The Blue Monkey Review

Several readers of my recent postings have asked where my romance with Helen Fisher is going. I’m not sure if they felt concern that I might have romantic longings for someone I’ve never met and whose picture I’ve only seen three times. But, we all know there is no accounting for the crazy twists and turns of love. Or, I don’t think that you can account for them. Maybe Helen thinks you can. Anyway, I think it will relieve you to learn that my “thing” for Helen Fisher seems to have faded away. On the other hand, as is often the case in romantic entanglements, I find myself drawn in another direction, toward another intellectual obsession. That’s right. I’m rebounding. There’s someone else.

After writing about romantic love for two weeks I thought I’d make an easy transition by writing this week about mental health and its apparent disappearance in modern times. As I was perusing the Psychology section at my local Barnes and Noble, looking for George Beard, American Nervousness (no luck) or even Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (ditto) I happened upon a book whose title proved irresistible. The book is Against Love: A Polemic (New York: Pantheon, 2003) by Laura Kipnis. I opened to the first chapter, whose first line is, “Will all the adulterers in the room please stand up.” (11) This, I knew, was a book that people would either love or hate. And right there I found myself falling for Laura. (I hope she doesn’t mind my first-naming her—I feel I already know her so well.)Download file

Against Love is a short book, but it is not slight in any other way. Although Laura writes with wit and verve, the work demands more of the reader than Why We Love. It deals with concepts that many readers won’t get right away unless they come to the book with some academic background. Laura references Marx, Freud, Weber and other big thinkers, and she knows the work of these writers (and many more) well enough to weave them into the pattern of her argument. If use of terms like “liberal democracy” and “superego” don’t frighten you (or slow you down), then you will enjoy the ride that Laura offers.

Or you will hate it. The reference to Marx above should have tipped you off. This book deals with bad things, like capitalism. Or, specifically, she digs into the consumer-driven model of capitalism that we all share in common these days. We are told by self-help writers and radio hosts that love requires attention, self-sacrifice, compromise, communication—in other words, work! But wait a minute, isn’t love supposed to be, you know, fun? Nothing, Laura writes on page 26, “in the historical or anthropological record indicates that our amorous predecessors were ‘working’ on their relationships.” Just as I pointed out during the last two weeks, Laura makes clear that only “relatively recently was marriage the expected venue for Eros or romantic love” and that the “presumptive object” would more likely have been someone else’s spouse than your own.

As I’ve pointed out before, during the 19th century middle class courtship became a romantic love boot camp. These courtships went on for years, usually, and during that time the couple had to maintain some sexual self-control while they were given more and more privacy to discuss their futures together. The situation gave itself over to longing and its epiphenomena, idealization. But romance made good sense, too. Marriages based on property lost out to sentiment as individuals became more mobile and wealth became more fluid. [Please note, then as now, people tend to marry within similar class and income lines (broadly conceived).] Passionate love probably became more necessary to separate young women from their mothers and the network of close female friends and family members. And as Karen Lystra has shown in Searching the Heart (New York: Oxford, 1989), middle-class women depended on their husbands for many decades after the nuptials. Putting their beaux through long, chaste courtships with sustained romantic avowals gave young women a chance to find out who could go the distance. It was during the 19th century, then, that love and marriage started going together like horse and carriage.

By the 20th century, at least by the 1920s, love and marriage had begun to go together like popular music, Ivory soap, Listerine, and RCA Victrolas—if you wanted to be a vital human being, you’d better have all of them. Love became one of the most important motivators that advertisers used to convince consumers to part with their hard earned cash. If you would like a more academic (though still well-written) treatment of this process, I recommend Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley: U California, 1997). Dating and romance both became associated with leisure (or luxury) commodities during the 1920s and 1930s, according to Illouz, and luxury cost then what it costs now--too much. The connection between romance and luxury, however, meant that love could turn into an advertising campaign for everything from dining to travel.

