Time for Reality to Replace "PDB" History

March/April 2005 Historically Speaking 33 Time for Reality to Replace "PDB" History Clark G Reynolds The United States has been at war against Middle Eastern-based terrorists since September 11, 2001. Does the American public—much less professional historians and their students—know why? Other than the few specialists in Middle Eastern studies, are historians making serious efforts to leam and teach the causes, stakes, and prosecution ofthe current conflict? The short answer is, "No!" Professional and personal excuses for this failure by scholars will not do; their negligence, though understandable, is inexcusable. The major blame lies with the baby boomers who during the 1960s and 1970s sanctimoniously revolted against the consensus mainstream of American culture with their own "counter" (i.e., non-) system—an intellectual "cop out," to use their own proudly trumpeted but pathetic phrase. The rebelling historians among this truculent generation, along with intellectuals of similar persuasion in other disciplines, set out to replace conventional approaches to the past with their own philosophical biases. Intolerant of other (mostly older) methodologies and explanations, they fostered a "new" deeply politicized and distorted outlook. It was and is much more (or less!) than a school of historical thought; indeed, it established a virtual dictatorship over the profession. These rebels—not revolutionaries, because their attack has floundered—condemned what they regarded as a narrow focus on "dead white males": history's winners. The "new social" interpretation of the past has focused instead on gender, class, race, and inequality. My own designation of this meanspirited, misguided, conceited, and selfrighteous movement is "PDB" history. The letters stand for the poor, dumb, bastard folk whose sorry plights and activities were customarily minimized by pre-1960s historians: poor, the poverty-stricken, exploited, oppressed, ignored, disenfranchised, enslaved. dumb: the ignorant, under- and non-educated , dull-witted,blindly prejudiced. bastard: the illegitimate, outcast, criminal . The PDBs have indeed been the traditional losers of history—and not because of historians . Notably, the plight of women—at least half of the human race—had been comparatively neglected. By simple (and simplistic ) reasoning the deeply feminized new social history elite (a word they would reject, as do all professed communalists) decided to turn the study and teaching of history on its head. Indeed, to borrow a tool from the philosopher 's lexicon: the logic of the PDB rebels is simply an example of "the fallacy of the ambiguous middle." That is, their spurious reasoning is contrived in order to justify their assault on the profession, i.e., because men have dominated the telling ofincomplete history , such male historians are inferior scholars and should be neutralized. This is nothing less than single factor determinism, a philosophy utterly false, irrelevant, and even dangerous , especially in wartime. The outbreak of undeclared war between international terrorists and the civilized world has exposed this new intellectual tyranny as nothing so much as extremist self-delusion. The current wartime U.S.—beset by criticism from Europe and Canada, broad social needs at home, and the new social history pap taught in the colleges—demands a fresh dose of real, balanced history, however makeshift, followed by a broad rethinking ofthe profession 's responsibilities to society in general. This means the study ofpower relationships in the past in all their aspects, each treated equally: political, economic, socio-intellectual , and military-diplomatic. None of these aspects is more important than another. Examined together, they define the way that all history should be approached, written, and taught. And corrective measures need to be taken now. The present Middle Eastern-based conflict likely marks only the initial campaign of a prolonged struggle between the civilized, industrialized, democratizing, Westernizing world led by the American hegemon against peoples whose fragile infrastructures—tribal, feudal, authoritarian, reactionary, religiously militant—are threatened by it. Three years ago in Historically Speaking ("Democracy versus the Other: Incompatibilities of the Modern World," April 2002) I outlined the history of the inevitable conflict between the few liberal superpowers of the post-1500 modem era (Dutch Republic, Great Britain, United States) and the autocratic polities and noncivilized peoples. What must be understood and taught by historians is that throughout all history— from desert nomads battling the first civilizations of ancient...