At a one-day conference about public ceremonies in the Fifth Republic that I recently attended, Xavier Darcos gave a short presentation about France Mémoire, the organization that he is the director of. With the help of government funding, Darcos explained that France Mémoire is meant to depoliticize memory in France by promoting its most harmless elements (Proust, Pasteur, and Champollion’s deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example) which he claims have come under attack by a force that he jeeringly calls “wokeisme.” He went on to share his horror of a new generation of historians who are no longer interested in French history, but instead interested in a terrible slur that he calls “global history.”
Darcos’ stated goal gets to the heart of modern academia: depoliticize. But what he says after – about the horrors of “wokeisme” – reveals that the project to depoliticize knowledge is, itself, a political battle. On the one side, we have people like Darcos who are wedded to the existing order and are offended by anyone who would question the traditional narrative. This is the right. On the other side, we have a generation of activists who have embraced Howard Zinn’s claim that you can’t be neutral on a moving train. Like Zinn, this is the insurgent left, broadly defined. But this conflict hosts a third, neutral, force, one which is outwardly sympathetic to a generation of activists and endorses their explicit political goals, but who also, in their day-to-day work, silently reinforce the existing power that they claim to be morally against. Like France and Britain during the Spanish Civil War, these neutral liberals are mobilized to defend the right’s existing order against an insurgent left which they claim to morally support. Academic knowledge, history, and memory are not protons that can be examined in a lab, they are all parts of a grand political conflict that can only be ended by a political solution.
The idea for this article first came to me in a class about public history. For two weeks, the professor invited several North Irish historians to discuss how one goes about doing public history in a “conflicting society.” But, as each of them presented what they do at their different universities, museums, and governmental bodies, I was shocked by how simple their answer was: you ignore the conflict.
These historians presented how the people of Northern Ireland have “study fatigue” from decades of inter-communal violence and the subsequent decades of grueling academic research. They claim that the people of Northern Ireland are bored and would rather talk about anything else! Many of these historians have acted upon this perceived desire for depoliticized history by organizing workshops about women, disabled groups, and LGBTQ+ people in Ulster’s history. But these projects are, themselves, part of a broad political program that the liberal academics creating them insist is actually apolitical since human rights are inherent, and women et al. are, indeed, people. Lynn Hunt (Inventing Human Rights, 2007) and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (“Revolutionary rights,” 2014) have already pointed out that human rights are not inherent, but the result of a long struggle that saw an insurgent liberal-left defeat the old regime in a political struggle. It is only after the fact that revolutionary passions have faded that this once liberal left enshrines its struggle with supernatural meaning that serves as the basis for the new, liberal, order that says “here, and not one step further!”
Being a public historian in a “conflicting society” means being a good historian, but not how these North Irish historians imagined it. Michelet, Taine, and de Tocqueville were all public historians of the French Revolution, but that is because they wrote their histories as part of a political project. But these are also great works of history, public or otherwise. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution as a defense of his liberal beliefs against Louis Bonaparte’s authoritarian Second Empire, but it is still a literary masterpiece and indispensable text in the historiography of the French Revolution. The North Irish historians who visited us could not disagree more. They, alongside our French professor, made sure to denounce the various sectarian museums as producing bad history. I’ve been to one of the nationalist museums that they mentioned, the history was not bad at all, just biased. They believe that public history involves working with communities, but also maintaining objective distance. By failing to be objective nationalist museum curators have, by definition, created bad history. They, by contrast, keep their academic knowledge apolitical and are unable to attract much interest as a result. One presenter explicitly commented on the difficulties she faces working at a public institution, there is little interest in what her government organization is doing to begin with, and her problems are compounded by a nationalist community that rejects the legitimacy of the state. One wonders if, despite the biased history, that nationalist museum has difficulties with attention from the community it represents. That historian’s lamentations are probably the product of her inability to accept that she is, regardless of her personal opinions on Northern Ireland, actively participating with one side of the ongoing conflict.
And that’s probably because she wants a job. Jobs in academia are increasingly rare and history and memory do not have a high barrier to entry. De Tocqueville did not need a master’s degree, so finding someone who will pay for your research is a luxury that she would be foolish to ignore. But it is a Faustian bargain, all it requires is participating in the mechanisms of a controversial state. But instead of accepting that reality – that the British government pays the bills –, these historians have mentally had to turn their financial realities into a moral virtue. Therefore, making sense of their own place in North Irish society requires them to deny the influence they have in their own jobs, by claiming to be neutral arbiters and keepers of depoliticized knowledge.