Laura takes this further than Eva, I think. Love has become the gateway to marriage where love can almost certainly not survive. If you are considering purchasing this book, I think you can justify the cost (whatever that is) just for the section that responds to the question, “What can’t you do because you’re in a couple?” It runs from pages 84 to 92. Marriage and other forms of monogamous coupledom inevitably serve up large helpings of boredom (at best) if not tension, anger, frustration, and contempt. No wonder Dr. Laura and Dr. Phil tell you to work. If you don’t work, if you don’t put all of your efforts into maintaining your relationship, then you are going to end up not liking your partner and probably not thinking well of yourself. Forget about love—you will feel lucky to have mutual respect and contentment. Laura calls adultery a “de facto referendum on the sustainability of monogamy.” (27)

So why are we so likely to marry? Laura provides a nice discussion of this, noting the “goons” that enforce our conformity to marriage. In short, though, love has been mobilized by liberal democracy to manufacture conformity to the social system and to consumer capitalism. Marriage keeps us deeply dissatisfied, ever ready to go shopping or to go into therapy. You may be reluctant to accept Laura’s cynicism or her theory of social control embedded in marriage. But you have to admit, that at every step of the journey from lovesmack to marriage therapy, someone stands to make a buck. Marriage, like capitalism, can be said to “work” as a set of natural relationships only if you ignore all of the effort put into maintaining it in full vigor. The hidden hand of the world economy keeps fixing fair prices only with the aid of GATT and the World Bank and U.S. hegemony. Marriage needs marital therapy and divorce just as much as the free market needs marketing.

Note: I meant to send this into the blogosphere before now, but, fortunately, I had a cup of tea and realized I’d better append at least another couple of paragraphs. The above might be taken as a mild indication that I am hostile to marriage, and even hostile to love. That isn’t quite true. Few things in life match the feeling of expansiveness and excitement that come with romantic passion (but, you shouldn’t need me to tell you that). It doesn’t need my recommendation or endorsement. In fact, the irresistibility of romance makes it the perfect shill for many things that are highly resistible, like cheap cologne, expensive restaurants, and reality TV.

And, whether we like it or not, love also guarantees that people will continue to marry. I think that’s fine, and that love, even romantic love, can be part of the package. But no one should expect it to be a permanent fixture. Partnerships of all kinds can make sense. Our divorce rate tells us that many marriages don’t work out, and non-marriage unions are even more likely to fail. Still, when a couple can share friendship, mutual support, and even intimacy, then you would have to consider that a success. If, after many years, the couple splits, that does not mean the entire relationship was flawed or wrong or anything of the sort.

Love and marriage may flow into each other, but they are different experiences. For almost all of us, marriage (or some kind of committed couplehood) will take up far more of our lives than romantic passion. If you try to reverse that equation, then you are playing with forces you do not want to tempt.

Posted by at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

After last week’s extended rant on love and love-addiction, I thought I had finished, that I had said the last word on love, or at least my last word, or at least my last word for now. But in the week that has followed, the subject kept intruding into my life in unexpected ways. For one, over the weekend I finished reading a short novel by Colombian writer Alvaro Mutis, La Ultima Escala del Tramp Steamer (Espasa, 1999). Although the story doesn’t begin as a novel about passionate love, it turns into one. Mutis concludes that “Los hombres…cambian tan poco, siguen siendo tan ellos mismos, que sólo existe una historia de amor desde el principio de los tiempos, repetida al infinito sin perder su terrible sencillez, su irremediable desventura.” [Partial and poor translation: “…there exists only one love story from the beginning of time that through infinite repetition never loses its terrible simplicity [or “innocence”]…” But other forces also worked on me, drawing me back to the topic of romantic love and its “irremediable desventura.”

I know this blog is not all about me, that it does not exist as an excuse for me to share the sturm und drang of my life. But I have to admit, the main reason I couldn’t let this topic alone was due to one person—Helen Fisher. After my review last week of her article (and her writing and her views) in Time, I could let go of her. But she kept intruding into my life. I noticed her new book at Barnes and Noble early in the week, placed with on a table with a pink color motif for Valentine’s Day. It lay among books of love poems and books on seduction. This didn’t bother me too much. I didn’t even pick it up—just noted where I could find it if I needed it. But the next day, as I labored on the stationary bike at my gym, I looked into the TV screen and there she was! Helen Fisher sitting cara a cara with Diane Sawyer, recounting the results of her experiments just as she had done for Time readers, giving her insights into the love rituals of post-modern Americans, unwrapping the deeper meanings of Sex in the City. Actually, I don’t know for sure that she did all this. The TV volume was set uncharacteristically low, so all I could hear was the occasional word like “… love… men… brain… money… sex… power….” So I had to interpolate most of the dialogue:

Diane: Helen, if love is so much a part of our human nature, how do you explain the most awkward and unsavory part of it?
Helen: You mean, men?
Diane: Right. I mean, how can you include “brain” and “male” in the same sentence. Aren’t those terms contradictory?
Helen: Well, true, some computer programs won’t let you do that. But look, Diane, men can’t help the way they act. It results from millions of years of evolution. They can only think about one thing.
Diane: Money?
Helen: Sex.
Diane: Doesn’t that make you wonder how they could ever have gained a monopoly of power in society?
Helen: Diane, I can’t sleep most nights wondering about that.

