Mr. Farmer’s fixation on the supposed inequities of the history department belies a fundamental misunderstanding of academia and of the larger pursuit of knowledge. A crude equalization of the number of faculty in each field by arbitrary quotas would not bring us any closer to the truth, but it would assuage the egos of the guilty, who confuse their own conception of ethics for the perceived sins of others. The columnist decries the fact that a global perspective does not equate with “an egalitarian representation of history.” On this account he is right, but his prescription is wrong. History itself is not egalitarian; it necessarily “privileges” the study of those peoples, societies, and topics that people in later eras feel compelled to study, for a myriad of reasons. Those reasons range from wanting to study those who succeeded at statecraft and empire-building, to wanting to know why certain societies failed in the way they did, to trying to figure out why people acted in the way they did in the face of competing alternatives.
The craft of history — and of any serious discipline — requires the selective appropriation and marshalling of facts, from which one derives a generalization. This process “privileges” certain facts over others as more relevant. Everyone from radical Marxists to reactionary conservatives operate on these principles, which are not pernicious when properly employed.
The construction of historical narratives and analyses in turn requires the skillful yet honest combination of facts and arguments in accordance with the dictates of logic. The results of this process do not give equal weight to every single event and to every single society in every single topic or time period — for the simple fact that different societies and regions have greater impact at certain times than others, and do so for different reasons.
It would be appropriate in a course on modern history to give greater attention to the dynamics and mechanisms of European societies than Chinese society in a course on late modernity, because for most of that period European imperialism wrought a profound and indelible mark on history out of proportion to the populations of European nations. Likewise, in a study of the period circa 1000 to 1600 C.E., it would be appropriate to give equal or disproportionate attention to Chinese institutions and dynamics, because during this period China rivaled and in many ways surpassed Europeans — and all other civilizations — in economics, warfare, and political influence. The pursuit of knowledge transcends contemporary fluctuations in identity politics; it instead responds to the nuanced and contingent array of facts that the past presents us by giving order to those events and recognizing patterns.
As a side note, it is interesting to see Mr. Farmer use a curious liberal inversion of the Eurocentric practice of inappropriately grouping manifestly different societies and cultures under a common rubric. The older Eurocentric version disregarded the cultural and historical heterogeneity of Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans; Mr. Farmer’s version places such vastly different people with such vastly different histories as the English, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Italians, the Serbs, the Finns, the Poles, and the Hungarians into a homogenous category of “whites,” much in the same way that Kazakhs, Han Chinese, Koreans, and Indonesians used to all be “Orientals,” all with one undifferentiated history.
Robert Venosa is a graduate student studying history.
