In a recent post, James Lowen's savaging of history textbooks was discussed, and this quote was offered:
We read partly in a spirit of criticism, assessing what the authors got wrong as well as agreeing with and perhaps learning from what they got right. When we study the more distant past, we may also read critically, but now our primary mode is ingestive [learning]. Especially if we are reading for the first time about an event, we have little ground on which to stand and criticize what we read. .... Thus authors tiptoe through the [recent past] with extreme caution, evading the main issues, all the main “why” questions.
This struck me as a highly implausible view of how 8th grade middle school students (at least that was my grade for American history) are likely to read discussions of the recent past. Their parents and grandparents may remember the recent past, but those kids will not be able to.
I think instead, that history textbooks are subject to the same issues that all textbooks are -- the PARENTS of kids, do not read critically, but sometimes get worked up by politicians or troublemakers agitating over a misrepresented passage. A textbook subject to a fulminating local talk show host in even one district, is a textbook in marketing trouble nationwide.
I would like to offer a test to my thesis, by citing a few of what I consider to be pretty clear lessons from recent history, ands see if they get our board here worked up.
Lesson 1, Wholesale socialism does not work
Motivated by the failures of market capitalism: the sweatshops, terrible wages and political control by oligarchs at the turn of the last century, a wide selection of alternatives were advocated for, and tried, in over half of the world, for most of the last century. These efforts ranged from social welfarism, socialism, democratic communism, thru bloody communist dictatorships. This represented a massive uncontrolled experiment to evaluate alternatives to market capitalism. Karl Popper, in The Open Society and its Enemies, notes that democracies prove the most rapid feedback loop for correcting bad government policy, but that other forms of government may learn in a feedback loop as well. At any rate, by ~1990, almost all the communist states had replaced their controlled economies with market economies, and the democratic socialist states had replaced much of their bureaucratic controlled sectors of their economies with contracted or privatized sectors.
There HAS been some successes with the massive experiment in socialism. Wholesale literacy, and both primary and secondary education were mostly implemented. Much more access to Housing, and more widespread medical care, were among the benefits. And socialist states often did a better job with infrastructure investments.
What they did not do well. was technology innovation, product quality, or response to fluxuating demand. .
The socialist democracies basically abandoned the socialist goal of the public owning the means of production, and instead adopted a social welfare program, of providing the education, medical care, housing, and safety net that markets do poorly. The countries of the world have, coming out of this experiment, converged on a model of 50-70% market economics, with 25-50% state services.
Lesson 2, Burke was right, anarchists wrong
Burkian social conservatism is -- basically, a Darwinian belief that a successful societies norms and institutions are GOOD norms and institutions, as they are the ones that a successful society used to out-compete the legions of societies that are now historical footnotes. Burke basically advocated for stability and social convention above all, out of a concern that societies are fragile, and institutions and norms difficult to recreate. Lord of the Flies was a Burkian book.
Robert Heinlein, a mid century Science fiction writer, was a leading advocate of an alternative more optimistic anarchist view. He advocates that breaking social conventions, leads to societies that spontaneously form new structures and norms, and that these are generally better than what they replace. Much economic market theory basically assumes this spontaneous emergence of unplanned order is expected.
We got to test these two models, in China, and Eastern Europe, when they each de-socialized. China did this gradually, fearing instability. Eastern European leaders were assured by market advocates of the ability for spontaneous order to emerge, and the old controlled Soviet economy was basically shut down overnight, and sold off for a pittance. China, gradually built up an effective and innovative market economy, while state employers have been gradually scaled back over a period of decades. China is now a global economic superpower. While Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe -- have yet to experience the economic windfall that was promised decades ago by anarchist libertarians.
Lesson 3, Armed revolutions work, except when they don't. Ideas are more powerful.
The 2oth century started with most of the world occupied by a few European powers. Under the Enlightenment values that those nations supposedly held, this was unjustifiable. And the peoples in these occupied regions became restive. There were world wide violent revolutionary movements against colonialism over much of the 20th century. The cost and blood needed to maintain those empires, was more than those countries were willing to pay anymore, and revolutionary movements gained control of newly freed colonies worldwide. This gave the illusion that popular revolutions are easy, and readily successful.
Other than the decolonization by democracies whose own value system did not support colonization, there were few other successes. Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Nicaragua and Soviet Afghanistan were among the few. Thousands of other revolutionary movements died in remote jungles and mountains, and the torture chambers of secret police. Most states, are stable. At least against armed revolution.
What works far better to overthow a state, is to subvert it, with more attractive ideas. Note, that is how the decolonization happened -- the colonial powers were forced, by internal civil rights movements, to confront the racism that was behind their occupations. And enough of the state decision-makers were no longer believing in the racist/imperialist principles that are needed to be a colonial power.
The Shah as also overthrown by ideas -- democratic theocracy in his case. His army was unwilling to fight the popular will for democratic theocracy, so he fled. Ferdinand Marcos fell the same way, although to democracy not theocracy,. And both Eastern Europe, an South America, democratized due to a groundswell adoption of enlightenment principles by the dictatorial state's own agents!
Ideas matter, and have replaced many times more abusive states than armed revolution has. .
Lesson 4. 9-11, and Iraq Invasion. Blunders all Around. And good by accident.
Both Lowen and Germaine seem pretty off here on even this very recent history. Here is Lowen:
Textbooks find it hard to question our foreign policy because from beginning to end they typically assume the America as “the international good guy” model .... Like all nations, the United States seeks first to increase its own prosperity and influence in the world. .... We preach democracy while supporting dictatorships.
the 9/11 attacks are inexplicable [I assume meant "Are only explicable] if most Arabs and other people in the Muslim world see America as a great hypocrite, not an innocent international good guy?