Finally, yesterday, as I sat in Barnes and Noble piecing together a lecture on physical geography, one of the managers walked over to show me a book she thought might interest me. That book was written by Helen Fisher! I couldn’t get the woman out of my life—she had even invaded my ruminations on plate tectonics. I had to face the question: Am I falling in love with Helen Fisher?

Okay, maybe love states the problem a little bit too strongly. Maybe I had some other emotion, maybe even lots of other emotions, but because I’ve spent so much time lately thinking about romance, and because Professor Fisher is quite an attractive woman, I got confused and instead of thinking, “Helen Fisher and I both do a lot of thinking about love” turned it into “I think I’m in love with Helen Fisher.” But I had to know more. So, today, I spent some time this morning reading parts of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: Holt, 2004).

In spite of my doubts about some of her ideas, I must admit that Fisher writes well. Most readers will find the book accessible and interesting. If you managed to avoid acquiring a fundamentalist prejudice against evolutionary theory, you might also find her explanation of the evolution of love satisfying and perhaps even seductive. For every major change in the social organization of our pre-human ancestors, some change had to take place in the relationship between male and female proto-us. Fisher notes that early hominids probably raised children in about four years, so needed couples to last as couples through infancy. Even today, divorce tends to spike about four years into marriage. Later in pre-history, when the species du jour had longer lifespan, childhood lasted longer. So, courtship became more elaborate along with the need for longer-lasting partnerships.

Yes, I admit, I found Fisher’s ideas more and more interesting as I read. She had an evolutionary explanation for everything about romance, even for the volatility of romantic affection. “I think love’s capriciousness is part of nature’s plan,” Fisher tells us on page 151. If men and women constantly fell in with other, newer partners, even while their young were still, uh, young, then that made possible new supplies of viable seed for women (with a possible doubling up on resources if the old lover could be kept in the dark) and new wombs and the possibility of many more progeny for men. She notes that a contemporary study using DNA testing showed that 10% of children were not the offspring of their legal fathers.

And Helen Fisher even goes into the dark emotions that come after love. She conducted brain scans on people who had been dumped to match the scans she had done on those still smitten (in one case, one of her subjects was scanned both for both parts of the experiment). Post-love emotions, like love itself, has their evolutionary backstory. She writes about abandonment rage (a means of motivating the abandoned partner to fight for resources for children) and depression (a means of attracting aid from other members of the pack/tribe/community).

Throughout her book Helen Fisher uses literary references, particularly poetry, to illustrate the feelings she discusses. Yet literature never exactly becomes a source. Even when she cites a series of poetic treatments of lost love, from Japan and the Inuit and other places, these references support her conclusions. She is not drawing conclusions from the literature. Instead, Fisher uses literature as a means of dressing up conclusions based on real science, on anthropology and on brain chemistry. And, in spite of my growing feelings of longing for Helen Fisher, and the lack of objectivity that these feelings encourage, I’m forced to conclude that Helen is an emotional realist. In other words, the emotions we talk about are entities that exist within our bodies. We share much the same feelings because we all have the same anatomy and physiology and biochemistry.

To this version of emotional realism I’d like to offer Occam’s Razor (Sounds kinky, no? Well, in fact, no, it isn’t.) Entia non multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Do not mulpliy entities (or explanations) beyond necessity. In Why We Love we have a huge apparatus of brain chemistry standing as surety for the emotions under discussion, and anthropological discovery and theory as a way of making sense of the chemistry. In terms of logical argument, the fact that it all makes sense (it all fits) does not weigh very heavily in favor of these arguments—not just a multiplication of entities, but entities raised to the second power.

In his 1893 textbook, Psychology: Briefer Course (published by Helen’s publisher, Henry Holt), William James proposed that emotion had two parts, the exciting cause (the object in the world that inspired our feelings) and physiological changes such as dizziness, panic, nausea, nervousness—in other words, in love). Emotion was one way of explaining those feelings. In other words (to put the idea into a slightly different, more recent formulation), emotion is the story, or narrative, that we create to explain our feelings. And for all emotions, and most spectacularly for love, we have a narrative tradition that would be hard to ignore.

