Anti-anti-anti-postmodernism
Strange anti-anti-‘postmodernism’ is cropping up everywhere today. (Okay three places that I’ve seen. That’s postmodernist for ‘everywhere.’) The scare-quotes on postmodernism are because the postmodernism in question seems in every case to be some kind of weird ragbag or catch-all term that is so elastic it means pretty much nothing, or anything, or just ‘whatever I feel like making it mean for the purposes of this particular sentence or this particular non-argument.’ But the fact that the word is being used as a ragbag doesn’t mean it doesn’t function as a sower of suspicion of dastardly enemies of (unspecified and very very blurry) postmodernism. (The word is also being used, confusingly, to mean ‘various forms of skepticism and critical scrutiny that have been around for twenty or thirty centuries at least but that I, because I haven’t read very widely, think are all the invention of something called postmodernism.’)
Iain Macwhirter on Stephen Law’s new book for instance.
Now, postmodernists and structuralists might say that Law is naive and reductionist and that he fails to recognise the social context of morality. It’s all very well laying down absolutes, but you have to take into account people’s different viewpoints…Law is impatient with all this. “Postmodernists accuse me of authoritarian conservatism; that as a white male I shouldn’t be telling people how to live. But I don’t have a lot of time for that.” Perhaps he should find the time, because as an author of popular philosophy he can’t ignore the most influential strand of modern philosophy in British universities. “Structuralism” doesn’t even appear in Law’s index, and there is no discussion of the popes of postmodernism, such as Louis Althusser or Michel Foucault.
But part of the reason ‘postmodernism’ is ‘influential,’ if it is (which depends for one thing on how it’s defined, and for instance whether or not one considers Althusser a postmodernist), is for the same sort of reason the head of the MCB is ‘influential,’ which is that newspapers like the Telegraph keep calling him influential. This business of being influential is very much a self-fulfilling prophecy – very ‘constructed,’ in fact, in good postmodernist (according to some ragbaggy definitions) fashion. And the more newspapers and journalists keep repeating that one ‘can’t ignore’ postmodernism because it is influential, the more influential it will become, thus making it even more mandatory that one not ignore it, in a tightening spiral of influence and mandatoricity and thou shalt not ignoreism, all quite independent of any merit inhering in postmodernism itself. And is Althusser really a pope of postmodernism?
Then there’s Marc Mulholland, commenting on the utter inanity of a Florida law barring the teaching of ‘revisionist’ history.
This is outrageous. Historical knowledge is approached by the interplay of evidence, scholarly protocols, and veracious argument. The state has no useful function to play in determining academic procedures. This seems rather to confirm my long standing concerns regarding the obscurantist uses the mundanities of militantly anti PoMo can be put to use.
But know-nothing fits about ‘revisionist’ history in the US have no need of postmodernism. Such fits have been going on for decades, and they don’t necessarily have anything to do with putative postmodernism at all. They simply boil down to ‘any interpretation of history that I don’t like.’ Again, one needs a terribly ragbaggy, capacious, sagging, world-size definition of postmodernism to make it central to this issue. One also, perhaps, needs to adopt this irritating and uninformed idea that putative postmodernism invented every single skeptical or critical thought anyone ever had in order to think it is central to this issue. One, postmodernism has no monopoly on either skepticism or critical thought, and two, postmodernism often abjures and even reviles critical thought rather than recommending and embracing and making use of it. Norm has a comment here; I saw the post via his.
And there is the (very interesting, I must say) discussion at Inside Higher Ed, where the ‘postmodernism thought of everything and without it we’d all be credulous robots’ line keeps coming back, along with a repetitive insistence that people who defend the idea of truth don’t mean truth but Truth or Absolute Truth or certain truth. No matter how many times I say ‘no, just truth,’ the capital letters and transcendent adjectives keep returning. Like the repressed.
