Review of “The Undivided Past”

Last week the Washington Post published my review of David Cannadine’s The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences. I enjoyed the book, though while reading it I was reminded of something one of my Wesleyan professors told me long ago. Hayden White joked that historians know they can always say, “things are more complicated than that, aren’t they?” It always sounds like a reasonable question (which means it’s really an empty question). Over the years, I have seen Hayden’s point made time and time again when we academics (not just historians) make similar rhetorical gestures. I play with that empty question in the review below.

Cannadine’s book is very thoughtful and wide-ranging. I’m now making the final revisions on a short book on liberal education — and I know someone will be able to say, “Roth, things are more complicated than that!”

 

THE UNDIVIDED PAST Humanity Beyond Our Differences By David Cannadine Knopf. 340 pp. $26.95

In the 19th century, historians liked to tell triumphal tales of how people came together in powerful, sometimes glorious ways. Sweeping accounts described how religious groups or nations managed to achieve great things, often after battling other groups. In recent decades, historians have very much taken the opposite tack, showing how groups that we once thought were unified were actually quite divided. Difference, not unity, has been the preferred category for thinking about the past. Triumphal tales of groups coming together have been replaced by studies of how divided we have always been from one another.

David Cannadine, a British historian teaching at Princeton, offers a critique of the major categories historians have used to describe how some human beings are fundamentally different from others. Ideas of religion, nation, class, gender, race and civilization have generated intense feelings of belonging but also feelings of antagonism toward rival groups. Hatred of “the other” is the flip side of the fellow feeling that unites people into these mutually “belligerent collectivities.” Historians have focused on the conflicts that have emerged from this process, on the particular ways in which solidarity has given rise to antagonism toward groups of which one is not a member.

In his wide-ranging and readable new book, “The Undivided Past,” Cannadine shows that a very different story can be told. Rather than underscoring perennial conflicts between mutually exclusive human groups, Cannadine emphasizes how people find ways to get along, to cross borders and to maintain harmonious societies.

He begins with religion, which in many ways seems an unlikely vehicle for showing how people can get along. Given the missionary monotheism of Christianity, a religion that is both exclusive and proselytizing, the stage would seem set for stories of endless strife. But Cannadine finds many examples of pagans and Christians collaborating, and he shows how the “intermingling” of Catholics and Muslims in the late medieval period “transformed Europe’s intellectual landscape and made possible its twelfth-century Renaissance.” He knows well the bloody divisions that swept across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, but he insists that for most ordinary people, religious affiliation did not lead to violent conflict.

Rulers did try to generate national ties that would motivate their subjects to love (or fear) their monarchs and to fight against rival kings and queens. But intense feelings of nationalism, Cannadine shows, were a short-lived late-19th-century phenomenon, not some natural feeling that people are bound to experience. Class solidarity, too, was never the defining figure of identity for most people, even during the heyday of industrialization when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed their theory that class conflict drove history. Sure, there are times when workers hate their bosses, but in any historical period there are “more important forms of human solidarity” than class. History is “more varied and complex than Marx or Engels would ever allow.”

Like any seasoned historian, Cannadine knows that one can always say of another’s account that “things are more complicated than that” as a prelude to offering one’s own. So it goes in “The Undivided Past.” He positions himself as an enemy of generalization, and so he can criticize Marxists for over-emphasizing class and feminists for over-emphasizing gender. Things are more complicated than that — not every worker has experienced oppression at the hands of the bourgeoisie, and not every woman has been stifled by patriarchy. Nations, though important for a brief period of history, were never monolithic entities inspiring universal devotion. Many French and English citizens, for example, had intense local allegiances that trumped national identity. When you look at history afresh while emphasizing different facts, customary generalizations can appear rather arbitrary. Things were more complicated than that.

