IS HISTORY DEAD? | PAGE 1, 2, 3, 4
- - - - - - - - - -

Foucault's legacy, Windschuttle believes, may be most apparent in the character of contemporary academic debate. Each of Foucault's major works asserted that different eras and cultures have different systems of thought -- he has called these variously "epistemes" and "discursive formations" -- which are incompatible with one another. The upshot of this assertion is that what is "true" is only true within a certain society. There are no universal standards that can measure the truth of a proposition in every culture, there are no universal values, no single human nature. (This emphatic denial of universals is what differentiates poststructuralism from structuralism, which posited that there are standard rules of language and culture that determine behavior in all societies).

Foucault himself, it is true, implicitly renounced cultural relativism in the last years of his life when he took up the cause of gay rights -- without universal standards, human "rights" talk was impossible. But Foucault's admirers still embrace his earlier relativism, which provides easy refuge in any academic exchange. Just as Marxists once "refuted" opponents by identifying their class position so as to expose purported ideological bias in their arguments, so "Foucaldians," in Windschuttle's view, now ensure that in any historical debate, "any question about the facts of a statement is ignored and the focus is directed to the way what is said reflects the prevailing 'discursive formation.'" Thus history discussion seminars increasingly consist less of "talk about real issues" than of an endless cycle of "talk about talk."

As evidence of this decline in the standards of debate, Windschuttle offers up the recent public brawl between Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere over the death of Captain Cook. Although both are anthropologists, their argument has serious implications for historians. Briefly, Sahlins' structuralist explanation of the events leading to Cook's death runs as follows. Although Cook was initially welcomed by natives as their returned god Lono upon arriving in Hawaii in January 1779 during a festival celebrated in Lono's honor, his return to the island in February to repair a broken mast coincided with a different period in the cultural calendar, when the warlike god Ku usurped Lono's authority. Cook's bad cultural timing, Sahlins argues, necessitated his sacrificial death, so that his godly powers could be usurped by the Hawaiian warrior chief, Kalani'opu'u.

This structuralist determinism, Obeyesekere counters, is nonsense. The historical evidence available suggests only that the Hawaiians, possessed of "practical rationality" like all peoples, welcomed Cook as a chief, most likely to enlist his aid in the incessant warfare waged with chiefs on other Hawaiian islands. In fact, Cook, during his successful first visit, was forced to genuflect in a temple before an icon of the war god Ku, something a god could not possibly do. More importantly, Cook was a foreigner who didn't know the natives' language and knew nothing of their religion -- behavior surely untypical of Hawaiian gods. And he was killed for very prosaic reasons: After Cook took the native chief hostage in retaliation for the theft of his ship's cutter, the Hawaiians surrounded Cook's men and killed them when they tried to escape. No theory, structuralist or otherwise, is needed to explain this.

Sahlins' subsequent response to Obeyesekere, Windschuttle demonstrates, provides a textbook demonstration of the Foucauldian method of intellectual debate. The attempt to ascribe "practical rationality" to the Hawaiians, Sahlins writes in his recent book "How Natives Think" (1995), proves that Obeyesekere, although a Sri Lankan, is a captive of Western concepts. "Rationality" is, in Sahlins' view, a cultural construct, an ideology he labels "commonsense bourgeois realism." To prove his point, Sahlins invokes a famous passage from Foucault's "The Order of Things," frequently cited by academics, that described a strange taxonomy to be found in "a certain Chinese encyclopedia," in which animals are described as "(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens," and on and on. Because this classification system makes no sense to us, Sahlins argues, "it must mean that objectivity itself is a variable social value." Because the cultural system of the Hawaiians lacked such "objectivity," Cook must indeed have been killed as "Lono," however improbable that seems in the face of a common-sensical interpretation of the evidence. "Different cultures," Sahlins concludes, "different rationalities."

Sahlins' argument for cultural relativism, like his explanation of the death of Captain Cook, collapses when exposed to empirical reality. In fact, Foucault's "Chinese encyclopedia" does not exist -- it was invented as a playful thought experiment by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. "There is no evidence," Windschuttle writes, "that any Chinese person has ever thought about animals in this way." Amazingly, Foucault himself admitted this, openly citing Borges as his source. But Sahlins, like most academics who deploy Foucault's Chinese encyclopedia, does not mention Borges; he is using it as evidence about the supposed mental world of non-Western cultures. "That a piece of fiction can seriously be deployed to make a case in history or anthropology," Windschuttle declares, "indicates how low debate has sunk in the postmodern era."