One of [Foucault’s] mind blowing and truly innovative arguments centers on the creation of homosexuality as a social category. Foucault contends that the articulation of homosexuals as a distinct and scientifically identifiable group occurred in the late 19th century; “homosexuals” were “created” in 1870s. This doesn’t challenge the “truth” of same-sex attraction or its pre-1870s history. BUT, it suggests that the scientific way of understanding same-sex eros is history-bound and culture-bound. The sexologists in the late 19th century didn’t suddenly just “get it right” by turning sexuality into an object of scientific inquiry. As I see it, that’s the “post” of the “postmodern” part; after reading Foucault, we don’t have to slavishly buy into a modernist/scientific reading of sexuality – a reading that’s likely to be reductionist, determinist, essentialist, and some other bad word.
As if (as ‘we’re all scientists now’ points out) we would have had to before reading Foucault. Sometimes (often) one wants to stop arguing with self-declared postmodernists and just urge them to read more widely. A lot more widely.
“We’re all scientists now” added some more highly incisive comments, including an amusing little pomo parody, over at Inside Higher Ed. Recommended.
It seems to me, based on admittedly little reading of the stuff, that pomo is basically over-intellectualised, dressed up relativism, which must be based on subjective idealism.
And as for truth, of course it is relative, but that part of it which will not be refuted in the future is the theoretically absolute part. The problem is that we usually don’t have a very precise idea of which part that is when dealing with complex issues. Some issues, however, are not complex. The statement, “Today, June 11, 2006 is Sunday” is absolutely true, as the probability that it will ever be refuted is vanishingly small.
As I said on Marc Mullholland’s site, historical events did happen; there are facts; there is such a thing as truth.
Despite the fact that a member of the Me generation of the Bush family agrees with it, I am more comfortable with “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed” than I am with Harold Pinter’s “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false.”
We have to agree there is such a thing as truth before we can argue about what it is.
And given the sway that Pinter and the Pinterish statement holds over western higher education, I am in fact relieved to see even the bald, over-done statement, “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed”, because it signals a fightback against the idea that there is no truth.
I would think Scott McLemee and the authors of Why Truth Matters should feel similarly. N’est-ce pas?
I saw your comment over there, Juan. The trouble is, revisionism is not the same thing as relativism. It’s completely absurd for a legislature, or in fact anyone, to declare that revisionist history can’t be taught, because all history is revisionist. History is an interpretive discipline, of its nature. It’s also an empirical discipline, of course, and some interpretations are wrong; but revisionism is not at all the same as epistemic relativism. Pointing out that history is interpretive as well as empirical is not at all the same as saying that there is no truth.
Richard Evans is good on all this. Check him out. (One of the earliest articles here, if you don’t have time for his book.)
But those who are attacking the Florida law are confusing relativism with revisionism as much as the Florida law does. The Florida law is meant to counter relativism and unfortunately it erroneously equates that with revisionism. Like so much that the Bushes do, I guess, it’s rather ham-handed. For that reason it deserves criticism.
Yes, of course history is an interpretive discipline and the Florida law does not seem to recognize that. It certainly should have done, but I guess the lawmakers were not thinking beyond putting a lid on nonsense like
But it does draw a clear bright line about facts. It says, American history “shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence”. There’s nothing wrong with that. I find that an excellent statement in fact, which makes the law an effective starting point for fighting back against the absurd ideas that relativists are getting away with.
Now they will have to defend the soundness of their ideas and the accuracy of their facts. They won’t be able to say first one thing and then another and pack it all round with the fudge that relativism lives, breathes and shits.
There’s nothing in there about how settlers’ treatment of the Indians is to be taught, about how the role of religion is to be taught, or slavery or women’s rights or anything else like that. But you can bet those will all be made into flash points, so we have to be there fighting them just as they will be.
It should be fun and productive now because we can approach history as something that is “knowable, teachable, and testable” — not perfectly so, but knowable, teachable and testable nontheless.
This gives everyone the same solid, level playing field. Before we had a squishy playing field full of holes.
So I hope academics of the decent left in Florida will find the situation has improved.
It will be easy to pick at the errors in the law and try to vitiate the whole thing in that way, but I would warn against that for I think most people in Florida won’t buy into that exercise and will see it as the cheap, superficial pseudo-intellectual snobbery that it is.
I really do hope the left doesn’t get the wrong end of this stick, too!
