Historical Intervention
As someone who reads, researches, and writes about history, I feel a bit of a responsibility. The "lessons of the past" are often very powerful explanatory tools in the present. Lots of people rely on an understanding of history to inform their ideas about what is happening today. Many public figures (politicians, business leaders, cultural influencers) use their interpretations of the choices, actions, and intentions of people in the past to decide what to do in the present. Or at least, to justify what they do in the present. I'm often unsure how much is real and how much rhetorical, when politicians call on historical precedents. And don't even get me started on the Supreme Court!
In any case, I feel like there's a bit at stake, when history is misused to support choices that are obviously NOT consistent with the justifications given. That's not to say that people can't have disagreements about what is important in the past and what it meant. Or even about what happened. But this reasonable disagreement is short-circuited when a very simple position is taken and then someone will argue that it MEANS something they want to promote. For example, "America was conceived as a Christian nation and so we should outlaw abortion". Or "America was explicitly established as a secular nation and so we should tax churches." The historical reality is more complicated than that. America was NOT explicitly established as a religious or a secular nation. There are indications that many of the founders were not particularly orthodox in their beliefs. Jefferson rewrote the New Testament with no miracles in it. Several patriots were apparently also deists. The head of state was not also the head of an established church, as was the case in Britain. But on the other hand, the states were not all required to immediately break the bond between church and state. Massachusetts didn't disestablish the Puritan (Congregational) Church until January 1, 1834! And even after that late date, people were convicted and imprisoned for blasphemy!
So I get a bit annoyed, when these types of overly simplistic claims are made to justify whatever position someone wants to take in the present. And as I mentioned, I have a real problem with the way America's highest court dances around pretending to get inside the heads of the founders; or even assuming that's how they should be doing their job. That's probably a post for another day. For today, I feel like it ought to be at least a small part of what I do here, to weigh in on things people are saying about history. In the past, I used to make YouTube reaction videos where I'd discuss things others were posting. I've read several historical Substacks and I've commented on some. Often it's just to add a point or call the author's attention to details they may not have considered. To date, I haven't engaged in full-on debunking, partly because I don't think there's as much nonsense on Substack as there might be on other platforms.
But there IS a bit of weirdness, that as a historian I have been a bit uncomfortable with. I'm talking about the way the biggest history-related Substack, written by my former mentor, has seemed to devolve into a talking-points-memo for the Blue Team. Also some of the stuff I'm seeing from
and his colleagues at Canadian Patriot and the Rising Tide Foundation. I've been dipping into their content occasionally. There's a lot of it; this seems to be a very well-funded and prolific operation. And the production values are pretty high. So it seems like they might be taken seriously and believed, which I think could be problematic.One of the biggest issues I have with the stuff I've looked at so far is the strange mix of apparently well-sourced statements on the one hand and completely unsupported claims on the other. Ehret, like his teacher Lyndon Larouche, calls on events and people that aren't common knowledge and tries to tie them together in novel ways. I have been interested in some of the people, and curious about the claims Ehret and Larouche have made about them. But I'm confused about the world-view that seems to inform the way they have organized the past into an eternal battle between good guys (the Platonic Humanists, if I understand it) and bad guys (the Aristotelian Oligarchs). I have been a bit surprised, I have to admit, by some of the folks they have put on the good guys team or the bad guys. And there’s a lot of emotion.
There's a passage at the end of a long Larouche article from the late 1970s, where he concludes, "The history of mankind...is the history of reason's struggle against the oligarchical principle of unreason. Not to be a Neoplatonic humanist today is to be morally not a member of the human species." This isn't a compelling advertisement for the type of history I think these people are going to produce. There's another passage in this same article, where Larouche says, "The cleverest way, psychologically, in which to hide a secret is to divert the investigator down a tiring trail toward a false discovery. His own efforts convince him either that he has found a secret through great energy and cleverness on his own part, or, if the secret he seeks appears still but to barely elude his grasp, he values all the more his continued course of misdirection." (both quotes from "The Secret Known Only to the Inner Elites", The Campaigner, May-June 1978). I'm reminded of advice I received as a rookie salesman long ago, that to convince a customer one could either "dazzle them with brilliance or baffle them with bullshit."
I'm not saying everything these Canadian Patriots say is bullshit. But I get suspicious when I see broad generalizations and claims made that the author just expects the reader to accept without either evidence or a compelling argument. I'm unsure, however, how to proceed. Does it make any sense, chasing them down their rabbit hole? The whole worldview is head-spinningly at odds with...well, history. Again, that's not to say that the Master Narrative is correct. I'm probably more prone to reflexively challenging mainstream history than anyone you'll meet. But that doesn't mean that any idea that challenges the mainstream is equally valid. Whig History, or Hegelian or Marxist teleology, for other examples.
The question I'm struggling with, I guess, is whether to intervene? How popular is this site? How many people, not knowing anything about any of these historical figures like Ruskin (who was a legitimate weirdo and inspired Cecil Rhodes) or Isaac Newton (whom they say was a "fake" scientist who plagiarized the real ones), will take their word for it? What conclusions will people draw about the present and what we should do in it? Is this just a crazy but ineffectual little crank movement, like Ayn Rand's Objectivists in the 80s? Or is this alternate history gaining momentum?
In contrast to the U.S., Canada, where I live, has not defined itself by disputes over religion. From colonial days, English speakers were nearly universally members of Protestant creeds and French speakers members of the Catholic Church. They formed our "two solitudes", co-existing without warfare but with tension from the past apparent. Increasingly, though, with immigration coming from nations which are neither Protestant nor Catholic, we are becoming more pluralistic, though not without objections from nationalist racists.
Plus organized religion has taken hits in popularity, most chiefly with the recognition of its denial of the humanity of Indigenous peoples in the residential school system (and the physical and mental abuse related to that), although America did its fair share in that line as well.