For Germaine, the 9-11 attack was not a popular attack. The entire world, arab, muslim, and everyone, rallied to assist us in destroying Al-Quaida. Russia offered their bases. Iran offered their intelligence info, etc. For Lowen -- the US reputation, has nothing to do with the attack.
Osama Bin Laden was a zealot. He believed in religious purity, AND that a community of religious purists would triumph over rivals. This is a common view in history. Zealots want their society to adopt their zealotry, in order to defeat other societies. This generally means purging those who oppose Zealotry.
His model for this all came from his early life, as a Muhajideen volunteer in the Afghan war against the Soviets. Zealots frm around the musllim world came together, defeated the Soviets, and their secular/communist Afghan quislings, who were killed and their ideas have not resurfaced. THEN, compromisers and corrupt leaders squabbled, until a MORE pure zealot movement swept the corrupt away, and unified the country. Something very similar had also just happened in Lebanon, during an Israeli occupation. Osama wanted to apply this model to the world, by:
- start a war with the USA
- provoke the US to become an occupier, like the Soviets were
- rally the zealots of all of Islam to fight the US
- Use war with US to purge Islam of secularists and corrupt non-zealots
- Us will be defeated more easily than the soviets, because we have no staying power (lesson he learned from Vietnam)
- A victorious unified Isalm, under a new Caliphate government, will then replicate Mohammed's success in conquering and converting much of the world.
9-11 was not about hypocrisy, or ANYTHING the US did. Only what we were -- a secular state, with an army, and no backbone.
Osama was right about roughly 2/3 of his agenda. The US became an occupier, he was successfully able to propagandize this, and rally millions to Al Quaida, and Zealots killed thousands of secular educators, writers, and screen personalities across the Muslim world. But the Zealots could not defeat stable states, nor unify. And the Us DID eventually pull out, but after MUCH longer than he predicted. His 2/3 agenda -- had harmed the world immensely.
Note, the US WAS an innocent target for 9-11.
Then, the Bush admin, run by the "Valkyries" who believed that mass movements were irrelevant, in the greatest foreign policy blinder in my recent memory, decided to use 9-11 as a pretext to "take some pieces off the board" by invading the uninvolved Iraq. they were convinced that AlQuaida, and the GWOT was actually irrelevant, because they were not state actors. ,
Much of the Left's criticism of the Bush2 admin was valid. We did invade on a lie. Part of the calculation, was that we could take Iraqi oil as payment for our military costs in liberating them. The centrist critique, that there was no plan to govern, was only partly true. The Bush2s -- after all -- were mostly Heinlein optimists about spontaneous organization. Many of the others has thought "roll in, roll out" should have been the plan.
Blunders accumulate: When the lack of any police or courts became a clear problem, The Bush admin overruled the Valkyries, actually did set up a military occupation, and seemed to be trying to learn from and copy the successful Japan occupation from a half century earlier. That occupation had been for over a decade, and left Japan a stable democracy. But the Bush people had not looked at the Lebanon example, that Osama had. Religious/nationalist zealots increasingly attacked the US forces. An election was coming up, Iraq was spiraling out of control, Bush's Valkyrie and post WW2 advisor teams were both out of ideas. Kerry put a proposal together of transferring Iraq to an appointed administration of Iraqis, and planned to run on it. So Bush -- implemented Kerry's plan the very next month!
The US was an innocent, attacked for domestic political purposed, by a purging religious zealot. And then, while the US was deceitful about it, for about half of the Bush admin the planned outcome of the Iraq invasion was to eventually leave them with a democracy. Lowen's own example does not support his apparent thesis that the US was attacked for justified reasons on 9/11, and invaded Iraq purely for selfish reasons.
Lesson 5 -- Marx was mostly right (if you drop the historical determinism)
Karl Marx was a pretty good economist, and a pretty good sociologist, and he built a toy model for both, to try to understand our future. He ALSO believed in historical determinism, which got in the way of his understanding his own models. But we can look at the models without the determinism. Those models predict that oligarchs will maintain economic affluence, basically forever, and they will use that money to buy governments that help them maintain their wealth. This model was true of the time he contracted it. Both democracies and monarchs protected and assisted oligarchs.
But soon after he constructed it, the income of workers went up, as did their political power, and the western democracies imposed OSHA requirements, and work week requirements, etc that ended the sweatshop era. There is a question here -- why was his model wrong? And more importantly will it STAY wrong?
The answer appears to be no -- we have seen a gradual re emergence of oligarchs, along with a decline in worker income. Which, as per his sociology model, leads to a more pro-oligarch government.
The problem in his economic model was he trusted Malthus, and assumed workers would multiply without limit. Remove unlimited workers, and add a cost to ship goods, and one can get a local labor shortage when industries co-locate to minimize transport costs. We had a labor shortage in N America for a half century. Industries are relocating to the 3rd world, and that drops our wages here, and increases oligarch profits.
Note, we have seen previously that oligarchs will own our democracy if they have all the wealth, One of the major themes of this board is how to prevent that from happening. This lesson -- shows we really need to figure that out.
Do these belong in a history textbook?
Here were 5 controversial, yet potentially critically important lessons I at least see from recent history. But does anyone else here agree with all of them? Note I am a centrist -- my views are probably less offensive to more people than that of most historians. I would be surprised if everyone on this board could agree on more than one or two minor lessons from recent history. Do what should a text do? Just make some parents apoplectic?
