The Lost Tools of Learning from History
There are consequences to the loss of metaphysical thinking on our ability to assess historical events and then, to come full circle, to apply in our present ethical context. Of course those very biases concerning present tensions can often be what clouds our vision into the past. However, the more dominant roadblock is the loss of conceptual categories required to make key distinctions, even when we do have a clear sight of the past.
To take two infamous cases—the Crusades and the U. S. Civil War—the history is presented to us as a monocausal event with actors who comprise monolithic sides, which we are called to represent as “taking.” The implied pressure is that the “student” is called on to make a confession (a guilty plea as it turns out) more than an inquiry. In more overly Christian circles, there is the added pietistic pressure that such and such was not very Christ-like, and it certainty wasn’t the gospel.
But why should the missing ingredient to our pushback be “metaphysical thinking”? you may ask. Would it not be enough to say: “History is much more complex than that,” or else, “History is not for us to ‘take sides’ but to learn from.” Why not let the dead bury their own dead here too, leaving the statues alone and the serious course corrections to us? And as to those being “not the gospel,” we may challenge our conscientious objector as to whether or not he has abstained from work lately (especially if it is a Christian police officer or judge) on that basis.
Indeed, those may be a few good ways to put things. However, one’s ability to help our neighbors through this confusion will turn on abstract thinking—i.e., the arrangement of particulars by means of universals. Everyone in the discussion believes in some ideal and that the ideal has either not been met in the past, or that we have fallen away from it in the present.
What is the sense in learning from history if it is only filled with sinners and their failures? We may give the minimalist answer of “learning from their mistakes,” but I would dare say that the people who drive us to this historical minimalism would apply the same fatalism to the present results of that learning.
In fact, they don’t mean to learn anything at all in the sense of a plan of action. Such action, if we were consistent, would be just as doomed by our human frailties. What we must not improve upon is virtue. What we must not expect is anything heroic. In short, we must not do anything fundamentally different, even while sitting in judgment over what they did which was allegedly so disgustingly different.
Our first question, then, must be: What’s the difference? On what ground do we make distinctions that are specifically historical-ethical distinctions?
Universals and History
To consider persons acting more like persons were meant to be is irreducibly metaphysical.
If one were to say, “Let us imagine a just war in that case, and leave aside this or that motive, this or that atrocity,” the other side may just as easily reply: “But why should I do that? The real combatants didn’t.” What will be your reply? You may think that your reply will meet their lie head on. “I will refute their historical revision with facts.” You may on occasion do just that. But with present tensions at stake, it is unlikely that you will ever meet a sympathetic hearing. For every book that revises the revision, there are ten more than made the present revisionist orthodoxy what it is. Their original revision work is a ship that sailed long before our parents were ever born.
Even in the rare case of having piqued someone’s curiosity—and in times of a loss of confidence in our institutions, the fallow ground of mere followers has been tilled for alternative explanatory structures—it will not be tiny pellets of facts that will undo the whole fortress of modern liberalism. It is what sociologists have called “plausibility structures” that need to be deconstructed. No set of mere “facts,” taken in a piecemeal fashion will make a dent. There is a “moral of the story” that is being held on to. It is this big idea bubble that requires bursting.
It is tempting at such a time as ours to think that people are “ready” and “awake” and so forth. This is always a double-edged sword, as cynicism is hardly the sum of what is required for such an investigation. The mere cynic has only the conceptual tools for a pendulum swing. He will be happy to hear something equally untrue, so long as he has his vengeance on his most immediate fathers and brothers and teachers.
But about that method of simply correcting the historical revision, from root to branch, extolling only the virtues of one’s slandered forefathers and leaving the only intelligible application to do as they did without remainder—even at this the philosopher raises his eyebrows.
Whatever your more overarching reply is to the deconstructionist, it will be an appeal to a form or essence of justice, or perhaps, a form or essence of a nation’s more legitimate interest and therefore of a military’s more logical strategy. This “more than”—this closer proximity to the just, or the good, or the merciful, and so forth—is what is presumably implied by the critic of x historical action or cause.
Presumably—but we should not be so quick to presume.
The Form Behind Excesses is What Must Be Unburied
If he is not willing to go down the road of abstracting to the good, the true, and the beautiful, then he may rightly be exposed as a fraud. His criticism of the merit-based “preaching the cross” of Bernard to the Crusaders, or of the “Lost Cause” thesis and its link to the constitutional question—that criticism will have been nothing but a moral straw man that enlisted a handful of real historical facts. You may know what is behind the facade, but our onlookers for the most part do not.
You know that his cherry-picking of Dabney or recitation of the statements by state legislators about the inferiority of the black race—you know very well (or you at least used to know) that such overtures are designed only to paint the very idea of secession to be an attempt at white supremacy. You also know (or once did) that the mythology we were all taught about the Crusades was designed to emasculate any resistance to the present Islamic invasion of Europe and America via “asylum” and “dreamer” recastings of immigration. Such are not real historical studies, but struggle sessions.
My appeal to metaphysical thinking here is not to speak of the duty of magistrates and other political actors who may (and must) take a more direct approach to those who propagate such lies meant to obstruct justice and run cover for further violence. My appeal is to those tasked with the art of the teaching of history and with public discourse. If it is plain that such mono-monologues about the past function the same way that the words “racist” and “Islamophobe” and “transphobe” do in discussions about current events, then the way out is not to puff out our chests and wear the straw man like a badge of honor. It is not to simply chant Deus Vult and whistle Dixie.
Rather, it is to make a better case for a better case: that is, to lift the attention of the teachable above and beyond the historical circumstances (the case “on the ground”) to the principles that we know may have animated the best of men back then, but which are buried hopelessly below the smokescreen now. There is no frontal assault on the smokescreen that will penetrate into minds and hearts.
The “ought” (ethics) can only rise out of the ashes of what “was” (history) by an abiding “is” (metaphysics). This means that there is a form of “crusading” and a form of “confederation” to which the particulars of then and now may come closer or from which they may further deviate.
But the person who balks at the very idea of conformity to driving out a violent, invading force, or of conformity to retaining sovereignty at local polities so as to minimize the potential for violent force by a central power (both of which are fundamentally essences: the being of which many historical instances have participated)—such a person reveals that the alleged historical scoundrels are not their real enemies at all. Richard the Lionheart and Robert E. Lee are mere proxy figures that they burn in effigy only to lash out against the real image of God in their time. The burial of metaphysics under the ground of memory is simply a last line of defense.