So, how do I explain love? I don’t think I need to. No one who takes evolution seriously (a minority, alas) needs to pause even a moment looking for an explanation of sexual desire. More than all of the DNA conspiracy theories that has us seeking alpha partners and spreading seed or gathering male labor by hook or by crook, sexual desire is the not so hidden hand that has made physical self interest a dynamo for the common good. We copulate, we procreate, the species thrives. Love and every other emotion that we connect to it are the froth of nature’s wildness. But if it is froth, it is wonderful froth. But I think that stepping back and admitting that romantic love is not an entity with a life of its own allows us to recognize that love, even romantic love, takes its likeness and continuity from the stories we tell about it. And as stories change, so does that experience. We don’t have the same love as Don Quixote, or Werther, or Sappho. And while I’m inclined to agree with Alvaro Mutis, that we have the same story of love repeated infinitely (but also with infinite, important, variations), the story changes over time. You cannot take love out of history by pushing it into pre-history.

Posted by at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I had planned to write about love for more than a week. This week, though, as I thought more about the project the Time and the New Yorker that arrived in my mailbox both had texts that seemed valuable. In the end, my ruminations refer most often to the articles in Time. But, my impetus for giving this topic some attention, particularly the connection between love and addiction, goes back a couple of months when a therapist, in fact my therapist, suggested that I look at a book entitled Addicted to Love. I never managed to lay hands on that book, but I have done quite a bit of other reading on afflicted love and even more thinking about it. No, I won't be sharing any of my private life with the world community. I'm sure that's a relief to everyone.

This week’s (January 19) Time magazine claims to be a special issue on “How Your Love Life Keeps you Healthy.” The cover, of a happy couple cuddling and presumably enjoying the health benefits of intimacy, should have moved me to throw it away without opening it. If a good love life equals health, I should have revised my will long before now. But, no, the cover misled. The magazine contains a series of articles on the theme of romantic love and sex, and also one on marriage though I’m not sure what the connection was. In the lead essay by Jeffrey Kluger, “The Power of Love,” offers up the leading question of whether love is more than “hot wiring us for sex” with all its obvious benefits for the human species [Obviously not a slave to the Freshman composition principle of stating topics as theses, that is points to be supported or proven, Kluger has a scattershot paragraph of questions and then goes on to pepper us with more questions—all of these are presumably answered in the articles that follow.] As the cover claimed, so too some of the articles claim that love has all kinds of health benefits. Like most Time journalism, this series has a homogenized taste. No spice of conflicting viewpoints disturbs the reader. Love originates in the brain, we learn, and has clear, chemical explanations (dopamine, oxytocin—no, not the Rush Limbaugh drug). Passion depends on a hormone cocktail, and if you don’t have all the ingredients modern pharmacology can probably supply your deficit. If Time can be described as a liberal magazine, it must depend on the ability of its writers to leave the reader feeling slightly optimistic and little else.

For all their interesting points, though, these articles miss out on the messiness of love. If love somehow leads to better mental and physical health then I think we have a problem explaining the existence of popular music (Country music? Fuhgetaboutit!) Yet when psychologists or others in the helping professions talk about the dark side of love they quickly fall back on a concept like addiction or something that makes lovesickness into a psychopathology (the kind that get into the DSM—everyone knows that love makes you crazy, but that is true whether it goes well or badly). Most people living in the western world (and maybe the rest of the world, for all I know) considered romantic love an outlaw passion until the 19th century. Then, a narrow group known as the middle class began the process of regularizing romance until it became both the most admired (or at least the most discussed) of all emotional states and the only legitimate basis for a commitment for life. So, amazingly, the very social class that imposed its economic system on pretty much all of the planet, created the belief that in order to initiate a lifetime of committed cooperation and childrearing one had to experience the most volatile passion ever to spring fully armed from the human psyche. But, if romance has undergone regularization (embourgeoisment), it has also acquired its bureaucracy of therapists and twelve-step programs to help the lovesick. The scientific investigations of love explored in Time can stand as representatives of our scientific efforts to understand love. In general, these ignore the cultural (or, really, historical) context of romantic love and so lose the chance to have any valuable insights into passion.

