IP

Decline and Fall of the History Men -DANIEL JOHNSON

In 1874, the young Friedrich Nietzsche published On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. This "untimely" or "unfashionable" essay might have been directed at the propaganda of the Prussian school of historians, which presented the German Empire, newly unified by Bismarck, as inevitable. But Nietzsche's notion of the "abuse of history" had a very different target. What troubled him was the burden of living in a culture so saturated in the knowledge of the past, so paralysed by its "ironical self-consciousness", that it seemed to him to have been born "grey-haired". Around him he saw the human consequences of the explosion of historical knowledge and education since the Enlightenment. He could not stomach the liberal religion of progress, which had recently enlisted the support of Darwinian evolution: "Never has the view of history soared so high, not even in its own dreams, for now the history of humanity is merely the continuation of the history of animals and plants. Indeed, even in the depths of the ocean the historical universalist discovers the traces of himself in living slime." Nietzsche cannot contain his contempt for the overconfident complacency of his contemporaries. "Overproud European of the nineteenth century, you are stark raving mad! Your [historical] knowledge does not perfect nature, but only kills your own nature. Just measure the wealth of your knowledge against the poverty of your abilities."

Going up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1975, I was fortunate enough to read history at a time when the subject had not yet been hollowed out by the elimination of facts and dates, when a grasp of the broad sweep of British and European history was taken for granted among the educated, and certainly among those who aspired to lead the country. I belonged to the last generation before the abolition of grammar schools, which still placed a premium on wide reading and the acquisition of historical knowledge for its own sake. Within a decade, that kind of education had come to be seen as a privilege of the well-to-do. David Cameron would still have enjoyed such an education at Eton; yet as prime minister he was stumped by a question about what "Magna Carta" might mean. Today, I wonder how much history even those with degrees in the subject are actually expected to have read. The reaction to Michael Gove's new history curriculum suggests that many teachers don't relish the thought of inculcating knowledge rather than "skills".

(...)

Michael Gove, the first minister for a generation to care enough about history to wish to restore it to the privileged place in the nation's intellectual life that it once enjoyed, has encountered bitter opposition, not from philistines and barbarians, but from the historians themselves. Gove's emphasis on testing knowledge rather than "skills" in his proposed new curriculum would once have gained approval from the dons and the schools. Not, however, from their successors. Today, Michael Gove faces a hostile historical profession alone but for a few trusty defenders. Like Macaulay's Horatius, he stands defiant on the bridge: 

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers,

And the temples of his Gods?