Cannadine’s most pointed rhetoric comes toward the end, when he examines the idea of mutually antagonistic civilizations — an old notion recently popularized by the political scientist Samuel Huntington. Cannadine shows how “civilization” is intertwined with the idea of barbarism, and he quotes Montaigne’s quip: “Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.” Huntington saw the world as irrevocably divided into groups whose practices — religions, cultures and ways of life — prevented any meaningful integration. The claim is that Muslim, Eastern and Western civilizations, for example, are fated to be in conflict with one another, but Cannadine can find neither facts to back this up nor a coherent logic to the argument. He is biting in his criticism of neoconservative warmongers who draped themselves in Huntington’s pseudo-academic “findings.” “Of all collective forms of human identity,” Cannadine writes, “civilization is the most nebulous, and it is this very vagueness that makes it at once so appealing and so dangerous.”

Cannadine knows that writers and political leaders can all too easily generate solidarity on the basis of one element of a group’s identity in order to generate antagonism toward those who don’t share that element. His book is a reminder that generalizations based on the supreme importance of any one concept (be it race, class, gender, religion, nation or civilization) are likely to fall apart when closely examined. The “exaggerated insistence on the importance of confrontation and difference . . . misrepresents the nature of the human condition,” he concludes.

In closing, he writes briefly of the “just inheritance of what we have always shared” and urges us “to embrace and celebrate [our] common humanity.” But he doesn’t even try to provide evidence or arguments for what this common humanity might be. After all, that would be to make woolly generalizations; he knows things are more complicated than that.

 

Affirmative Action Preserved (for Now)

Yesterday the Supreme Court decided to return Fisher v University of Texas to a lower court to further examine the university’s admissions policies to ensure that its use of race as one factor in a holistic process of admitting students was essential to achieving the diversity that contributes to an effective learning environment. Critics of affirmative action are pleased that strict scrutiny will be used to ensure that any use of race meets a high standard of fairness to individuals, while defenders of affirmative action take some solace that current practices consistent with previous Supreme Court decisions will be allowed to stand. At Wesleyan, we have long believed that race and ethnicity are factors that legitimately play roles in an admissions process that aims to create a diverse student body, and we also are mindful of using our financial aid to ensure that students with great ability but limited economic means (of whatever race and ethnicity) are given a chance at the kind of progressive liberal arts education we provide here.

Defining who deserves to be admitted to any particular university is notoriously difficult. Every year I meet people who attended elite Ivy League schools and who were rejected from Wesleyan. And I hear about Wesleyan admits who were rejected at schools that are supposed to be easier to get into. Each year we strive to put together a class that has enormous potential to learn in an open curriculum on a residential campus — a class that is exuberant about learning, eager to look at the world from a variety of perspectives and prepared to experience the creative and scholarly dimensions of university life. In most cases, the students admitted have great test scores and high grades, but in some cases those conventional measures do not adequately reflect the student’s real potential. That’s why our Admissions Office employs a holistic approach. We want students who will thrive  at Wesleyan, and we are lucky that they choose to come here from across the globe.

Race remains very relevant to the lives of students before they apply to Wesleyan, and that is one of the reasons we take it into account in admissions. To ignore race in contemporary America would be to perpetuate racist practices that still exist. But race is not our only measure of diversity. For now, we have the ability to use race among other factors in building campus diversity. We will continue to do so with all the scrutiny this sensitive area deserves.

 

 

Online Education, Political Engagement

This week I’ve been in the Washington D.C. area for meetings with colleagues and alumni. The trip started out with a talk to the Annapolis Group, an organization of liberal arts colleges from across the country. I’d been invited to participate in a session devoted to teaching MOOCs, and I shared the podium with Andrew Shennan, Provost at Wellesley College. Andrew knows Wesleyan well, as he was part of our visiting team during the accreditation process. He spoke about the investment that Wellesley has made in EDx, and the long process that his campus is still going through to develop classes, produce them and share them through the platform started by Harvard and MIT. I’m sure their four classes will be interesting, and I look forward to seeing them in the coming year.

I spoke more about the experience of teaching a MOOC, and the surprises that came from working with very different kinds of students from around the world. I explained that I saw our large online classes neither as a quick revenue stream nor as a threat to the model of residential learning. The courses for now are free, and we don’t yet know how exactly they will be monetized. That’s why we are keeping our investment in MOOCs very modest, financially speaking. But we are learning a lot about teaching in a different medium and about how to communicate what liberal education is all about to students from around the globe. This will inform our work back on campus.