Sorry, Juan – I don’t think relativism should be made illegal, any more than I think patriotism should be made manadatory. I think this law is a ludicrous and terrible idea.
That would be mandatory, not manadatory. Der.
Relativism is not being made illegal in Florida any more than intelligent design was made illegal in Pennsylvania.
The relativism of “There are no hard distinctions between … what is true and what is false” has no more business being taught as fact than ID has being taught as science.
Governments have been involved in setting basic standards for education for as long as there has been public education. So I just don’t see a problem here.
You can probably get an academic consensus or at least majority against the use of the word “revisionist” in that law, but if you use that majority to ridicule the law’s attack on relativism everybody loses except for the sophists you rail about so well in Why Truth Matters.
Basic standards, but not detailed standards.
I’ve only been able to find that one article on the subject; I’ll look for more tomorrow if I have time. But the article quotes the bill as saying
“The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth. American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed.”
That’s just a confused, imbecilic, meaningless statement. Of course history is constructed! Just like meds and the Internet (see Green Yurt comment and comments), it doesn’t just drop on us from outer space; people research it, they choose what to research and how to research it; it’s not just a nice big giftwrapped box of facts. The Florida legislature might as well pass a law saying poetry shall be viewed as not constructed.
“but if you use that majority to ridicule the law’s attack on relativism everybody loses except for the sophists you rail about so well in Why Truth Matters.”
I’m not ‘using’ any majority, I’m saying what I think. And I completely disagree with you. It’s the other way around. If I clapped my hands and said ‘Oh good, they’re making relativism illegal, it’s about time,’ everyone would quite rightly conclude that Why Truth Matters should be shredded forthwith. We’re against epistemic relativism, that does NOT mean we think it should be against the law!
I meant an impersonal “you”, not you or anyone else personally. But I drifted from one to the other in the same sentence so that’s not how it came out.
There may be one other area where we are not in total disagreement: I think the Florida law would put extreme relativism on the same footing as the Pennsylvania court decision would put ID. I believe you are happy for ID to be in the situation it is in there. So presumably you would have nothing in principle against extreme relativism being in the same situation that ID is in.
Look, I recognize that the Florida law is a very flawed instrument but I think there is an excellent intention there. I wouldn’t rule out there being some less than excellent intentions lurking there, as well (which might be how the “revisionist” word got in there).
I recognize that the law doesn’t say “extreme relativism” and it does add in “revisionism”. So it is clearly flawed. But I think there is ample common ground there where all of us who respect the truth can stand and argue over it.
I think education has got horribly out of whack with Harold Pinter school of thought in command. I also realize I’m speaking from here in the UK where things might be worse than they are there. And my strongest feelings come from what I see my daughter being taught in London state schools. But I don’t really believe it’s all that different, and it is criminal for children to be taught that “anything goes”, and that’s what they are being taught. Most kids can’t tell the difference between right and wrong because “one person’s right is somebody else’s wrong”. Well, bullshit to that! And good on Jeb Bush if he’s willing to do something about it. The question, as I see it, is how to join up with what they’re doing in a way that moves things in the right direction.
What is needed is balance — a sensible way of looking at what is “out there” and what is “constructed”. The Florida moves things in the right direction with plenty of danger that it will go too far and that it will veer out of control in a different direction than the direction in which it is out of control now.
I think the movement behind that Florida law are people to be allied with in some way. And I am really quite sure that if they are ridiculed by the left it’s going to go very badly.
But I won’t say anything more about it here, at least for a while. :)
The point that a nothing term and movement like post-modernism can be made into something important and influential even if it doesn’t deserve to be is well made. Even tho I’ve not been viewing these type of discussions for long, the endless references to it are extremely tedious – altho I agree with everyone who slags it off for the half-baked non-existent nothingness that it is. In philosophy, just as in music, comedy, business, and all areas of life, you always get people who come with words like ‘post-modern’, or ‘memes’ in the case of philosophy, and ‘happy hardcore house’ in music and ‘heads-up and ‘customer-focused’ in business, and all this buzzword jargon, which all the arse-lickers and unoriginal sheep who dominate these fields, at least in the audience, then replicate ad nauseam. Why can’t we scxrap the ‘isms’ and the artificial categories thought up by self-aggrandising patronising jargon-spouting emperors in new clothes, and talk plain English. Post-modernism does not actually exist. Philosophy should be about life, not about fake internal cliques. Yawn.
