Moderate Muslims, the Writing of History, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

I see that Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali has made it to the bestseller lists. Hirsi Ali, it will be recalled, is the Muslim from Somalia who sought refuge in the Netherlands and took up the cudgels against Jihadism, and indeed against Islam, which she believes is inseparable from Jihadism. As a consequence, she was the object of death threats and, finally tired of living in a security bubble, fled to America, where she was given refuge by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Claire Berlinski reviews Infidel and concludes with this: “The chances are small, I fear, that Ms. Hirsi Ali will persuade one billion Muslims to accept that their future is not Paradise, but a reduction to a bag of bones. What she is saying about God may be true ¯I for one do not know¯but I do know that very few people want it to be true. And thus do I fall, reluctantly, into the camp of people who admire Ms. Hirsi Ali’s bravery but doubt that her words will do much to temper the Muslim world’s terror and loathing of the West. This does not make her a fundamentalist of any dye, and it certainly does not make her simplistic. Nor does it render her animadversions pointless: She has opened the eyes of many Europeans to the problems posed by Islam. But it does make her an unlikely¯nay, an impossible¯candidate for the leadership of any real movement to encourage Islam into modernity and welcome it into the bosom of civilization.” True enough, but it will hardly come as a surprise to Hirsi Ali. It is precisely her point that western intellectuals in constant search of a "moderate" Islam are chasing the wind. Which, it is obligatory to say¯even if one says it with waning confidence¯we must hope is not true.

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"Just the facts, Ma’am," said Sergeant Joe Friday, and many historians have thought that was what they were writing: history as it actually happened. The distinguished historian Keith Thomas, author of Religion and the Decline of Magic , a study of popular beliefs in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, reflects on how the writing of history has changed in recent decades :

No one in 1966 foresaw the impact of the various linguistic and literary theories known as “post-structuralism” and “postmodernism.” Their adherents caused some perturbation in the 1980s, when it seemed that these modern skeptics were denying the possibility of achieving any certain knowledge of the past. But that nihilistic doctrine has been tacitly rejected. Most practicing historians today take a commonsensical view. They are critical of their sources and do not need to be told that they are not a mirror of reality. They know that the categories they use, and the periods into which they divide up history, are expository devices, not intrinsic features of the past. They are aware that many so-called “facts” are contestable, and that events look different to different observers. But they also know that things really did happen in the past and that historians can often find out what they were. The outcome can be seen in acute methodological self-consciousness of the kind displayed by C.J. Wickham in his prize-winning Framing the Middle Ages (2005). Every term employed is carefully defined; the first person singular is often used, by way of disclaiming any pretence to oracular authority; and the very title indicates that the book records a continuing process of “construction.”

In sum, historians have not necessarily lost their confidence in the existence of truth, but have developed a salutary modesty about their craft. That salutary modesty extends to recognizing why historians write about what they write about. Keith Thomas again:

Nearly all the fashionable topics of the present time owe their vogue to essentially non-academic preoccupations. The countless studies of memory and forgetting are in part a legacy of the Holocaust. The passion for environmental history stems from anxiety about global warming and the depletion of natural resources. The renewed concern with Empire is closely related to US foreign policy. The obsessive interest in the history of the body has been fuelled by the AIDS epidemic; it also reflects the concerns of a secular and hedonistic age, preoccupied with physical health and instinctual gratification. Similar concerns underlie the current popularity of such topics as the history of consumer goods, the study of the emotions, personal identity and the emergence of the “self.” History has always embodied the hopes and fears of those who write it. Its future character depends on what those hopes and fears will prove to be.

Needless to say, those who are not part of "a secular and hedonistic age" will write about subjects inspired by hopes and fears more worthy of the historian’s craft.

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The obituaries of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. have been surprising straightforward in noting the ways in which he was not a very good historian. His earlier work on, for instance, the age of Jackson (meaning Andrew) was eclipsed by his becoming the "house intellectual" of the John F. Kennedy administration. Yet it was all of a piece. In the 1960s, there was incessant debate on the left about whether it was possible to work for radical change within "the system." At least for a time, when the system was in sync with where he thought history ought to be going, Arthur Schlesinger was determined to demonstrate a positive answer to that question. When in the 1970s I was with the Council on Religion and International Affairs (now called the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs), over on East 64th Street, Schlesinger was a regular speaker and participant in various discussions. He was usually bright, witty, and unflusterable in his confidence that liberalism and intelligence were synonymous¯especially the liberalism represented by the Camelot moment in which he had played a part, if mainly as an observer. He presented himself as a man of the center as defined by his influential 1949 book, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom . There and elsewhere he expressed his admiration for the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. From Niebuhr he said he learned an appreciation of historical ambiguity, but the admiration did not extend so far as theology. He enjoyed being known as the founding head of a mythical organization known as "Atheists for Niebuhr." He exemplified the insouciance of Lionel Trilling, who dismissed conservatism as irritable gestures trying to pass themselves off as ideas. More than that, for Schlesinger conservatism was indelibly tainted by racism, xenophobia, and, most damning of all, anticommunism. It is hard for many to remember today how deeply entrenched was the dogma of anti-anticommunism in the liberalism of those days. I notice that the New York Times several times says he was an "anti-Communist." That is true within the context of those days. He rejected the ideology of communism and was among those who founded Americans for Democratic Action in order to distance liberalism from the "Old Left" of the 1930s, which was still very much alive decades later. But he was emphatically anti those anticommunists who were viewed as opposing communists more than was absolutely necessary. To his credit, in the 1990s, in The Disuniting of America , he challenged "Afrocentrism" and other multicultural fashions in the academy. Nonetheless, Arthur Schlesinger was a delightful interlocutor. It was simply that he had not had a fresh thought for years. Our last encounter was at Princeton in 2004 at a conference occasioned by the twentieth anniversary of my book The Naked Public Square . I’m not sure he had ever read the book, but he used the occasion of what he understood to be its argument to blast the Bush administration for being the most dangerously religious presidency in American history. He was then age eighty-six and somewhat frail, and the other speakers at the conference were gentle but firm in trying to set him straight. But I had the impression that Schlesinger wasn’t listening. At that point, and for many years before that point, he had made up his mind. The most striking thing about Arthur Schlesinger, apart from his professorial manner and impish humor, was what seemed to be a lack of intellectual curiosity. The course of a thoroughly secularized liberalism was the trajectory of historical progress, and deviations from it were to be viewed with amused contempt and occasional spurts of anger. Trilling rose above his dismissive aphorism. I’m not sure that Schlesinger ever did. The self-confidence, often indistinguishable from smugness, of the liberal intellectual consensus of the 1940s and 1950s was unshakeable. It all came together with JFK, the star to which Schlesinger hitched his wagon. And he rather poignantly tried to bring it together again in his support of the presidential aspirations of Robert and Edward Kennedy. As James Piereson wrote in an insightful essay in Commentary a while back, it was with the assassination of JFK that the left began to embrace a darker view of American history. But Arthur Schlesinger kept the faith. As did John Kenneth Galbraith, who died last year at age ninety-seven. I suppose there are not many left from that time of an older liberalism that casually dismissed deviations from its consensus as irritable gestures pretending to be ideas.