, advises the White Paper, look at the California state university system, with 23 campuses - its "primary mission to be a teaching-centred comprehensive university rather than to be research-based". Similarly, to accommodate the Prime Minister's election pledge of 50 per cent participation, the White Paper tweaks the definition of higher education, proposing that expansion take place through two-year foundation courses, for which read US community colleges. The most breathtaking instance of the White Paper's urge to replicate American solutions is its long-term plan for funding higher education: "The way forward is through endowment." British universities should build endowments and use the income "in much the same way as is done in the United States". The argument proceeds by wistful reference to the endowed wealth of Harvard, Princeton and Yale universities but fails to consider historical and sociological factors that have made private philanthropy such a force for so long in the US. Let me be clear: there is much to admire in US higher education. The US research university and the "multiversity" state system are among the most successful institutions of the 20th century. The real irony in the White Paper's copycat approach to US higher education is its deafness to distress signals emanating from that system. Craig Calhoun, president of the US Social Science Research Council, warned recently that a key idea of US higher education for much of the 20th century - that the twin virtues of excellence and openness can simultaneously be achieved - is in the process of unravelling. This theme was visited by Robert Reich in his Higher Education Policy Institute lecture this year. He described how state governments have cut higher education spending, while the federal government has slashed Pell grants to poor students. He shocked his British audience by describing the degree of social stratification within higher education in the US. Students from the richest 25 per cent of families are more than ten times likelier to attend college or university than those from the poorest quartile. As The Times Higher has reported, low and middle-income students are increasingly excluded from US higher education. Three-quarters of students at America's top 146 universities come from the wealthiest quartile, only 3 per cent are from the poorest quartile. Derek Bok, formerly president of Harvard, last year published Universities in the Marketplace, a sober yet devastating account of how the commercialisation of the campus has warped US higher education. "Universities share one characteristic with compulsive gamblers and exiled royalty: there is never enough money to satisfy their desires," he wrote. In consequence, "universities show signs of excessive commercialisation in every aspect of their work". Like individuals experimenting with drugs, "campus officials may believe that they can proceed without serious risk", but "the hoped-for profits often fail to materialise, while the damage to academic standards and institutional integrity proves to be all too real". The pursuit of ephemeral profit leads to the sacrifice of essential values: "Universities will find it difficult to rebuild the public's trust, regain the faculty's respect, and return to the happier conditions of earlier times." Perhaps the White Paper's authors should have considered Stephen Sondheim's sardonic lines: "Everything free in America
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Monday, July 05, 2004
What Michael Moore Misses About the Empire - SUPERB deconstruction of the Film
http://www.counterpunch.org/jensen07052004.html
July 5, 2004
Stupid White Movie
What Michael Moore Misses About the Empire
By ROBERT JENSEN
I have been defending Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" from the criticism in mainstream and conservative circles that the film is leftist propaganda. Nothing could be further from the truth; there is very little left critique in the movie. In fact, it's hard to find any coherent critique in the movie at all.
The sad truth is that "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a bad movie, but not for the reasons it is being attacked in the dominant culture. It's at times a racist movie. And the analysis that underlies the film's main political points is either dangerously incomplete or virtually incoherent.
But, most important, it's a conservative movie that ends with an endorsement of one of the central lies of the United States, which should warm the hearts of the right-wingers who condemn Moore. And the real problem is that many left/liberal/progressive people are singing the film's praises, which should tell us something about the impoverished nature of the left in this country.
I say all this not to pick at small points or harp on minor flaws. These aren't minor points of disagreement but fundamental questions of analysis and integrity. But before elaborating on that, I want to talk about what the film does well.
The good stuff
First, Moore highlights the disenfranchisement of primarily black voters in Florida in the 2000 election, a political scandal that the mainstream commercial news media in the United States has largely ignored. The footage of a joint session of Congress in which Congressional Black Caucus members can't get a senator to sign their letter to allow floor debate about the issue (a procedural requirement) is a powerful indictment not only of the Republicans who perpetrated the fraud but the Democratic leadership that refused to challenge it.
Moore also provides a sharp critique of U.S. military recruiting practices, with some amazing footage of recruiters cynically at work scouring low-income areas for targets, whom are disproportionately non-white. The film also effectively takes apart the Bush administration's use of fear tactics after 9/11 to drive the public to accept its war policies.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" also does a good job of showing war's effects on U.S. soldiers; we see soldiers dead and maimed, and we see how contemporary warfare deforms many of them psychologically as well. And the film pays attention to the victims of U.S. wars, showing Iraqis both before the U.S. invasion and after in a way that humanizes them rather than uses them as props.