Back at the conference, one of the presenters spoke about the hot memories of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s long repressions. Spanish dating apps have split over who should have won the war (anarchists or communists) and the Spanish right still thinks about the postwar decades with nostalgia. She argued that Spain needs to overcome these political divisions by creating a shared understanding of the past: a depoliticized memory that can work as a common framework to rebuild Spain at the end of history. Perhaps a Spanish Panthéon is needed, they have one in Portugal after all. Despite all the presenter’s knowledge, she misses the key point, that the contested memory is the site of Spain’s political struggles. The left argues about the memory of the civil war as a proxy that they can beat the right with while the right guards its political power by protecting Franco’s legacy. By their very nature, memory and history cannot be depoliticized because they serve political purposes. Marx would point out that it is the battle slogans of the past that we use to wage our current battles, not a collection of interesting facts that we use to impress the teacher.
Treating academic knowledge like a cool collection of facts that we can use to win intellectual arguments is actively harmful. In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, David Cole used Erwin Chemerinsky’s new book to explain, point by point, why constitutional originalism is bullshit. The basic premise, Cole explains, is that judicial activism is legally impossible because judges’ hands are tied; they must interpret the constitution as the founders intended and nothing else. The key flaw in the argument, as Cole points out (and as every historian ought to know), is in the sources that prove “original intent” require interpretation. The core of what originalists argue is that there is no interpretation necessary, all one must do is look at “the Sources” and the founders’ singular intent will be obvious. The trick is in what sources are considered legitimate, but without even knowing to ask the question (as I’ve learned many people don’t know how to do) the question devolves into who knows more “Facts,” something measurable, unlike the political nightmare that is interpretation. It is the opposite for Cass R. Sunstein’s review of George F. DeMartino’s book about the “bloodless science” also known as economics. By pretending to be a science, economists hide their political prescriptions behind a screen of flawed utilitarian philosophy that feigns objectivity. By turning political prescriptions into a “hard science” the political dimensions of the world we live in are denied in favor of the bourgeois status quo.
Part of the way states preserve this status quo is by embracing memory as a way to create “historic justice” rather than just improving our current living conditions. It is no coincidence that the one-day conference was officially organized by the Ministry of Culture and overseen by one of its chief bureaucrats. It is easy to think we understand private memory, individuals and groups making sense of how they got here among themselves (think of that nationalist museum in Northern Ireland). But public memory is messy and subject to outside (read, political) meddling. But why is there outside meddling in the first place? Because private memory is not free from politics either, it is politics! “Meddling” in public history is an expressly political act and whatever side is doing it, does so for its political benefit.
The example of François Mitterrand’s 1981 inauguration ceremony makes this clear. During the conference, we watched a clip of the Fifth Republic’s first socialist president proceed to the Panthéon alone to place two roses on the graves of Jean Jaurès and Jean Moulin, two socialist figures entombed in France’s national memorial. That this common memorial that is home to Napoleonic generals (although not the man himself), résistants, liberal presidents, and even a few socialists and anti-colonial dissidents like Aimé Césaire suggests something that I have long considered, that French national identity is, somehow, “left-wing.” This does not mean that France is the Soviet Union, but rather that French national identity is couched in the language of the political left. The Panthéon was a republican symbol that was heavily contested throughout the nineteenth century, but as the Third Republic inscribed republicanism onto French identities it lost its political salience. Bastille Day, another republican symbol, was celebrated by the Vichy government without a second thought. When the Fifth Republic was eventually established the republic was no longer in question and those political republican symbols were depoliticized in the eyes of the victors who had now established their own, liberal, old regime.
But it’s a sleight of hand, depoliticized ceremonies are still political, it is just that those acting out those ceremonies deny the political nature of the ceremony to reinforce the regime. Politics can change, but this is static.
As is all depoliticized knowledge. Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog have argued that engineers are more likely to embrace right-wing radicalism because the hard sciences do not care about differences of opinion; “facts don’t care about your feelings” is the line that Ben Shapiro likes to chirp. By depoliticizing knowledge, history, and memory, our ability to picture a different world is taken away from the public in favor of a more efficient version of what already exists. When North Irish historians ignore the Troubles they are not creating “historical justice,” instead they are lending legitimacy to the North Irish state.
This is what pisses me off about the neutral middle: their self-satisfied superiority. They claim that their oil-soaked hands are clean, unlike the right’s blood-soaked arms or the left’s muddy fingernails. And oil is the right metaphor because the regimes that cheer on depoliticized knowledge are not just liberal ones. Gulf monarchies – and even China – have a simple bargain with their populations, political autocracy for economic prosperity. The citizens of Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia are all promised incredible wealth if they will just avoid political questions. It is the same trade that western liberal democracies like Luxembourg have already made. Progress is presented as apolitical so historians, who want to keep their cozy gigs with six-figure salaries, play along and try to explain how history is not applied politics but really an “awkward science.” Engaging in politics means becoming controversial and risking your funding, or worse, your salary. So, no matter where your personal politics may be, it is much easier to just collect a paycheck and not think about it. But if you do feel guilty, it is comforting to know that you are the neutral saint, unsullied by bad history that’s tainted with politics.
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche)
Normal Thoughts 