2. The Rise of the Revisionist Historians , book review of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization

[Hong Key]

The Uniqueness of Western Civilization
Ricardo Duchesne
Leiden: Brill, 2011

Review by Collin Cleary

2. The Rise of the Revisionist Historians

Duchesne’s first chapter is entitled “The Fall of Western Civilization and the Rise of Multicultural World History.” But what “fall of Western civilization” really refers to is the demise of the old “Western Civ” courses that used to be ubiquitous in academia. In the old days, it was thought that since our students were living and studying in the West, they needed to have a firm grasp of Western culture. Furthermore, the old-fashioned texts used in those classes tended to assert that history exhibited a discernible pattern: a linear trajectory, with the West leading the way. They assumed, in short, an ideal of progress, and were guilty of what is denounced today as Eurocentrism.

All this changed in the 1960s. With the rise of the New Left in the academy, the West was now seen to have advanced through the exploitation of other peoples, which scarcely counts as “progress” at all. “It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the 1960s saw the onset of a tidal wave against the idea of progress,” Duchesne writes (p. 23). Cultural relativism, post-colonialism, historicism, deconstruction, and critical theory all converged, with the result that by the 1970s most academic historians had lost faith in Western civilization and in the old progressive interpretation of history.

One of the most influential architects of the new revisionism was the anthropologist Marvin Harris (1927–2001), whose work was heavily influenced by Franz Boas’s cultural relativism. Harris grafted Boas onto Marx, specifically Marx’s theory of the different levels of society, where what we normally refer to as “culture” is held to be a “superstructure” founded upon economic relationships. The result for Harris was not only a rejection of any progressivist and Eurocentric model of history, but the dismissal of all attempts to understand cultures in terms of things not directly connected to the struggle for material survival and prosperity. Harris claimed that this was the only proper consideration, not just because of his Marxist roots but because he insisted that only a consideration of purely material factors could lend a semblance of “scientific objectivity” to the study of culture.

In fact, this is one of the central claims of the revisionists. As Duchesne puts it, they hold that “the first and most important preoccupation of human life is adaptation to the environment, and that this must be accomplished by creating technological and economic systems. . . . This premise assigns ontological and causal priority to the material conditions of social life. It views the role of ideational factors (philosophies, religious beliefs, art) in terms of their ‘feedback’ effects on these conditions” (p. 321, italics in original). I have already identified this premise as derived from Marxism.

Furthermore, Duchesne observes, correctly, that packed into it is an understanding of human nature as fundamentally passive and reactive. Essentially, the revisionists see human beings as buffeted about by material conditions, and culture as a kind of construct that has arisen as a result of how men have reacted to those conditions. The revisionists will permit no talk of “great men” moved by ideals or motives that transcend the drive for survival and reproduction. For such ideals and motives are vague, unobservable, and impossible to measure. Hence, to build an account of culture or history on them is “unscientific.”

To see the fundamental error in this, imagine how revisionist anthropologists or historians might explain the following situation. Suppose that a husband and wife go out to dinner. Suppose further that there is a complicated dynamic between these two. The wife has complained for years that her husband must always have things his way, and is fundamentally inconsiderate and selfish. She feels that his behavior demonstrates a basic lack of respect for her, and thus she has come over time to deeply resent her spouse. Now, suppose that a table full of revisionist anthropologists and historians observe these two at dinner. At a certain point the husband picks up the salt shaker, which was sitting at the center of the table, sprinkles his food with it, and sets it down beside his plate. Seeing this, the wife reaches out, snatches the salt shaker, and places it beside her. If we ask our tableful of revisionists to explain this behavior, their answer will likely be: “There must be a salt shortage.”

Should we suggest that it might be wise to consider the psychological dynamics of this relationship – the husband’s selfishness and lack of consideration, the wife’s desire for respect and resentment against her husband – we will be told that such considerations are “not objective,” and irrelevant anyway since in fact all human motivations relate to material conditions. The revisionists will have based their account on something “objective” all right, but the account misses everything. Duchesne will argue, in fact, that it is impossible to understand culture – especially Western culture – without taking into consideration the ways in which men are motivated by concerns that transcend the material, and physical survival.

Despite these obvious shortcomings, the approach of Marvin Harris and his followers was extraordinarily influential not just in anthropology, but in history and sociology as well. Another key figure in the rise of revisionism is the sociologist Stephen Sanderson, who was greatly indebted to Harris. To cultural relativism and historical materialism, Sanderson added the ostensibly reasonable idea that individual societies have to be understood in terms of networks of relationships to other societies. All cultures are interdependent and none can be seen as standing on its own – especially Western culture. The West, he argued, is not unique: other cultures have achieved most of the things that have been (falsely) credited to the West, and the West has been heavily dependent on what it has borrowed from other cultures.

However, as Duchesne argues at length, these claims are false on two fronts. First, most of the resemblances that revisionists find between the West and other cultures are, predictably, in the area of economics – such as trade practices, the development of commercial networks, etc. But even there the similarities are often quite superficial. Second, though it is undeniably true that the West has learned much from other cultures (demonstrating an openness that is in fact uniquely Western!), it has developed the ideas it has taken from others in ways they never dreamed of. Further, it must be said that the claims made by the revisionists about the achievements of other cultures are often patently dishonest. One revisionist historian, for example, claims that Newtonian mechanics was anticipated by the Chinese! (See p. 173.) Before we come to the dishonesty of revisionism, however, we first treat more fundamental matters.

http://www.counter-currents.com/2013...-civilization/

[Anthropos]

Nice little debunking of the exclusively materialistic viewpoint.