The problem is that these positive elements don't add up to a good film. It's a shame that Moore's talent and flair for the dramatic aren't put in the service of a principled, clear analysis that could potentially be effective at something beyond defeating George W. Bush in 2004.
Subtle racism
How dare I describe as racist a movie that highlights the disenfranchisement of black voters and goes after the way in which military recruiters chase low-income minority youth? My claim is not that Moore is an overt racist, but that the movie unconsciously replicates a more subtle racism, one that we all have to struggle to resist.
First, there is one segment that invokes the worst kind of ugly-American nativism, in which Moore mocks the Bush administration's "coalition of the willing," the nations it lined up to support the invasion of Iraq. Aside from Great Britain there was no significant military support from other nations and no real coalition, which Moore is right to point out. But when he lists the countries in the so-called coalition, he uses images that have racist undertones. To depict the Republic of Palau (a small Pacific island nation), Moore chooses an image of stereotypical "native" dancers, while a man riding on an animal-drawn cart represents Costa Rica. Pictures of monkeys running are on the screen during a discussion of Morocco's apparent offer to send monkeys to clear landmines. To ridicule the Bush propaganda on this issue, Moore uses these images and an exaggerated voice-over in a fashion that says, in essence, "What kind of coalition is it that has these backward countries?" Moore might argue that is not his intention, but intention is not the only question; we all are responsible for how we tap into these kinds of stereotypes.
More subtle and important is Moore's invocation of a racism in which solidarity between dominant whites and non-white groups domestically can be forged by demonizing the foreign "enemy," which these days has an Arab and South Asian face. For example, in the segment about law-enforcement infiltration of peace groups, the camera pans the almost exclusively white faces (I noticed one Asian man in the scene) in the group Peace Fresno and asks how anyone could imagine these folks could be terrorists. There is no consideration of the fact that Arab and Muslim groups that are equally dedicated to peace have to endure routine harassment and constantly prove that they weren't terrorists, precisely because they weren't white.
The other example of political repression that "Fahrenheit 9/11" offers is the story of Barry Reingold, who was visited by FBI agents after making critical remarks about Bush and the war while working out at a gym in Oakland. Reingold, a white retired phone worker, was not detained or charged with a crime; the agents questioned him and left. This is the poster child for repression? In a country where hundreds of Arab, South Asian and Muslim men were thrown into secret detention after 9/11, this is the case Moore chooses to highlight? The only reference in the film to those detentions post-9/11 is in an interview with a former FBI agent about Saudis who were allowed to leave the United States shortly after 9/11, in which it appears that Moore mentions those detentions only to contrast the kid-gloves treatment that privileged Saudi nationals allegedly received.
When I made this point to a friend, he defended Moore by saying the filmmaker was trying to reach a wide audience that likely is mostly white and probably wanted to use examples that those people could connect with. So, it's acceptable to pander to the white audience members and over-dramatize their limited risks while ignoring the actual serious harm done to non-white people? Could not a skilled filmmaker tell the story of the people being seriously persecuted in a way that non-Arab, non-South Asian, non-Muslims could empathize with?
Bad analysis
"Fahrenheit 9/11" is strong on tapping into emotions and raising questions about why the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, but it is extremely weak on answering those questions in even marginally coherent fashion. To the degree the film has a thesis, it appears to be that the wars were a product of the personal politics of a corrupt Bush dynasty. I agree the Bush dynasty is corrupt, but the analysis the film offers is both internally inconsistent, extremely limited in historical understanding and, hence, misguided.
Is the administration of George W. Bush full of ideological fanatics? Yes. Have its actions since 9/11 been reckless and put the world at risk? Yes. In the course of pursuing those policies, has it enriched fat-cat friends? Yes.
But it is a serious mistake to believe that these wars can be explained by focusing so exclusively on the Bush administration and ignoring clear trends in U.S. foreign and military policy. In short, these wars are not a sharp departure from the past but instead should be seen as an intensification of longstanding policies, affected by the confluence of this particular administration's ideology and the opportunities created by the events of 9/11.