I explained to my liberal arts college colleagues that rather than seeing MOOCs as a threat to what we do, I see many of them as showing an appetite for the kind of broad, contextual learning that we prize. It was clear from many of the discussion boards for the Wesleyan classes on Coursera that students were learning for its own sake, and that they saw these courses as opportunities to broaden their intellectual horizons and connect with other people around the world who might have similar interests. There is no way that the experience of these online classes replicates the campus experience. The dynamic synergies of campus learning in a small residential setting are uniquely powerful. The online experience is quite different, but it, too, can provide a context of learning that is compelling for many students who otherwise would never have an opportunity for this kind of education. Through our Coursera classes, Wesleyan faculty have been able to share some of what we’ve learned on campus with an extraordinarily large and diverse audience. The appetite for liberal education is much deeper and broader than many of us had imagined!

Last night I moderated a conversation with three Wes alumni who exemplify many of the virtues of liberal education. Governors Peter Shumlin (Vermont) and John Hickenlooper (Colorado) and U.S. Senator Michael Bennet (Colorado) joined more than 150 Wesleyans in a campaign kick-off event in Washington, D.C. We spoke about the joys of public service and also about the frustrations of gridlock. Education was high on our list of issues to be addressed, and we also fielded questions from the audience concerning climate change, poverty, gender, money in politics, and the challenges of compromise in an age of hyper-partisanship.

316_this_is_why  eve_dc_2013-0619192952 (1)

There were several current students in the audience, as well as alumni from the last six decades. We all reconnected with old friends and made some new ones. We raised money for scholarships and reminded one another that Wesleyan’s progressive liberal arts education should inspire us to take on the most pressing issues in the public sphere.

THIS IS WHY.

 

Wesleyan Scientists Win Big Grant (Again)

Reading the Hartford Courant, I came across the following story:

The latest round of state funding for stem cell research — totaling $9.8 million — will go to 23 research projects, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s office announced Thursday. The Connecticut Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee chose the recipients from among 109 applicants. The largest award, $1.49 million, went to Janice Naegele at Wesleyan University for a project titled “HESC-Derived GABAergic Neurons for Epilepsy Therapy.”

I wrote to Professor Naegele, who told me that the “grant is a multi-Investigator grant with Gloster Aaron and Laura Grabel. These funds will allow us to embark on new studies to determine whether human embryonic stem cell-derived GABAergic interneuron transplants restore memory and reduce seizures and anxiety in mice with severe temporal lobe epilepsy. The grant also provides stipends for graduate students and undergraduate researchers.”

This is the kind of project that is many years in the making, and I know that Profs. Naegele, Aaron and Grabel (and their students) have been dedicated to stem cell research in the epilepsy field for a long time now. When I’ve visited their labs, I’ve been so impressed by the students’ dedication and expertise. This is a great example of how scholar-teachers at Wesleyan are having an impact on the world and on their students. Congratulations to everyone who worked on the grant!

THIS IS WHY.

From Mississippi to Middletown

Coming back from lunch Friday, I saw two people having their picture taken on the steps of South College. Ollie L. Hamblin Jr ’74 and his wife Virginia Hamblin were back on campus for the first time in almost forty years. Ollie is a teacher in a small town in Mississippi, and he and Virginia wanted to visit Wesleyan to renew old memories and see what’s changed. He explained that he had been recruited to come to Wes in 1969-1970, and that he seized on the opportunity even though he didn’t know anything about the university. The full scholarship he received was life-changing, and his career as a teacher is grounded in the educational experience he had as an undergraduate. Ollie joked that he didn’t have a million dollar check to hand over, but that he wanted to express his gratitude for the opportunity that his scholarship provided. I explained that his account was priceless, and that fundraising for scholarships was our highest priority. He and Virginia (they married in Ollie’s senior year) were happy to take a pic with our BECAUSE poster.

BECAUSE Wesleyan is our cause
BECAUSE Wesleyan is our cause

Ollie L. Hamblin, Jr. ’74 — math teacher extraordinaire in Canton, Mississippi. THIS IS WHY.