One of the Time articles is drawn from the book Why We Love by Rutgers anthropologist Helen Fisher. She and her associates scanned the brains of people passionately in love as they gazed at pictures of their beloved, and so identified areas of the brain most active during those moments of visual stimulation. Since this is an article in a news magazine and not a journal, it contained none of the explanations about the background literature and how the experiments would meet the standards for the publication of data. That is certainly something to be thankful for, but it does leave dangling the question of whether the group who were tested can represent all of humanity. A study in 1975 claimed that only 5 to 10% of those studied had experienced the full range of what both the investigators and the subjects themselves considered to be romantic love. Different wiring for different monkey-boys and –girls? If so, then what we call love might actually be distinct physical entities from one individual to the next. I’m inclined to doubt this, falling back as I often (and lamely) do on individual variation. Probably we all have a little of everything that everyone else has, whether that is dopamine or machismo or appreciation for hip hop. But it’s also clear that individuals vary so greatly that one person’s crush is another person’s ticket to a twelve-step program

Love addiction? Yes, that seems to have a lot of currency lately. Helen Fisher has something to say about it, though it is unfortunate for her that this particular pronouncement made it into the popular media. Her brain scans identified chemical activity in the brain’s reward system as her subjects mooned over photos of their love objects, “including areas of the septum and a brain region that becomes active when people eat chocolate. Chocolate can be addictive. I maintain that romantic love is addictive too.” I want to Professor Fisher's Freshman comp instructor and lower his salary. Those statements seem to claim that love originates in an area of the brain that is vulnerable to physical addiction. In fact, though, every statement there simply stands on its own and is joined by nothing more than what David Hume would call propinquity—well, hell, anyone would call it that. Brain chemistry. Chocolate. Love. Addiction. You can put all that together into one dish, but you have to do the mixing yourself. Nothing in Fisher’s evidence connects them.

Wagging a finger at Helen Fisher won’t make the love and addiction connection go away. Barnes and Noble either stocks or can obtain three books with the title Addicted to Love. Zev Wanderer and Tracy Cabot, [ Letting Go (NY: Dell, 1987)] state near the beginning of their guide for overcoming lost love that “Being ‘in love’ is being addicted to the loved one.” (34) You have the same person around all the time, you get used to him or her, you start building your life around this person. Well, that doesn’t exactly sound like addiction to me. And, note that they put quotation marks around “in love,” making that into something that isn’t quite real, and not around “addicted.” You would think they would want to say that the being in love, something that many of us know first hand, is like being in an addiction, a place that presumably only a tiny minority inhabits. For Zev and Tracy, the addiction is real—they have long lists beginning on page 27 that allow you to see if your post-love trauma has left you obsessive, compulsive, depressed, phobic or what.

Okay, I’m playing ingénue here. I get their point! That person who shares a part of your self disappears, you are gonna suffer, baby! Elizabeth Kuster, in Exorcising Your Ex (NY: Fireside, 1996), opens one chapter by saying that if you have just split up you are probably thinking about your ex a couple of times every second. Part one of this useful guide to and advice manual for post-break-up life has the subtitle, “Welcome to Hell.”

Yet equating love with addiction doesn’t make much sense. Stanton Peele, a New Jersey psychotherapist who had co-authored a 1976 book entitled Love and Addiction offered a nicely balanced consideration of using the addiction model to discuss love in a 1988 essay contained in a collection entitled The Psychology of Love [Robert J. Sternberg and Michael L. Barnes, eds, (New Haven: Yale, 1988)] . He offers a set of opposing ideal states, such as love as idealization versus love as a “helping relationship.” No one should be expected to fall entirely on one end of any of these ranges. We would all be in-between on most of these, and have a mix in where our extremes lay. A nice likert scale test might even be able to test this. Yet Peele at least allows us to recognize that lots of love might not look like addiction at all.

From thinking of love as addiction, it makes one a bit giddy to suddenly turn to the view of Art Aron as revealed in the Time piece written by Fisher. Aron, a colleague of Fisher’s, put forward a hypothesis that “romantic love was not an emotion but a motivation system designed to enable suitors to build and maintain an intimate relationship with a preferred mating partner.” At first glance this seemed perfectly correct. Romantic love hooks you up with someone you like. That’s clear. But, once more, we would have to bid a tearful farewell to Country music. Any serious study of some of the standard authorities in the field, such as Days of Our Lives, Dallas, or even Friends would have to lead the researcher to conclude that romantic love is a motivation system designed to leave us depressed, bitter, vengeful, and generally messed up.