Look first at Moore's treatment of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. He uses a clip of former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke complaining that the Bush administration's response to 9/11 in Afghanistan was "slow and small," implying that we should have attacked faster and bigger. The film does nothing to question that assessment, leaving viewers to assume that Moore agrees. Does he think that a bombing campaign that killed at least as many innocent Afghans as Americans who died on 9/11 was justified? Does he think that a military response was appropriate, and simply should have been more intense, which would have guaranteed even more civilian casualties? Does he think that a military strategy, which many experts believe made it difficult to pursue more routine and productive counterterrorism law-enforcement methods, was a smart move?
Moore also suggests that the real motivation of the Bush administration in attacking Afghanistan was to secure a gas pipeline route from the Caspian Basin to the sea. It's true that Unocal had sought such a pipeline, and at one point Taliban officials were courted by the United States when it looked as if they could make such a deal happen. Moore points out that Taliban officials traveled to Texas in 1997 when Bush was governor. He fails to point out that all this happened with the Clinton administration at the negotiating table. It is highly unlikely that policymakers would go to war for a single pipeline, but even if that were plausible it is clear that both Democrats and Republicans alike have been mixed up in that particular scheme.
The centerpiece of Moore's analysis of U.S. policy in the Middle East is the relationship of the Bush family to the Saudis and the bin Laden family. The film appears to argue that those business interests, primarily through the Carlyle Group, led the administration to favor the Saudis to the point of ignoring potential Saudi complicity in the attacks of 9/11. After laying out the nature of those business dealings, Moore implies that the Bushes are literally on the take.
It is certainly true that the Bush family and its cronies have a relationship with Saudi Arabia that has led officials to overlook Saudi human-rights abuses and the support that many Saudis give to movements such as al Qaeda. That is true of the Bushes, just as it was of the Clinton administration and, in fact, every post-World War II president. Ever since FDR cut a deal with the House of Saud giving U.S. support in exchange for cooperation on the flow of oil and oil profits, U.S. administrations have been playing ball with the Saudis. The relationship is sometimes tense but has continued through ups and downs, with both sides getting at least part of what they need from the other. Concentrating on Bush family business connections ignores that history and encourages viewers to see the problem as specific to Bush. Would a Gore administration have treated the Saudis differently after 9/11? There's no reason to think so, and Moore offers no evidence or argument why it would have.
But that's only part of the story of U.S. policy in the Middle East, in which the Saudis play a role but are not the only players. The United States cuts deals with other governments in the region that are willing to support the U.S. aim of control over those energy resources. The Saudis are crucial in that system, but not alone. Egypt, Jordan and the other Gulf emirates have played a role, as did Iran under the Shah. As does, crucially, Israel. But there is no mention of Israel in the film. To raise questions about U.S. policy in the Middle East without addressing the role of Israel as a U.S. proxy is, to say the least, a significant omission. It's unclear whether Moore actually backs Israeli crimes and U.S. support for them, or simply doesn't understand the issue.
And what of the analysis of Iraq? Moore is correct in pointing out that U.S. support for Iraq during the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein's war on Iran was looked upon favorably by U.S. policymakers, was a central part of Reagan and Bush I policy up to the Gulf War. And he's correct in pointing out that Bush II's invasion and occupation have caused great suffering in Iraq. What is missing is the intervening eight years in which the Clinton administration used the harshest economic embargo in modern history and regular bombing to further devastate an already devastated country. He fails to point out that Clinton killed more Iraqis through that policy than either of the Bush presidents. He fails to mention the 1998 Clinton cruise missile attack on Iraq, which was every bit as illegal as the 2003 invasion.
It's not difficult to articulate what much of the rest of the world understands about U.S. policy in Iraq and the Middle East: Since the end of WWII, the United States has been the dominant power in the Middle East, constructing a system that tries to keep the Arab states weak and controllable (and, as a result, undemocratic) and undermine any pan-Arab nationalism, and uses allies as platforms and surrogates for U.S. power (such as Israel and Iran under the Shah). The goal is control over (not ownership of, but control over) the strategically crucial energy resources of the region and the profits that flow from them, which in an industrial world that runs on oil is a source of incredible leverage over competitors such as the European Union, Japan and China.
The Iraq invasion, however incompetently planned and executed by the Bush administration, is consistent with that policy. That's the most plausible explanation for the war (by this time, we need no longer bother with the long-ago forgotten rationalizations of weapons of mass destruction and the alleged threat Iraq posed to the United States). The war was a gamble on the part of the Bush gang. Many in the foreign-policy establishment, including Bush I stalwarts such as Brent Scowcroft, spoke out publicly against war plans they thought were reckless. Whether Bush's gamble, in pure power terms, will pay off or not is yet to be determined.
