Caleb Anderson: The Denial of Complexity in the Search for Simplicity

I initially trained to be a history teacher, but have spent most of my career in school administration. I have sometimes thought that, in retirement, I would give my time to the nearest secondary school, at no charge, for the simple privilege of working with their senior history students, inculcating a love for the discipline, and maybe to encourage some students to further their studies of history at the tertiary level.

It has become increasingly obvious to me that the history I studied at University in the eighties, and the discipline that so energised me, is profoundly different from the history that is generally taught (and permitted) today.

When I studied history all arguments were on the table. It was about how well you argued your case, how you assembled the facts, how you justified a given assertion, how you dealt with the contradictions, and how you responded, if at all, to compelling contrary evidence.

Sometimes the biggest challenge was to argue a seemingly impossible case, something antithetical to your personal worldview, just for the sport of it.

History has never been value free, almost nothing is, but this is what has not only made it fun, it is also, paradoxically, what has made it one of the truest of all disciplines.

One of the fundamental baseline assertions in psychology is that we create reality by how we populate (or define) that reality. In other words, we deal with the complexities of competing and contradictory ideas by accepting some ideas and rejecting others. We do this all of the time. In other words, a particular argument is framed by the ideas we factor in and, equally, by those we rule out.

So, of course, with history.

It is possible to form opposing arguments, and for each argument to be equally compelling and, in a sense, for each to be true.

The history taught today is profoundly different.

History today is often, although not always, constrained by presuppositional assumptions that rule in some ideas and rule out other ideas at the outset. There are predetermined boundaries of content and discourse. Some things are held to be objectively, and incontrovertibly, true and others to be untrue, and even dangerous.

There is a sense in which this has always been, but it is a matter of degree.

There is a reason why the New Zealand History Curriculum commences in 1840 and not before, why its content is constrained by overarching statements that constrain and configure discourse, why whole perspectives and areas of enquiry have been ruled out, and why its content bears the fingerprints of the incursions of more radical and self interested disciplines.

Postmodernism and critical theory have denuded many of our disciplines of the very things that once gave them value, that provided insight, that protected us from simplistic arguments, that reconciled (by necessary accommodation) seemingly contradictory arguments.

It is hard to know if our universities, and the disciplines through which we once navigated and reconciled complexity and contradiction, are even able to be redeemed.

The postmodern narrative, in its sheer denial of complexity, in its ruthless negation of alternative facts, and in its unyielding adherence to dogma, has initiated a new dark age.

An age which is inevitably generative of the rejection of reality, and the usurpation, and disintegration, of order.

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.