I would say that postmodernism, in so far as it comprises post-structuralism too (let us say Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Cixous, Barthes, Jameson, Kristeva, Baudrillard to start with) has been and remains influential in that its terminology has entered general parlance and influenced thinking, not merely as a crude relativisation of everything, which is what this thread seems to be discussing, though some of that does go on.
That is not however to argue that no ‘contexting’ is valuable. Foucault on illness and institutions, for example: the way institutions and groups label certain states and conditions as exceptional and sick and therefore to be controlled.
It is not entirely nonsense to talk of discourses, that is to say stories that bind together a slanted view of the world. It is a useful sceptical exercise to unpick certain discourses that present themselves as objective truth but which turn out to be true only by the light of the language they have set up to describe objectivity.
And there is certainly postmodernism in architecture (see Jencks, Michael Graves etc etc), as there is in all literature (Donald Barthelme, Peter Esterhazy etc), as there is in…(add your own)
I don’t think the insistence on examining contexts rules out the possibility of objective truth, of course. That is the reductio ad absurdum of a proper analytical practice. But that comes through having questioned the way objectivity is arrived at, asking the cui bono question. Who gains by this objective truth, and is it as objective as people say it is?
Of course Sokal, of course the nonsense of being terrified of scientific method as applied to physical phenomena, including the physical phenomena of history. Distortions happen. But I started offf very dubious about it (by it I mean the bunch above) and now find some of its insights very useful.
Which is not to say that Violet, of your earlier post, is any less daft than you think her to be, only that the daftness is extra. There is, I grant, a lot of it about.
You bet, George. All that is pretty much what we say in the book. Right down to pointing out that it is often crucial to ask ‘cui bono?’. But it is the ‘lot of it about’ problem that is a worry.
(Funny how ‘postmodernism’ [whatever it may be] prides itself on skepticism and yet so often emerges as the blankest credulity. That’s very odd…)
Juan,
(just so as not to leave this dangling)
“There may be one other area where we are not in total disagreement: I think the Florida law would put extreme relativism on the same footing as the Pennsylvania court decision would put ID. I believe you are happy for ID to be in the situation it is in there.”
No. Because – as Judge Jones pointed out – the matter should never have been in court at all. I’m certainly glad Judge Jones decided the way he did, but (in common with many many other people) I don’t think the courts are the place to decide school policy. If the dang school board had consulted its own dang teachers in the first place, instead of imposing fool demands on them without consulting them, the case would never have been brought.
It’s not unlike the Irving-Lipstadt libel case. That subject, as Lipstadt has said often, is not best decided in court either.
I do not think legislators are the right people to decide school policy. (I also think school boards should be a civil service entity, not a qualification-free elective office. Sigh.) Have a look at the In Focus on the Academic Bill of Rights for further discussion of why. I wrote that two or three years ago, so this isn’t some new whim of mine.
So, OB, if you had some political clout along the lines of Jeb Bush or the leading Florida legislators, what would you do instead of what they did?
Would you start by making school boards civil service bodies, and take your policy stand at the point where they are appointed? If so and if the school boards were run as they should be run, with the powers they should have, and with qualified people, what might be some good moves they could take to stop the rot?
I’m not sure I would do anything. But then I wouldn’t have clout along the lines of a governor or legislator, because I wouldn’t be motivated to have it, because I’m not interested in all aspects of government and administration. That’s not merely irrelevant, I think; the point is that the two are different areas, and call on different abilities and interests.
I do take your point though. What are people to do when schools run off a cliff. In the case of the Dover school board, the parents had no option but to sue.
The thing about qualified people is a huge one. For large, not easy to shift reasons, such as the fact that women have other job options, and teaching isn’t always rewarding (to say the least). A friend of mine who teaches high school math is tired of (among other things) being called a fucking bitch by students. Well, yeah, that would get on my nerves right smart quick. As a matter of fact, as I told her, it would take only one of those and I’d be out the door. (I have another friend who tried teaching and was out the door pretty much instantly.)
