A Proper Sense of History

Featured

Aug 15

Students today often view history as a fascinating but largely useless subject – the sort of thing you study for pleasure but not the most practical of activities. The German philosopher Fredrich Nietzche understood history differently. He argued that history is not just a random field of study but an approach to better understanding our contemporary society – making it one of the most vital subjects we can learn. In his work On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life, Nietzsche breaks history into three different methodological approaches – monumental, antiquarian, and critical. He is clear that each of these histories has its place in society and that if used at the wrong time there are disastrous consequences. Though a deeply problematic thinker in several ways, Nietzsche’s discourse on history shows that much of the problems contemporary society faces stem from its obsession with critical history. A problem that can only be solved by reviving critical history’s worthier cousins.

Nietzsche’s Types of History

The first category of history discussed by Nietzsche is monumental history. Monumental history is to “take the high points of humanity” and pull them from the distant past to make them “alive” as inspiration for the modern day. In other words, monumental history is studying the greatest events and people in the history of our civilization with the hope that they may provide guidance for the problems we currently face.

This type of history has its clear advantages - particularly for a society that has lost its sense of greatness. In other works, Nietzsche expounds at length about the nature of the Last Man - the insipid remnant of a once great mankind, that desires nothing and cares for nothing. This Last Man is one of the more lamentable future possibilities opening up in the world of AI and social media, but monumental history offers a stay execution. For it is through knowledge that the great once existed and may well again be possible that modern man can triumph over some of the weaknesses of our nature. Even though monumental history has this distinct advantage, Nietzsche argues that it has an equally great disadvantage. For monumental history itself damages the past, ignoring large portions of history that do not offer examples of greatness. This allows society to too easily forget the mistakes of the previous generations.

Antiquarian history is the second category of history Nietzsche discusses in the Uses and Disadvantages. Antiquarian history is characterized by pure reverence for a former time that seeks to replicate the conditions of the past. The practice of Antiquarian history is “tending with loving hands what has long survived … to preserve the conditions which grew up for those who will come after.”

Antiquarian history has several distinct advantages, first among these is that this sense of reverence for the past can fill “modest, course, even wretched conditions in which a man or a people live with a simple touching feeling of pleasure and contentment.” To put it more simply, Nietzsche contends that antiquarian history makes terrible situations and circumstances seem romantic at best and bearable at the least. The problem of antiquarian history is that “it merely understands how to preserve life, not how to generate it.” For Nietzsche, to whom life is the greatest good, this is a cardinal sin. While the chief problem with monumental history is that it causes one to lose knowledge of large portions of the past, antiquarian history freezes one in the past and prevents them from understanding the present.

The third and final category of history is critical history. Critical history is studying the past and exposing the mistakes and problems of former generations. Nietzsche describes it as “an attempt … to give oneself a past from which one would like to be descended in opposition to the past from which one is descended.” Critical history is designed to shatter and dissolve parts of the past so that society can progress and no longer be held back by nostalgia.

While monumental history and certainly antiquarian history can trap society in the past and prevent them from fully understanding the present, critical history makes possible an understanding of history that cuts off the ties to previous ages. The weakness of critical history is that it is not possible to free oneself from the chain of history. No amount of judgment and condemnation can fully separate one from the events that led to the present day. What is more, the creation of a preferable new past is a falsehood and will inevitably be inferior.

Critical History and the Modern Age

Different ages in history are often dominated by one or more of these types of history. The Romans lived in monumental times, and the Victorians in an antiquarian one. It is our misfortunate that we are living in an epoch dominated by critical history. This is nothing new, the push to teach critical race theory in schools is merely the culmination of an academic trend long in the making. With increasing frequency scholars have condemned the history of the West, and America in particular, as irredeemably racist, corrupt, and cruel. Instead, they seek to articulate a different vision of civilization by focusing on the history of societal deviants and revolutionaries. They highlight the people and movements that openly or covertly reject Western culture. To put the narrative of modern critical historians simply they argue deviancy and rebellion are good, the West and what it stands for are bad. To make matters worse, these scholars offer very little room for debate. Either you hate capitalism and the West, or you are wrong.

For many years critical history has confined itself to the halls of academia. However, in recent years the critical narrative has started to go mainstream. Calls to tear down statues of great statesmen, the removal of national history from many colleges required curriculum, and a press increasingly unaware of the events of actual history are just some of the signs that what was once an obscure academic viewpoint is increasingly becoming a major public philosophy.

Just as Nietzsche predicted, the effect of critical history dominating the intellectual and political world is a society dangerously divorced from its past. The average American knows very little of the cultural and political tradition that has given birth to the world in which they live. When a nation and its citizens are set adrift from their historical context the results are always the same: attempts to remake the world in accord with impossible intellectual visions that in turn give rise to a tribalistic rejection of those visions. America has followed this pattern exactly. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the 1619 project and Bronze Age Mindset were published in the same decade. They are symptoms of the same disease – a divorce from tradition and the order it brings society.

Restoring Order to An Age Divorced From History

What then can be done? How can we revive a sense of tradition and combat the havoc critical history has released upon our nation? The answer to such questions is inevitably as complex as the problems themselves. However, a start would be restoring a sense of monumental and antiquarian history in our culture. Both of these histories are key to reviving a full sense of tradition. Monumental history provides a nation with aspirations and antiquarian history provides a wariness of the future that tempers radical ideologies.

Reviving monumental history is admittedly much easier, since it has never totally died. Popular historians such as Joseph J. Ellis, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and David McCullough have made sure that portraits of human excellence are never far from the public’s reach. However, monumental history is only rarely respected by most institutions of higher learning. Professors tend to look down on monumental history as elitist and superficial. This attitude is understandable, for monumental history can sometimes border on hero worship. However, its benefits are too great to ignore. Leo Strauss has perhaps best summarized the vital need for monumental history in modern academia: “For we are supposed to train ourselves and others in seeing things as they are, and this means above all in seeing their greatness and their misery, their excellence and their vileness, their nobility and their triumphs, and therefore never to mistake mediocrity, however brilliant, for true greatness.” To achieve this goal modern history curriculum must disregard its monomaniacal focus on social history (as worthy a subject as that is) and also teach students about the lives of great statesmen and the roles they played in shaping our civilization.

Antiquarian history will prove more difficult to resuscitate. Democratic nations are inclined to produce a people who are chiefly concerned with the present. John Quincy Adams put it perfectly when he declared that “Democracy has no forefathers – It looks to no posterity – It is swallowed up in the present, and thinks of nothing else.” Monumental history offers something that is glamorous and exciting to most citizens, but reverence for the past for its own sake is a harder sale. Nonetheless, vestiges of antiquarian history remain in unexpected places and we have a duty to encourage them. Cultural phenomena such as period dramas, genealogy, and historical tourism all contribute to a tender fondness for the past. A fondness that can be greatly increased by strengthening religious and localist sentiments.

Keeping up with current events has become a depressing business. We live in an age with more than its fair share of petty political squabbling, violent unrest, and open suppression of long respected traditions. Despite all of this, the situation is not without hope. Many of civilization’s greatest moments followed periods of political instability. The turbulent years of Regency England were followed by the well-ordered Victorian Era, and the turmoil of World War II was followed by the American Century. As a nation, we should take solace in these lessons of the past, and do what we can to revive a proper sense of history.