When the film addresses this question directly, what analysis does Moore offer of the reasons for the Iraq war? A family member of a soldier who died asks, "for what?" and Moore cuts to the subject of war profiteering. That segment appropriately highlights the vulture-like nature of businesses that benefit from war. But does Moore really want us to believe that a major war was launched so that Halliburton and other companies could increase its profits for a few years? Yes, war profiteering happens, but it is not the reason nations go to war. This kind of distorted analysis helps keep viewers' attention focused on the Bush administration, by noting the close ties between Bush officials and these companies, not the routine way in which corporate America makes money off the misnamed Department of Defense, no matter who is in the White House.
All this is summed up when Lila Lipscomb, the mother of a son killed in the war, visits the White House in a final, emotional scene and says that she now has somewhere to put all her pain and anger. This is the message of the film: It's all about the Bush administration. If that's the case, the obvious conclusion is to get Bush out of the White House so that things can get back to to what? I'll return to questions of political strategy at the end, but for now it's important to realize how this attempt to construct Bush as pursuing some radically different policy is bad analysis and leads to a misunderstanding of the threat the United States poses to the world. Yes, Moore throws in a couple of jabs at the Democrats in Congress for not stopping the mad rush to war in Iraq, but the focus is always on the singular crimes of George W. Bush and his gang.
A conservative movie
The claim that "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a conservative movie may strike some as ludicrous. But the film endorses one of the central lies that Americans tell themselves, that the U.S. military fights for our freedom. This construction of the military as a defensive force obscures the harsh reality that the military is used to project U.S. power around the world to ensure dominance, not to defend anyone's freedom, at home or abroad.
Instead of confronting this mythology, Moore ends the film with it. He points out, accurately, the irony that those who benefit the least from the U.S. system -- the chronically poor and members of minority groups -- are the very people who sign up for the military. "They offer to give up their lives so we can be free," Moore says, and all they ask in return is that we not send them in harm's way unless it's necessary. After the Iraq War, he wonders, "Will they ever trust us again?"
It is no doubt true that many who join the military believe they will be fighting for freedom. But we must distinguish between the mythology that many internalize and may truly believe, from the reality of the role of the U.S. military. The film includes some comments by soldiers questioning that very claim, but Moore's narration implies that somehow a glorious tradition of U.S. military endeavors to protect freedom has now been sullied by the Iraq War.
The problem is not just that the Iraq War was fundamentally illegal and immoral. The whole rotten project of empire building has been illegal and immoral -- and every bit as much a Democratic as a Republican project. The millions of dead around the world -- in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia -- as a result of U.S. military actions and proxy wars don't care which U.S. party was pulling the strings and pulling the trigger when they were killed. It's true that much of the world hates Bush. It's also true that much of the world has hated every post-WWII U.S. president. And for good reasons.
It is one thing to express solidarity for people forced into the military by economic conditions. It is quite another to pander to the lies this country tells itself about the military. It is not disrespectful to those who join up to tell the truth. It is our obligation to try to prevent future wars in which people are sent to die not for freedom but for power and profit. It's hard to understand how we can do that by repeating the lies of the people who plan, and benefit from, those wars.
Political strategy
The most common defense I have heard from liberals and progressives to these criticisms of "Fahrenheit 9/11" is that, whatever its flaws, the movie sparks people to political action. One response is obvious: There is no reason a film can't spark people to political action with intelligent and defensible analysis, and without subtle racism.
But beyond that, it's not entirely clear the political action that this film will spark goes much beyond voting against Bush. The "what can I do now?" link on Moore's website suggests four actions, all of which are about turning out the vote. These resources about voting are well organized and helpful. But there are no links to grassroots groups organizing against not only the Bush regime but the American empire more generally.
I agree that Bush should be kicked out of the White House, and if I lived in a swing state I would consider voting Democratic. But I don't believe that will be meaningful unless there emerges in the United States a significant anti-empire movement. In other words, if we beat Bush and go back to "normal," we're all in trouble. Normal is empire building. Normal is U.S. domination, economic and military, and the suffering that vulnerable people around the world experience as a result. This doesn't mean voters can't judge one particular empire-building politician more dangerous than another. It doesn't mean we shouldn't sometimes make strategic choices to vote for one over the other. It simply means we should make such choices with eyes open and no illusions. This seems particularly important when the likely Democratic presidential candidate tries to out-hawk Bush on support for Israel, pledges to continue the occupation of Iraq, and says nothing about reversing the basic trends in foreign policy.
