Spain: A Unique History

Chapter 16: Controversies over History in Contemporary Spain

16 Controversies over History in Contemporary Spain 243 Acommon complaint about contemporary Western society is that it suffers from amnesia and has little knowledge of, or interest in, history. Growing addiction to the Internet atomizes reading, so that information is obtained in snippets or packets without sustained study or broader understanding, and without criteria concerning accuracy or reliability . This results in vast amounts of information, much more so than in any preceding era, yet without many standards, organization, or sustained comprehension . Thus the young spend untold hours seated before computer screens, but do not read books. It is alleged that they learn less than preceding generations, compared with their level of formal education. They do not study but merely “retrieve ” bits and pieces of information.1 Is such criticism accurate? To some degree this would seem to be the case, and as far as history is concerned, it is absolutely clear that the great expansion of formal education has not been accompanied by an equivalent expansion of the knowledge of history. A culture informed by the most intense narcissism and materialism in human history is oriented toward instant gratification and thus loses touch with its own cultural tradition. There is another side to the story, insofar as there has never been so much scholarly research on history as at the present time, and never have so many books of history been written, purchased, and, presumably, read. This is due, however, in large part to the growth in population and in the economy, and the expansion of the university systems, which creates a larger base for specialized activities. In addition , it is sometimes argued that historical thinking or historical consciousness has become more common, at least among much of the intellectually informed minority of the population, than ever before.2 Moreover, in the United States and several other countries, there are many skilled scholars and writers of history who are not university professors. They concentrate on the kind of big topics and themes of broader interest that academic historians usually spurn, and as a result often sell large numbers of books. Military history, especially, seems to flourish in all countries, even though political prejudice largely bans it from the universities. All these signs of interest in history exist but do so amid increasing intellectual and cultural fragmentation, and are characteristic simply of certain minorities, with little or no effect on the population at large. This produces a seeming paradox: on the one hand, a minority studies and reads history more than ever before, while the great majority—despite universal literacy and basic education—has little or no awareness of history, which recedes more and more in the educational curriculum. Moreover, among historians the study of history has been greatly broadened on the one hand, while on the other it has been weakened by politicization, contemporary cultural trends, and trivialization. Dominant among the latter are the ideology of political correctness, totally hegemonic by the 1990s, and the consequences of postmodernist theory, two different but mutually reinforcing trends. The effect is drastic deconstruction of previously dominant paradigms, replaced by a contradictory combination of new political dogmas that coexist with radical subjectivism. In the universities, this has almost completely eliminated certain fields, such as military history, and resulted in a major de-emphasis on political history, though this is somewhat less notable in Spain. Major themes are replaced by comparatively minor considerations, which emphasize small groups, deviants, and cultural oddities. Most studies are required to fit somewhere within the new sacred trinity of race, class, and gender—the new “cultural Marxism.” Research that does not conform to these criteria is increasingly eliminated from the universities, where hiring practices in the humanities and social sciences have become blatantly discriminatory. New cultural and political trends often take a little longer to arrive in Spain, but by the twenty-first century they have become increasingly characteristic of new historical work in Spain, as well. The great expansion of the university system has indeed resulted in much more research and writing than ever before, producing historical knowledge and significant publications in almost every field, but as stated earlier, the study of history in Spain is constrained by the provincialization Controversies over History in Contemporary Spain 244 and trivialization of history on the one hand, and the weaknesses of the university system on the other. Production of significant historical work in the past generation...