So, in short, I don’t have answers, or claim to. But I don’t need to in order to think micromanagement by legislators is a crap idea. I don’t know how to cure your gangrene, but I’m still sure you shouldn’t put bear dung on the open wound. (Well I sort of know how to cure it, but I don’t know what the right antibiotics are.)
There’s nothing unusual or bear-dungish about the state government setting the school curriculum. The UK government sets the National Curriculum for primary and secondary schools in great detail. Great detail. I would gladly exchange all that detail for a simple statement similar to the Florida one.
The UK National Curriculum is an example of micro-managing. The Florida law is the opposite of micro-managing, actually. It is setting a broad principle to be followed. That’s the thing that stands right out for me. Why not take them up on the commitment to truth in education and see if we can hold them to it? It would mean engaging with Jeb Bush, but is that so terrible? Isn’t pluralism about dealing with what others put forward in return for them dealing with what you put forward?
It’s not a commitment to truth in education, it’s a commitment to forbidding the teaching of “revisionist” history, which, as I said, is tantamount to forbidding history, period. They might as well forbid the teaching of analytic philosophy. Maybe they will soon.
See for instance Ralph Luker at Cliopatria:
“Taken seriously, the law would ban all history from the classroom. The use of the term “revisionist history” by politicians and, alas even some academics, has become a signal of demagoguery. I’d go further than NYU’s Zimmerman does. If Jeb Bush thinks that what was taught as history in Florida between 1861 and 1865 is the same objective history he’s willing to tolerate today, he’s just whistling dixie.”
You say
‘It’s not a commitment to truth in education, it’s a commitment to forbidding the teaching of “revisionist” history, which, as I said, is tantamount to forbidding history, period.’
But that’s unfair. If you take the actual language of the law, it says,
“The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth.”
That is much more of a commitment to truth in education than it is a commitment to banning revisionist history. In fact it does not ban “revisionist history” at all. You could say it bans “revisionist…viewpoints of relative truth”, but that’s not the same thing at all. Now I have already said I think use of the word “revisionist” is wrong in there, but it is simply not true to say that the law “bans revisionist history”.
One could go further and interpret the law in a way that could improve the teaching of history in Florida significantly.
What about, as a tactic, pushing for interpretations of the law that would facilitate an honest communication of facts and an honest discussion of their significance? That could also lead to the law being changed but it wouldn’t mean a head-on confrontation. And there’s no reason for anyone to get hurt that way, either, except the twat who insists that Aristotle stole his ideas from a library that wasn’t built until after he died.
Once the focus is on truth, things are more likely to get better than worse. We haven’t seen a focus on truth on education recently. This law at least says it does that. Take it at its word and try it out.
Maybe you’re not aware that the word “revisionist” has a history? Note what Ralph says. It’s a kind of code. It tends to mean something like “not patriotic enough” or “not flattering enough to national self-esteem” or “too concerned with little things like slavery”. It’s not a harmless or innocent word, especially not coming from a state legislature.
I recognize that. And I recognize that the Florida law is a very flawed instrument, but I think there is an excellent intention there. I wouldn’t rule out there being some less than excellent intentions lurking there, as well, and that is likely where the word “revisionist” came from.
I’m sure many of those supporting and working for that law were primarily concerned with ridding the world of insufficiently patriotic views of US history. But clearly there is real concern about the relativist disavowal of truth. And I think that is the point to join them at; that is where we can say, “OK, gimme some truth now and I’ll give you some”. No fudge, true facts, some disputed facts, what are the most likely explanations for them, and what are we going to make of those? “A frank and robust exchange.” :) Let the patriots speak, let the anti-patriots speak and let regular people speak. But we are not going to treat myth as fact and one of our goals will be to make sure the kids – all of them – come out of it feeling proud to be who they are.
Most of the Republicans I knew when I was growing up were decent folks, you could talk to them, they would listen to reason, very much like the Democrats that way. They’re not the ones who are beyond the pale on this issue. The know-nothing relativists are the ‘enemy’ we can gang up on here, even though they can surely be decent people in other circumstances on other topics, just like the Republicans.
