On historical imagination

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, by Rembrandt

As the summer semester wrapped up I came across this piece by James Hankins at Law & Liberty, a critique of American Birthright, a set of proposed standards and reforms for social studies education put together by the conservative-leaning Civics Alliance. Though sympathetic to the proposal’s good intentions and goals, Hankins finds that American Birthright is “not . . . beyond criticism.”

Let me note that this is, as far as I can recall, the first I have heard of the Civics Alliance and this project, so I can’t comment on that. But Hankins made some interesting and more broadly applicable points regarding the teaching of history in the modern academic environment.

First, on a neglected question—what is history for?

As an intellectual historian of the premodern world, what struck me the most, as I read through statement after earnest statement on the aims of social studies pedagogy, was the almost complete lack of interest today in what was always the chief rationale for writing and reading history from the time of Herodotus until the blessed advent of the Educational Testing Service in 1947. State departments of education, the National Council for Social Studies, and even the Civics Alliance speak of acquiring reading and writing skills; learning how interpretation is based on sources; learning how to summarize, analyze, and criticize historical accounts; how to gather evidence and evaluate it; how to assess historians’ arguments; how to ask questions, form hypotheses, and test them. All of these are immensely valuable skills, to be sure, but they sidestep the traditional goal of history in the premodern world: acquiring the virtue of prudence or practical wisdom—Aristotle’s phronesis. It’s worth asking why this is the case. After all, practical wisdom is the virtue we most need if our civic life is ever to be restored.

The disadvantage is that prudential judgements cannot be machine graded. This poses, first, a practical problem in that standardized testing is the great bronze image before which education bows down today—ignore it at your peril—and, second, a philosophical and ethical one in that teaching to an exam that tests only unambiguous right-wrong answers undermines the very purpose, “the traditional goal . . . in the premodern world,” of learning about the past: “the best [test] questions, to be ‘objective,’ have to be stripped of implicit moral judgements, contingencies, or imponderables—the very stuff of phronesis.”

Hankins offers a concrete example that couldn’t have been better calculated to get my attention:

Hence the Civics Alliance wants your child to know what year Robert E. Lee invaded Pennsylvania, who won at Gettysburg, and what Lincoln said after the battle. You can test for that. Progressive pedagogy will want your child to evaluate five different interpretations of why Lee invaded Pennsylvania and identify their ideological motivations. You can test for that too, though it’s easier to insert ideological messaging into the questions (for progressives, a feature, not a bug). A teacher concerned with phronesis, by contrast, will put you in command of the Army of Northern Virginia in the summer of 1863 and ask you whether, without benefit of hindsight, you would have invaded Pennsylvania and why. But your answer won’t be right or wrong; it will be wise or foolish. It can’t be machine-graded. It won’t produce metrics the Department of Education or ambitious parents can use to evaluate your teachers and your school. A wise answer won’t help you get into Harvard.

What Hankins reveals here is the place of imagination in historical study—imagining what it was like. This is “the inside of history,” as Chesterton put it, in a phrase that might as well be one of the mottos of this blog.

Imagination is severely underrated as a component of historical study—largely owing to the discipline’s scientific pretensions since at least the late 19th century—but that imagination should have a role should be clear, since history began as a literary exercise, was written almost exclusively as narrative, and, among Greek and Roman historians, written with a literal audience in mind. (The big difference between your textbook and ancient historians, I tell my students, is that ancient historians read their work to a live audience and were thus obliged to be interesting.) The fathers of history wrote so that their audience could put themselves in the shoes of the people they wrote about.

Hankins’s insistence on phronesis and wisdom is also crucial, as these virtues are impossible without imagination. A certain kind of killjoy uses “imagination” (perhaps overactive, vivid, or simply big) as a putdown, but we all intuitively recognize imagination’s practical, prudential value when we criticize someone as “unimaginative.” We recognize this not merely as a lack of appreciation for movies or fiction, but as a moral weakness.

To put my point in negative form, unimaginative people can be many things, but they are never wise.

But I’m finally putting these thoughts into some kind of coherent form because of David McCullough. McCullough died Sunday aged 89, a great loss to readers and lovers of history. I haven’t read nearly as many of his books as I’d like, but I have, God willing, years to fix that, and I regret that we’ll have no more from him.

So it was with great interest that I read a blog post by Samuel James entitled “What David McCullough can teach us,” which several of y’all sent my way this week. Let me commend the whole post to you. It’s excellent. But I want to highlight one paragraph that will tie my ramblings together, and that helped me think through yet more concretely some of what Hankins set in motion.

James contrasts McCullough’s work with the modish Jesus and John Wayne, purportedly an historical exposé of the role toxic masculinity has played in the rise of evangelicalism (I’m old enough to remember when the real culprit was The Corporations), and the exvangelical crowd’s biggest hit in the last couple of years. In this book, James writes, its author “wanted me to see the subjects of her history the way she sees them, not as how they saw themselves. How they interpreted their lives and beliefs was of little consequence. How the generations after them interpreted them was everything. This is the kind of history that gets people angry and eager to deconstruct whatever they sense is tainted by moral failure.”

McCullough, on the other hand,

doesn’t do this. McCullough clearly has positive feelings about John Adams, George Washington, Harry Truman, etc. But these are not hagiographies. One of the most memorable parts of John Adams is the way that McCullough fleshes out Adams’s penchant for vanity and insecurity. This shows up throughout Adams’ life and in his presidency, including, crucially, the ill-chosen Alien and Sedition Acts (that all but dismantled his friendship with Thomas Jefferson). McCullough is up front and lucid about how Adams’ personal flaws came out in his relationships and his policy. But McCullough is also extremely careful about letting Adams, and especially Abigail, live these flaws out themselves. We come away feeling as if we know about Adams’ vanity the way we know about the vanity of a close friend or even a spouse: that particular way we process the failings and flaws of people we nonetheless believe in. To reach this point with a subject of a biography is not just a wonderful reading experience. It’s an exercise that strengthens a Christian’s moral imagination.

I can’t put it better than that.

David McCullough, writer and historian, a model for the engagement of the heart and the strengthening of the imagination in a discipline of the mind, RIP.