The Follies of Instant History
The recent news of a poll by today’s historians didn’t make as much news as I had hoped it would. Where was the analysis by pundits? The poll’s premise - that today’s historians could pass judgment on President Bush’s legacy 8 months before he leaves office - was ridiculous. The only good analysis I could find was from an openly anti-Bush historian who did a really great job of explaining his concerns about this poll:
On the recent poll:
We have gotten ourselves into such a state in this regard that most historians no longer even see any problem here—they no longer see a principled distinction to be made between our present politics and our historical judgments. Indeed, I suspect few of my colleagues see anything wrong with this kind of poll, and think I am out on some fringe somewhere with my concerns. And I fear I am. That is the real tragedy of it: this conflation of politics with historical scholarship is so commonplace that old-fashioned historians like me have become fringe characters by stint of our unwillingness to move along with the postmodern crowd.
Simply put: it is foolish to think that historians can offer an historical judgment on the Bush presidency (even a tentative one) while that presidency is still in motion. We cannot short-circuit the processes of historical research and scholarship and produce anything remotely related to valid historical judgments.
He also wrote back in 2006, after a similar poll:
Historians have both a right and a duty to try to influence public policy in ways they think desirable. As public intellectuals, they can and should speak out about Bush Administration policies. But they cannot pretend that, qua historian, they are giving us a professional assessment of the presidency of George W. Bush, while that presidency is still in motion. It is a form of intellectual dishonesty to pretend that the discipline of historical analysis currently certifies—as a matter of learned scholarship—that Bush can be judged, even tentatively, as among our worst presidents. A historians can say—as a political liberal—that she disagrees with Bush policy in a number of areas, and she expects these policies to turn out badly. But she cannot play the coy game of pretending that this is the objective assessment of the history profession—no matter how many historians are polled in similar gestures of the same arrogance.
Source: The Follies of Instant History: Another Meaningless Poll of Historians and Should Historians Try to Rank President Bush’s Presidency, both by Larry DeWitt on George Mason University’s History News Network
It’s a flawed sense of Historiography, one that’s been corrupted by a lack of patience & a desire to use History as a weapon in contemporary political battles.
It’s always sort of been there - after all, the winners have always gotten to write the History, right? It’s just that in the modern/Western world, things haven’t been so blatant (Stalin aside). Once we entered into the post-modern era, though, all bets were off.
And now we reap the whriwinds like these bogus polls.
Rest assured, though, that the real History won’t even start to get understood & written for at least 50 years, and possibly until after all of today’s major players are dead & gone.