I’m entirely pleased at the idea of a topic that brings the decent left and the decent right together. It’ll do us all some good to do that.
The ‘relativist disavowal of truth’ is not a matter for the police.
If relativist disavowal of truth is injected into the school curriculum against the wishes and better judgment of those to whom the society has delegated the responsibility for deciding those things then it could become a matter for the police.
If your local school brought David Irving in to give a series of talks about World War II would you want the school board to enforce its policies via the police if necessary?
(And of course those same police should protect his right to address an audience in another venue provided those responsible for the venue wished him to.)
Via the police? No. Via other mechanisms.
There is some overlap here (I think) with that protracted discussion (via posts) with Norm, and Eve, and Jonathan. I still to this day disagree with all three of them that falsification of historical evidence is protected free speech; but I also don’t think it’s a police matter. I think it should be stopped, but by other historians (and the hiring and publication decisions that flow from that), not by legislators and not by cops.
Same with Ward Churchill. It was a faculty committee that investigated his falsifications, not a police team.
It’s not Churchill’s falsifications that are at issue but whether a school administrator or teacher or anyone else with the power to put him in front of school children should be allowed to get away with doing so.
Surely you would agree that those persisting with such intentions should be carted away by the police if they refused to leave any other way.
But more central is whether a state legislature should be able to set a school curriculum directly, i.e. via specific legislation. Ideally, no. But a broad general rule like “relativist disavowal of truth” will not be taught is OK by me if necessary. Ideally, sufficient attention to education policy should be given day to day so that things don’t reach such a ridiculous situation. But given that they have, I’m willing to accept legislative intervention. But, again, I admit it is flawed and should be corrected though this can be done via engagement, which would be good in itself.
I think falsification of historical evidence is protected free speech, every bit as much as relativist disavowal of truth, but I most definitely do not want either of them in my children’s classrooms and am willing to fight to keep them out of there, preferably through my delegated representatives on such matters – the police.
I am curious to know the history of the Florida legislation. How did the effort to pass that law get started? What examples of bad practice came up? What other solutions were considered or tried? The absolutely amazing thing is that I have not been able to find a word of such reportage via Google. Perhaps my googling skills have failed me.
No. This is my point. There is all sorts of tendentious, distorted history in the US as elsewhere, but it is only a certain kind of history that gets attacked for being “revisionist”.
I mean, for christ’s sake, Thucydides’s history was a revision of Herodotus’s history; should it have been outlawed? I don’t think so!
Furthermore: history doesn’t actually mean (in origin at least) ‘narrative of the past’, it means ‘inquiry’. It’s hard to have inquiry without revisionism.
What the law actually says is
“The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth.”
“shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth.”
That simply does not say there is only one acceptable interpretation of events. But it does suggest that not just any old interpretation will be accepted. That has to be good news. The bad news, of course, is that you don’t trust the people you expect to be deciding what is acceptable.
What I don’t understand is why everyone else here sees that as a glass half empty? Or completely empty? Or full of poison? I see it as one half full.
There has been a very serious and growing problem in the teaching of history in US public schools. That problem has been acknowledged and is being dealt with. Surely that should be seen as a starting point, not as something to be opposed, and — given the popular support I imagine it will have — certainly not something to be ridiculed.
Juan, I’ve explained why, and so have the historians I’ve pointed you to. There is simply no such thing as non-revisionist history. It’s a unicorn. It don’t exist.
And because ‘revisionist’ is code, the law does (in code) say there is only one acceptable interpretation of events. It then goes on to explain what that interpretation is.
(The main problem with the teaching of history in most US public schools is just that it isn’t taught at all.)
“There is simply no such thing as non-revisionist history.”
I have made it clear that I agree with this.
“the law does (in code) say there is only one acceptable interpretation of events”
You haven’t made a case for that. I think it is unfair to make that assumption.
“It then goes on to explain what that interpretation is.”
Ah, well, maybe this is where the problem is.
Do you think the history of the US was not the history of “the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence”?