In this sentiment, I am not alone. Ironically, Barry Reingold -- the Oakland man who was visited by the FBI -- is critical of what he sees as the main message of the film. He was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle saying: "I think Michael Moore's agenda is to get Bush out, but I think it (should be) about more than Bush. I think it's about the capitalist system, which is inequitable." He went on to critique Bush and Kerry: "I think both of them are bad. I think Kerry is actually worse because he gives the illusion that he's going to do a lot more. Bush has never given that illusion. People know that he's a friend of big business."
Nothing I have said here is an argument against reaching out to a wider audience and trying to politicize more people. That's what I try to do in my own writing and local organizing work, as do countless other activists. The question isn't whether to reach out, but with what kind of analysis and arguments. Emotional appeals and humor have their place; the activists I work with use them. The question is, where do such appeals lead people?
It is obvious that "Fahrenheit 9/11" taps into many Americans' fear and/or hatred of Bush and his gang of thugs. Such feelings are understandable, and I share them. But feelings are not analysis, and the film's analysis, unfortunately, doesn't go much beyond the feeling: It's all Bush's fault. That may be appealing to people, but it's wrong. And it is hard to imagine how a successful anti-empire movement can be built on this film's analysis unless it is challenged. Hence, the reason for this essay.
The potential value of Moore's film will be realized only if it is discussed and critiqued, honestly. Yes, the film is under attack from the right, for very different reasons than I have raised. But those attacks shouldn't stop those who consider themselves left, progressive, liberal, anti-war, anti-empire or just plain pissed-off from criticizing the film's flaws and limitations. I think my critique of the film is accurate and relevant. Others may disagree. The focus of debate should be on the issues raised, with an eye toward the question of how to build an anti-empire movement. Rallying around the film can too easily lead to rallying around bad analysis. Let's instead rally around the struggle for a better world, the struggle to dismantle the American empire.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity" from City Lights Books. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.
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Saturday, July 03, 2004
'Our job is to explain'
'Our job is to explain' Richard Evans The Times Higher Education Supplement: 13 June 2003 | |
| What is history? It's not simply gathering facts about the past, it's about searching for truth in them, says Richard Evans in the first of our series on Big Questions in History The answer to the question "what is history?" seems obvious enough: history is the study of the past. But, of course, it is not quite as simple as that. There are some ways of studying the past that cannot be classified as history. History is, in the first place, the study of the past in order to find out the truth about it. Unlike novelists or film-makers, historians do not invent things that did not happen or conjure up characters that did not exist. Playwrights and screenwriters can change the raw materials they use when they are dealing, as often happens, with a topic drawn from the past to make the subject more interesting and more exciting. They can make up dialogue, insert words into historical documents that are not in the originals, and generally use their imagination in a manner unfettered by the constraints of the historical evidence. Historians have no such luxury. They deal with fact, not fiction. This distinction has been made by all historians ever since the first serious historical work to have come down to us from the ancient world, the History of the Peloponnesian War . Its author, the Greek writer Thucydides, rejected the romantic myths purveyed by the poets and checked all his evidence, as he told his readers, "with as much thoroughness as possible". But he went on to complain, as historians have done regularly ever since, that the truth was far from easy to discover: "Different eyewitnesses give different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or the other or else from imperfect memories." In the two and a half millennia or so since Thucydides wrote his great work, historians have elaborated a whole battery of sophisticated methods of checking the evidence and dealing with the gaps and partialities of their sources. But they can never attain perfect or total knowledge of the whole truth. All they can do is establish probabilities - sometimes overwhelming, sometimes less so, sometimes hardly at all - about parts of the past: those parts that can be accessed by means of the remains it has handed down in one form or another to posterity. History only ever involves a selection of what is knowable about the past because it has a second essential quality apart from the search for truth: it aims not just at reconstructing and representing the past but also at understanding and interpreting it. This is what makes history different from chronicle, which tells the tale of the years, marking off events as they happened, but does not try to make any connection between them or attempt to explain why they occurred. The centrality of explanation and interpretation to history also make its approach to the past different from those of religion, morality and the law. Religions seek legitimacy through sacred texts handed down by prophets or their disciples from the distant past. To treat such texts historically, however, means to put their sacrality to one side and to question them just as one would question any other historical source, a procedure undertaken most powerfully by the greatest of the historians of the