Or, perhaps, we could consult the works of Shakespeare. Peele cites Shakespeare, recognizing that the Bard knew more about love than reading only Romeo and Juliet would reveal. The same crazy scheme suggested by Friar Lawrence (“Juliet, you pretend you are dead…”) that leads to a bloodbath actually works in Much Ado About Nothing when Friar Francis suggests it (“Hero, you pretend you are dead…”). Shakespeare had the full measure of the passion, and worked it through a variety of circumstances and freely used it for tragic and comic effects. It is worth noting that in the comedies people live long enough to make it to the wedding. Or, put another way, comedy happens when love leads to marriage.

For the mixed crowds standing in front of the Globe stage, love must have generally meant madness. Look at Romeo’s contemporary, Don Quixote. At least through book one we know the Knight of the Woeful Countenance is crazy. When he sets out to fall passionately in love with the farm girl Aldonza, that just seals the deal. Or look at Romeo, or Othello who “loved not wisely but too well.” Passion that leapt outside the bounds of social norms meant disaster. Most of Shakespeare’s audience probably assumed love needed to stay out of marriage and family, so those necessary relations could continue to combine property and rear children. The Puritans, who stayed away from the Globe, had already begun to shape an ideal of love growing within marriage. But they did not advocate the romantic excesses of Shakespeare’s passion-sick lovers.

I close with a recommendation of an article in this week’s New Yorker (January 19) by Katha Pollitt. In “Webstalker” (pp. 38-42--unfortunately not online) Pollitt spares neither her ex nor herself in recounting how, after the unnamed lover walked out on her, she used Internet search engines to track his movements and also to track down the many women he had affairs with during their time together. Pollitt is a poet, and clearly knows how to express herself powerfully, but what startles about this article is how dispassionately she seems to write about the break-up and what she calls going “a little crazy.” But the very evenness of her tone reveals for us the depth of Pollitt’s feelings. Love, and lovesickness, are passions. We feel them everywhere in our bodies, and they can take control of our entire lives for months or years or indefinitely. Certainly lovers need help when love ends badly—and to poll popular culture, it ends that way most of the time. Therapy, support groups, friends, alcohol, drugs (prescription and self-prescribed) all may help, and most often more than one is needed. But distorting love from madness to psychopathology only makes sense if you accept the bureaucratized love of psychotherapy.

Posted by at 8:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I've been MIA from blogging for a couple of months. I won't bore anyone who has stumbled upon this site with news about my life. Let's just say I find myself in a period of transition. No telling what lifeform I will resemble when it is over. But, for right now, I am making a new year's resolution to blog and blog consistently. I plan to add one short contribution to the blogosphere every week. If you are out there and read this, add grit to my resolve by sending along your comments. For this first full week of the 2004 I've reflected on history, my vocation (along with teaching) and also the main intellectual preoccupation of my life.

