Studying Dead White Men

 

When parents object to Critical Race Theory in the schools, a standard riposte is that they must be opposed to teaching the real history of Canada/America. 

This is ironic, since the schools have been cutting back on history in favour of “social studies” for years. And when they teach history, the history that is taught is often not the real history.

Why study history? Because, in the words of Santayana, “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

We study history to learn about human nature and about how best to organize society. History is the real social studies. We study to learn from the successes and mistakes of our ancestors. We do this through history, not current events, to avoid vested interests and hence bias. This is why, in the old days, only classical history was studied.

The modern trend is to study instead “women’s history,” “black history,” insert your ethnic group here, or else “oral history” from ordinary people who lived ordinary lives through events. This to redress some supposed imbalance, that history has heretofore unjustly been all about “dead white men.”

But recording the lives and experiences of ordinary people does not give us any lessons. Ordinary people did not make decisions the results of which we can reliably see; precisely because they were relatively powerless. We generally have little data on their lives, and this leaves too much room for imagination or for falsification. 

As a result, this “history” is no more, and no better, than idle gossip.

We study the actions of great men; not because they were men or because they were white, but because they were great. That is, they made the decisions the results of which we can study, and the records of which are extensive and preserved.