Postmodernism and You: History

Tom Dixon, Contributor

There are few events as historically well-documented as the Holocaust. The twentieth-century slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis left behind a churning wake of historical evidence, and the waves created by the dark ship's passing can still be felt fifty years later. We can still inspect the camps, the gas chambers, and warehouses full of documentation, and many who were directly involved in the gruesome events remain to tell of it. Such are the kind of sources and documentation historians dream of: a vast number of eyewitnesses whose accounts are in agreement, and a whole corpus of virtually harmonious evidence. Historically speaking, it doesn't get any better than that.

In the last few years, however, thousands of people have bought into the remarkable suggestion that the Holocaust was a grand hoax. Most historians have brushed aside this theory as ridiculous, thinking that if the Holocaust is not historically proven, probably nothing else is. But surprisingly, the idea has established a firm foothold in the nation's universities and news rooms, and a Gallup poll conducted in January of 1994 showed that 33 percent of Americans think it seems possible that the holocaust never happened.

"Holocaust denial is only the most spectacular example of a broader assault on knowledge, facts and memory that is sweeping through the culture," writes John Leo in U.S. News and World Report. He lists several other unfounded ideas that have gained a following, such as the supposedly strong influence of Iroquois thought on the U.S. Constitution.

Some people are convinced the truth about their own history has been deliberately hidden. An HBO-Pepsi poster promoting Black History Month features a picture of the pyramids and the words, "We are the builders of the pyramids, look what you did . . . so much to tell the world, the truth no longer hid."

The Changing Face of Historical Research

The Holocaust did, unfortunately, occur. But increasingly among students of history and even in popular culture, the facts of history are becoming more flexible and can be bent to accommodate almost any argument. One historian remarked that he preferred a cloud of "great vague ideas" to the dust of "true little facts." History, long held as an objective field of study like chemistry or physics, is now considered an ever-changing inquiry into the subjective viewpoints of past cultures.

Scholars used to view 'history' as the investigation into what actually happened in the past and why. Today's postmodern historians view history more as a study of people's images and thoughts about their society and their past. What actually happened is no longer the historian's primary concern, and in fact, can never be known. Instead, what matters is what people thought happened.

Such a trend is frightening, especially for Christians, whose faith is based on God's character of love and mercy as proven in his actions in history. God repeatedly reveals himself, not as primarily the God of inner impressions or even as the God of nature, but as the God of history. "For the Lord our God is He who brought us and our fathers up out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage . . ." (Joshua 24:17) and "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." (Exodus 3:6) Paul stresses that the historical resurrection is the lynch-pin of the Christian gospel, without which there is no Christianity. (1 Corinthians 15:17) No one has as much to lose from the postmodern approach to history as Bible-believing Christians.

The Rise of Social History

History departments have changed this century under the influence of two schools of historical research. The schools were Marxist history and the Annales School of historical research. Both tried to interpret the flow of history by looking at things other than the traditional forces associated with historical change-- politics, war, economics and intellectual history. The new form of historical study saw history as being moved by forces beneath the surface, including class struggle. Historians called the fusion of these schools "social history."

By the late 1970's, history departments across the nation and Europe which had long focused solely upon political and church history, had fragmented into a plethora of interests. Major schools began to offer black history, urban history, labor history, the history of women, criminality, sexuality, the oppressed, the inarticulate, and so on. Entire new departments were founded for Black Studies, Women's Studies, Hispanic Studies, etc. Much of what these departments taught was in the category that used to be known as history.

For example, studies of women and their roles in past societies appeared. These studies often argued that the key to understanding history is to realize that women have been historical victims of an enduring patriarchal regime. Thus, the struggle between women and their male oppressors is analogous to the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in Marxism. Careful observers will find much truth in these studies, even when not reaching the same conclusions when it comes to the big picture. The important point for us in this survey, is that feminist and other types of social historical studies constitute a completely new way to approach the study of history.

Social history, with its emphasis on the more common aspects of human experience down through the ages, has been described as "history from below." Instead of studies on the lives, for instance, of great political rulers or military campaigns, Social Historians focus on things like marriage, working conditions, and social organizations. Studies on these common areas of life increasingly appeared in historical journals. Between 1958 and 1978, the number of doctoral degrees in social history quadrupled and surpassed the number of dissertations written in political history.

Cultural History

As social historians sought to discover the history of the voiceless masses, they faced a fairly obvious problem: how do we listen to the voiceless masses? How can we learn the story of segments of society which left no biographies, no chronicles, or any written data? Social historians claim that although such peoples have left no official history, they have left behind tracks which can be detected in their cultural practices and forms. The study of these forms and practices is cultural history. Cultural history consists mostly of studying symbolic behavior among the inarticulate--that is, the illiterate or voiceless people who manage to express themselves very well through their cultural forms, according to cultural historians.

Underlying cultural historian's references to the inarticulate in history, is the thought that they are inarticulate because the powerful, in their own day and since, have silenced them.

In recent years, studies of intellectual and cultural history have overtaken those done in economic and social history. This shift from social history to, more specifically, cultural history has come as a younger generation of historians have reacted against strictly Marxist models. More importantly, the influence of postmodern literary theories has drawn historians' attention away from economic and social matters toward an increasing interest in language as the primary element of social reality.

The Rest of the Story

Read our book, The Death of Truth, and learn:

What the Annales school taught
How the Bible and biblical studies will be affected
Why social and cultural history threaten to overthrow historical fact for the sake of propaganda
How the politicization of history is already progressing on campus today

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