Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health.
Modern literary criticism was birthed with Roland Barthes’ short treatise The Death of the Author yet in history, and nearly without acknowledgement, a parallel trend has emerged: the Death of the Historian.
This death isn’t anything new. Indeed, it’s been decades in the making – and it seems, in part, that The Death of the Author was a contributor.
For those unfamiliar with the original 1967 essay, Barthes ‘killed’ authorial intent and replaced it with individual, de-textualised interpretation. Literature never looked back, and in history today much the same revolution has taken place.
Some 16 years ago Margaret Macmillan, Canada’s leading historian, picked up on that parallel trend in her work The Uses and Abuses of History. She concluded that to combat the misuse of history, professional historians need to re-engage with the public sphere.
Macmillan was right – but not for the reasons found in her work. Whilst she is well aware of history’s abuse by politicians and others seeking to imagine and create national communities, she failed to foresee another trend, more toxic because it is generally less transparent than the propaganda of politicians: the colonisation of history by journalism.
What I mean by this, specifically, is a form of ‘history’ marked by two things: the light-weight character of its scholarship (for it is not really intended to be scholarship in the proper sense), and the particular demographics of those peddling it.
Perhaps no better illustration of the trend exists than Otto English, with his cack-handed crusade against so-called “fake history”. But he’s far from the only offender. The common style that unites this particular school can be best described as midwit fact-checking.
Take the efforts of Russ Jones (another FBPE darling) to debunk Kemi Badenoch’s recent speech on how Britain’s wealth is built industry and institutions. Au contraire, says he: the real source is that the United Kingdom allegedly extracted $45 trillion (that’s three times the cumulative net worth of everyone in Britain today) from India during colonial rule.
A mind-boggling sum, to be sure. The only problem with this figure (apart from it originating from Utsa Patnaik, a Marxist historian and Indian nationalist) is that it is a complete actuarial fiction. The methodology behind it is nonsense.
To reach it, Patnaik added up the East India Company’s, and then the Raj’s, trade deficits with Britain, and compounded them by five per cent for 200 years. She also argued that a further ‘Keynesian multiplier’ be added, multiplying the total by six.
For reference, the necessary condition of this logic, which Patnaik has herself acknowledged, is to believe that Britain has therefore ‘stolen’ an additional $15tn from India in the last four years alone.
An error on this may be fair enough, given how often the claim has been repeated by people that should know better. A genuine scholar would accept the correction.
Yet when confronted with the methodological flaws Jones simply refuses to admit any flaws in the numbers he’s peddling, retreating behind appeals to authority (though at least here it is not his own, for there is none, but rather “Columbia University” and “basic mathematics”).
The actual problem, of course, is not “basic mathematics”, but the midwit’s application of it. To illustrate why, let’s apply Jones’ borrowed reasoning to another historical case: Edward III’s defaulting on his Florentine loans in 1345.
If we to apply the same formula, we conclude that England had stolen some $1.74 sextillion (that is 21 zeros) from Italy. Suddenly, India’s paltry $45tn contribution pales into insignificance: the true source of our national wealth is defrauding an Italian city-state that we never ruled at all.
Frankly, this sort of ‘debunking’ looks rather more like France’s nascent proletariat taking hatchets to the biblical kings adorning their national cathedrals during the Revolution than any useful, honest intellectual exercise.
Comparing English’s ‘work’ to ‘dismantle’ Che Guevara in Fake Heroes with the work of real deconstruction, what stands out most is that these writers in history (for they are not historians, not in the real sense) are incapable of seeing Barthesian myths; they are seen only as ‘fake news’ to be abolished, and not symbolic truths of our culture.
It is all very well and good for English to tell us that Guevara was not a very nice man, but it has all the interest of a Year 7 History class picking between Harold Godwinson and William the Conqueror.
What is interesting is the semiotics: how Guevara’s face has been transformed from a symbol of international socialism to globalised capitalism – designed in London, made in Vietnam, and sold in California. But one can scarcely imagine these journalistic myth-slayers grappling with such weighty material.
People finding identity from their history books is nothing new of course, but in the past the social signalling of the vast bulk of work was far more supplementary than foundational and at least contained some history.
Today, history has passed from the hands of academics and the state, but it has not been democratised. It has fallen instead into the hands of that generation which, whilst doing hugely well out our political order throughout its life, clings to its self-image of youthful radicalism. It looks rather like the sort of history you get from a balding man who bought a Camden townhouse for £50 in 1980 and is now sitting on a six million pound property yet still clings to the desperate fringes of the borough’s dwindling counter-cultural artsyness.
In truth, the best critique of this demographic comes from the left. In her book Die Selbstgerechten (‘The Self Righteous’), Sahra Wagenknecht, a left-wing German politician, argues that the left has become too middle class to concern itself with social economics and now exists in a milieu of ‘lifestyle leftism’, where signalling and policing the signalling of a socially progressive lifestyle is paramount.
Wagenknecht was writing about the German Greens, but her critique applies very well to our own midwit historians. Their writing isn’t scholarship; it is an expression of (and the books an accoutrement to) a certain social position, a lifestyle. It is Marx’s Warenfetischismus (commodity fetishism) applied to history.
Such efforts will always have their audience, those for whom the outward appearance of being wiser than the rubes who fall for ‘fake history’ is more important than doing the work of truly engaging with history, with all its inconvenient complexities. But never mistake it for the real thing.
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Author: Alexander Bowen
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