Relativist mantras about "cultural diversity" are not only intellectually untenable, they are a denial of history. "For the past ten thousand years at least," Windschuttle points out, "indigenous cultures on every continent have been subject to a process of change that has varied from merger and absorption into other cultures to complete obliteration by a conquering power." Cultural relativists wish to overturn this seemingly unstoppable historical trend. What they are really pining for, according to Windschuttle, is a "return to tribalism." By rejecting "rationality" as a tainted construct of Western reason, that is, relativists are abandoning history altogether: They would have us return to the mythical tall tales all human cultures once used to reinforce their self-image before Herodotus and Thucydides set out to find the truth about the past. If the relativist project were brought to its absurd conclusion, Windschuttle believes, advocates of cultural "diversity" would have us reject all that the Western historical tradition has learned over the past several millenniums and return to "differentiating between human beings on the basis of genealogical blood lines, in other words, on racial grounds."

Although most proponents of cultural studies would argue that their theories emphasize that cultures are human-made constructs, not effects of biological difference, Windschuttle has hit upon a deeply troubling aspect of the new historical relativism. If every culture must be interpreted according to its own values, is there any place for ethical judgement of another culture? Given this conundrum, it hardly seems like an accident that two heroes of the cultural studies movement, Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, were associated with the Nazis.

Might historians yet compose laudatory odes to Adolf Hitler, champion of a gloriously anti-rational, anti-Western culture? If this seems far-fetched, we would do well to remember that a number of paeans were in fact composed earlier this decade to indigenous American cultures that brutally dismembered innocent human subjects in ritual sacrifice and then ate them. As Windschuttle reminds us, when the Spanish conquistadors entered Tenochtitlan in 1519, they encountered piles of human skulls not unlike those uncovered in Nazi death camps. One Spaniard, Bernard Diaz del Castillo, remarked that the skulls were "so regularly arranged that one might count them, and I estimated them at more than one hundred thousand." If historians cannot evaluate the actions of various cultures according to standards of rational judgment, Windschuttle declares, then we may as well throw up our arms and accept the cultures of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as "equal but different."

Is history really dead? Of course not -- not yet, anyway. There are many energetic historians, both inside and outside the academy, who continue to do real empirical research and write readable books about real people. Windschuttle might have devoted more space in his book to celebrating the positive contributions to historical knowledge being made today by his fellow "born-again empiricists." He might also have chosen more challenging targets in his critique of the cultural studies crowd. Robert Darnton, for example, is a talented French Enlightenment historian who has greatly influenced the current trend toward "cultural history." Darnton is more scrupulous in his scholarship than Foucault, less polemical, and also a much better writer. But his use of structuralist theory to "read" the culture of Old Regime France raises no less troubling questions about historical practice than does Foucault's poststructuralism.

If Windschuttle's survey of contemporary historical practice is incomplete, however, his diagnosis of the current malaise in the historical profession is sharp and well worth attention. The attempt by postmodernists to reduce all history to competing narratives told by different cultural groups, Windschuttle argues compellingly, is "not only a theoretical delusion but ... politically inept." For, he argues, "to eliminate the narrative of what really happened irrespective of whether [historical actors] were aware of it or not ... would deprive us all, no matter what culture we inhabit, of genuine knowledge of our past." Just as so-called "Western" science and technology have long been open to the world's exploitation, so, too, should the tradition of impartial historical investigation bequeathed to us by Herodotus be available to everyone. Not by proclaiming "different cultures, different rationalities," but rather by giving us a chance to face "the truth of both our separate and our common histories," can historians truly fulfill their calling in helping people "learn to live with one another." If we allow history to die, we will lose this precious resource. Keith Windschuttle deserves high praise for opening our eyes to the danger.
SALON | Jan 11, 1998

Sean McMeekin is a Ph.D. candidate in history at UC-Berkeley and a freelance writer.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
R E L A T E D_.S A L O N_.S T O R I E S

Ask Camille More darts at Foucault's scrawny haunches.
By Camille Paglia
Dec. 2, 1998

Idiot savants? In a new book, intellectual gadfly Alan Sokal and co-author Jean Bricmont assail the demigods of French theory for their fraudulent use of high science. But does this mean all postmodern philosophy is bunk?
By Kristina Zarlengo
Nov. 2, 1998

I was Michel Foucault's love slave I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by theory, well-fed complacent leather-coated, dragging themselves through the Caucasian campuses at dawn looking for an angry signifier.
By Carol Lloyd
Feb. 10, 1997