It is almost impossible for an American traditionalist to dislike English conservative Peter Hitchens, who—I am not sure but I suspect—would abuse this blog if he ever read it. How can one not feel an easy magnanimity toward a man who writes:
If you don’t respect your own Armed Forces, you will fairly soon find that you have to respect someone else’s.
This article however regards not Mr. Hitchens’ attitude toward his country’s armed forces but rather his fine response to a remark by his correspondent Jeff Pollitt. Mr. Pollitt had written:
[Y]ou seem to be suggesting that we teach our children less than the full truth when it comes to history, in order for them to be patriotic. Would this not be teaching patriotism on a false premise?
Mr. Hitchens replied:
[Y]es, that is what I am suggesting, and it would not be on a false premise.
It would be impossible to teach them the ‘full truth’ anyway, since it is so vast, accounts are contentious, even over the battle of Bosworth and the Glorious Revolution - and school history has to be enormously selective.
On what grounds should it select?
To denigrate and dispirit? To confuse and leave fundamentally ignorant? Or to instil knowledge of and pride in the immense achievements of their forebears, which they will inherit and must hand on to their own children, within a coherent narrative?
I have no difficulty about this.
It is true that this country is the birthplace of freedom under the law, of religious and political tolerance, of a rich and majestic culture, which I am proud to have inherited.
It is also true that this has allowed it to be at the forefront of scientific development, to have the world’s first modern economy and - armed with all these things - to defeat - with astonishing valour - many tyrannies, at home and abroad, which threatened the human spirit with endless repression and enslavement.
Once they have learned that, and are confident in it, then they can discover the rest, and see it in proportion and in its proper context.
Mr. Hitchens appends a bit lamely:
I don’t think we should pretend that there were no bad things in our past (my school histories certainly did not do so) or that all foreign countries are inferior (I wasn’t taught that either).
However, the appendix cannot subtract from Mr. Hitchens’ ringing defense of proper patriotic history. I cannot speak for England, of course, but U.S. educationists since about the 1950s have erred egregiously in supposing, implicitly, that the reason we teach history to the young were to make little historians of them. The same educationists compound the error by supposing that history properly consisted of a mass of facts regarding the past, denying history as a civilization’s living narrative whose deepest roots lie more in her mythology than in her archaeology. Romulus and Remus may never objectively have lived, but if the ancient Romans for centuries believed that Romulus and Remus had lived, if they believed that Romulus and Remus had founded the city in 753 B.C., and if they acted on these beliefs, then Romulus and Remus have verily trembled the earth, leaving far deeper an historical footprint than any but a very few who have walked under the sun. Which then is the proper history? The one with Romulus and Remus, or the one without?
History of course can be enriched by original research; but, in the main, what is history if not a continuous, living narrative of which we ourselves are a part? When we permit our spiritually puny educationists, unfit to carry George Washington’s coat, to excise Mr. Washington and his father’s cherry tree from our history books on the myopic ground that “it didn’t really happen that way,” we begin to cut ourselves off from the living narrative of which we are a part. No settled chapter of the history our forebears learned and believed should lightly be excluded from the narrative, for the elemental reason that such chapters, having in fact been learned and believed, can hardly fail to have produced real, historical consequences of a kind, character and degree that most “real facts” never could.
History, properly construed, is the record of a people, attested in writing by those who knew its witnesses, confirmed by the sanction of ages. Small men who, for the sake of mean pride, would subvert such a thing—who arrogate to themselves, mere peddlers of greasy factoids, the honorable title “historian”—merit our contempt.
Knowing Mr. Hitchens, one is not surprised to find him unconfused regarding history’s true nature and purpose, but it is good to encounter his spirited apology nevertheless.
HJH