Enlightenment, Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . Moral and legal approaches to the past are concerned with judging guilt or innocence and assigning responsibility for actions that are classified as good or evil, lawful or criminal. These, too, are unhistorical ways of dealing with it. In recent times, it has become fashionable to categorise historical figures from a time such as the Third Reich, or the Atlantic slave trade, or the European settlement of Australia, in terms derived from morality and the law: as "perpetrators", "victims", "bystanders", "collaborators" and so on, and to distribute praise and blame accordingly. This is profoundly alien to the enterprise of history, which is concerned in the first place with explaining why people did what they did, with causes, effects and interconnections, not with issuing arrogant verdicts on complex moral issues based on the luxury of hindsight. Of course, historians can, do and in many cases have an obligation to provide raw materials, evidence or background briefings to assist institutions such as war crimes tribunals or commissions assessing claims for compensation for legally recognised historic wrongs, just as another important side of their work lies in producing scholarly editions of previously unpublished documents. But such a deployment of expertise, however necessary, is not the historian's main business. The historian's job is to explain; it is for others to judge. This means, among other things, that historians have to try to understand the past from as wide a variety of points of view as possible, not to see it through the eyes of one particular contemporary or group of contemporaries, still less to study it exclusively in the light of the concerns of the time in which they are writing. History written purely to fulfil a present-day purpose, such as encouraging national pride or showing that one ethnic or national group has been oppressed over the ages by another, is all too likely to degenerate into propaganda unless it is held in check by a willingness to bow to the dictates of the evidence where the evidence runs counter to the historian's purpose. Nevertheless, at the same time, history also inevitably involves formulating hypotheses on the basis of present-day theories and testing them critically against a thorough review of the evidence. Historical perspectives on the past change not just with growing distance in time but also with the changing ideas and interests of historians themselves and the developing ideas, methods and concerns of the intellectual world and the society within which historians live. That is one important reason why, over the years, history's scope has been steadily expanding. The days when it was concerned solely or even principally with kings and battles, politics and diplomacy, "great men" and great wars are long gone. In the 21st century, everything is grist to the historian's mill. Big questions involve the history of private as well as public life, of ideas and beliefs, of personal behaviour, even of broad topics such as the environment, geography and the natural world. They can be asked about any part of the world, any era of the past. All with one proviso: research into these areas is history only if it really is undertaken in search of the answer to a "big question". History is not, and never has been, the mere accumulation of facts and knowledge for their own sake: that is better categorised under the heading of antiquarianism. Of course, historians have always disagreed among themselves about virtually all of these points, as they have about most answers that have been put forward at one time and another to big questions about the past. Controversy is an indispensable means of advancing historical knowledge, as the rough edges are rubbed off implausible or exaggerated interpretations, and reasoned debate consigns the unsupported argument to the dustbin of discredited hypotheses. The pervasiveness of controversy among historians is one reason why politicians are always wrong when they claim that "history" will absolve them, judge them or vindicate what they have done. Historians will probably never agree about issues on which national leaders have made such claims, whether it is the Cuban revolution or the second Iraq war. The historian's training can generate a healthy scepticism with which to puncture the wilder claims of politicians and statesmen. It can, or should, help anyone who undergoes it to spot a fake when they see one, and to demand clear evidence for a statement before they accept it. Before rushing into print to denounce a politician's alleged statement that medieval history is not worthy of state support, for instance, medieval historians should have recollected their training and demanded to see a copy of his speech rather than accepting a tendentious, second-hand account of it from a journalist. Medieval history is as useful in this respect as modern history is, and in others, too: neither is necessarily more "relevant' than the other. Training as a historian is essential for a whole variety of jobs in the heritage industry and more than helpful in the wider field of culture, tourism and the arts, which generate a far higher proportion of national income and export earnings than the manufacturing industries do nowadays. History books, television shows, radio broadcasts, magazine articles and other cultural products have never been more popular. History in this broad sense is a major national economic earner. But its most important justification lies in its less immediately tangible effects. History can teach us about other societies, other beliefs and other times, and so make us more tolerant of differences in our world. And it can provide us with a democratic civic education to help us to build a better world for the future. Richard J. Evans is professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge. | |
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