For most scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, history carries a heavy intellectual burden. The context for important issues, and even the ability to understand the issue, depends on knowing that issue over time. The same applies to policy professionals. History, usually meaning “my view of the past,” either dictates or (more frequently) justifies policy decisions. Daniel P. Moynihan’s controversial investigation of slavery and the African American family became the foundation for programs directed at mitigating poverty and family dysfunction among African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. The sweeping policy decision at the heart of the Cold War, commonly known as “containment,” emerged from the post-World War II understanding of the rise of Nazism and the success of German expansionism during the 1930s. For almost all important social and political issues, a view of the past is essential, and the most powerful analyses of issues requires a historical framework that reflects all the complexity and ambiguity of the past.
Yet, for most people, it seems that their concept of history settled into a fixed evaluation (usually a negative one) based on a class taken long before college. Every time someone asks me what I teach, I brace for their inevitable reaction. They usually tell me something like, “I was horrible at history,” or, “I hated history.” Since these tend to be new acquaintances I have no knowledge of their lives, but I am probably correct 90% of the time when I respond in turn, “You had the wrong history teacher.” Probably they remembered dreary tests that depended on matching a date and a name, defining a term such as “indentured servant,” and recalling the three points the teacher or the text had made about the causes of the Civil War. History meant memorizing details that held no value or interest and probably no meaning. But even those who liked history probably had pretty much the same experience. For them, the past sounded like a really good story, or string of stories, with colorful characters, interesting plot twists, and heroic resolutions.
Two recent editions of History Matters, the monthly magazine of the National Council for History Education, provided essays dealing with the uses of history [see volume 16 issues for October and December 2003]. These articles noted the importance of particular approaches to history in the classroom, but taken together they provide some direction for thinking generally about the utility of history. History provides us with common knowledge of some important parts of our common life, it provides a vital method of critical inquiry, and it gives us the opportunity to learn from the example of others.
For Paul A. Gagnon, an emeritus professor from the University of Massachusetts, history education (along with social studies education) should “nourish citizens’ political judgment.” It can do this by providing a common vocabulary for understanding American and world democracy: “…citizens of whatever class, race, age, gender, or religion need a common body of knowledge that givens them the power to talk to each other as equals on their society’s priorities, each others’ experiences in it, and the political choices it confronts.” History is helpful when we have some of the same knowledge about it.
So, to be good citizens, what do we need to know? Professor Gagnon provides two categories of historical knowledge (and a third that is more contemporary social studies), one of which I will mention here and the third I will save for later. First, we should all understand the fundamental founding principles of American democracy. [This seems self-evident (a no brainer), but I should mention that my university, for all its virtues, required for many years an “American Studies” course that made no mention in its core learning objectives of democracy, let alone any of the basic documents and practices of American democracy.] Gagnon mentions, specifically, the practices of assembly and protest, the controversy over British Acts of parliament, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but also the arguments of Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the ratification of the Constitution. I would add that the controversy over slavery also redefined democracy, and that the issues of citizenship raised in the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution must be part of any individual’s intellectual toolkit for democracy.
In his short essay on “American History in American Classrooms” Zachary Osofsky, who is studying at Stanford to become a teacher, discusses the conflicting roles of history and social studies. For Osofsky, history provides a tool for understanding the world. Where Gagnon stresses content, Osofsky stresses process. The work of historical analysis is not adequately reflected in simplified definitions that often appear in the work of professional historians (who should know better), such as Carl Becker’s: History is “the memory of things said and done.” Osofsky writes, “historical memory is a complex process of inquiry that requires the historical investigator to pose questions, to marshal, weigh, analyze, and interpret evidence, and to articulate and defend an argument based upon the relationship between the questions posed and the evidence gathered.”
History, then, is useful as a particular type of thinking that problematizes the past. Once we identify an issue in the past, historical thinking demands understanding the relevant context of an issue, identification and critical evaluation of evidence, and development of explanations. While it is hard to ignore the allure of historical narratives, these almost inevitably hide the critical thinking and evaluations that made the narrative possible.
In addition to shared knowledge and habits of thought, history also provides “true stories,” to use Gagnon’s term, that show how people have fought for democracy and turned ideas into practice. From this point of view, history becomes important in providing examples that can, by analogy, be applied to problems today. In 1392 Peter Paul Vergerius wrote to Ubertinus of Padua explaining the value of what he called the liberal arts, whose “purpose is to teach men the secret of true freedom.” History, according to Vergerius, “gives us the concrete examples of the precepts inculcated by Philosophy. The one shows what men should do, the other what men have said and done in the past, and what practical lessons we may draw therefrom for the present day.” An even earlier advocate of the exemplary use of history was Thucydides, writing in the 5th century B.C. “It will be enough for, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other, and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.”
So, here is the policy wonk’s history. If the practice of history demands problematizing the past, exemplary history allows us to face current problems. I admit to some skepticism about this third use of history. Although I think that history must provide an important part of the context for understanding issues that we face today, I always keep in mind the words of Keith Bailor, who taught the world history course I took as a freshman in college. Always be skeptical when someone uses the phrase “lessons of history,” said Keith.Always be skeptical when someone uses the phrase “lessons of history,” said Keith. “History doesn’t have lessons. Historians do.” Lately, some of those historians, including Paul Kennedy and journalist Robert Kaplan, have srtipmined the past to support their views about the current direction of world affairs and to support particular policies. Donald Kagan of Yale University has recently published a history of the Peloponnesian War in which he recruits dear old Thucydides to punish skeptics of our current adventures in empire building. As a practitioner and advocate of holocaust education, I know that it is difficult to avoid implicitly (and not always implicitly, either) invoking the lessons of the holocaust. But, used cautiously, the past can provide abundant examples of human invention and aspiration. Maybe, if studied closely, the past can give us the opportunity to learn humility.

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