If you think that assertion is false, then that is something very different that I thought you were thinking.
Of course that was not the only thing going on, but that was the main thing going on, for goodness sake!
If you don’t think that was the main act then that may explain why you are so focused on “revisionist” and ignoring the other “r” word.
Presumably you welcome at least the gesture of a clear political rejection of “postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth”. Or do you really see nothing good in that law at all?
“but that was the main thing going on, for goodness sake!”
Oh really? Did slaves think so, do you suppose? Or (yes, I know it’s predictable) Native Americans? And is it up to the Florida legislature to decide that?
I really see nothing good in that law at all. I’ve already said that I don’t think there should be a clear political rejection of “postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth”, not in the sense of one having the power of law.
Let’s agree to disagree on this; we’re just going in circles.
Just my two penn’orth, but I’d say there was a fairly fundamental contradiction between “the creation of a new nation” and “the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence” — since ‘nations’ are by definition exclusionary entities, before we even get into those nasty ‘what happened to the Indians?’-type questions…
And of course, the commonplace, everyday antonym of ‘relative truth’ is ‘absolute truth’, which I suspect is not that far from the forefront of the lawmakers’ minds, our pious hopes notwithstanding. So, altogether, a Bad Thing, and a licence for vexatious litigation [such a juicy phrase, that, I love to slip it in…]
I’m sorry if I appear stubborn and boring, OB, but I’m having a hard time finding the logic in your responses.
It seems simply unreflective to insist that the main thing going on in US history was not the creation of a new nation and to respond with “did slaves or Native Americans think so” seems nonsensical. That suggests the European settlers went there to kill Native Americans and create a place for the slaves they were bringing from Africa.
Further, you say you don’t want a state legislature making education policy but ignore the fact that governments all over the world set education policy. And you complain that the law is “micro-managing” but are unresponsive to the fact that the central assertions of the law — “US history is knowable and teachable” and is about “the creation of a new nation” — are not details but rather set out a broad approach to the teaching of history, which is what policy is meant to do.
I can see that you are hostile to the Florida law. I am not so much trying to convince you to give it a chance (though that is part of it) as I am trying to gauge the extent of your hostility to it, locate that in the aspects of the law and your thinking, and understand what is behind it.
One reason I’m interested in this is that the law attacks “postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth” in favour ov a view of history as something that is “knowable and teachable”, and these sentiments seem to be in agreement with the point of view expressed in Why Truth Matters.
Another reason I’m interested is that the law calls for US history to be defined as “the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence”, which I think provides quite a good framework for study and I find it difficult to understand why someone concerned with education policy in the United States would disagree with that.
An interesting observation by Dave about the ‘contradiction between “the creation of a new nation” and “the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence”‘. That could provide quite a fruitful dialectic in the Florida schools, and I think will do if teachers and public intellectuals engage with the spirt of the new law.
It turns out that the line about “shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth” did not make it into the new Florida law in the end.
Under the heading,
1003.42 Required instruction.—
it says,
(f) The history of the United States, including the period of discovery, early colonies, the War for Independence, the Civil War, the expansion of the United States to its present boundaries, the world wars, and the civil rights movement to the present. American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.
The LA Times now has a correction up noting that Zimmerman’s article got it wrong. He wrote his article after that bit was removed but he based the article on the earlier draft.
Too bad. “Postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth” may not be very clear technically but everybody knows what is meant, and I think those “viewpoints” deserved a good kick in the ass.
But David Davisson, who brought this new information to my attention wouldn’t agree. He is certainly better at digging out Florida info than I am though.
So you say there’s no such thing as “non-revisionist history”. But then, after prodding, you vaguely concede that there’s such a thing as “non-tendentious narrative of the past”. If you’re saying that such a phrase would work better in a law, fine. But in that case, why wouldn’t you admit it’s only a matter of legal language?
If there’s a rhinoceros in the room, and a lawyer called it a unicorn, would you conclude it doesn’t exist?
What do you mean “only”?
You can’t think that the wording of legislation doesn’t matter. Can you?
Btw you do realize this discussion is nearly 8 years old, right?