Windschuttle's Warning

...And as for the argument that the Aztecs failed only because they conceived reality differently, or that they saw war only as sophisticated captive-taking for religious purposes, Windschuttle points out astutely enough that in their eleventh hour of desperation, the Aztecs did try to kill their enemies, mimicking their attackers, changing tactics, and adopting Spanish battle practices, even going so far as to force their captives to demonstrate the use of the crossbow...

...In short, they live lives quite different from those of students at Fresno State...

...Even with the sensational subtitle, who wants to read yet another story of postmodernism, even if it be a refutation...

...agree with me and we will see you at the think-tank...

...We care little whether Mr...

...WlNDSCHUTTLE'S WARNING In Praise of The Killing of History By Victor Davis Hanson Not another book about theory and the rise of cultural relativism, I thought, when first seeing Keith Windschuttle's The Killing of History: How a Discipline Is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists...

...How much easier, Windschuttle reminds us, it is to write opaquely than clearly, how much less work there is in dismissing positivist historians than in actually reading them— suggesting that much of theory's appeal among the young is in its sheer laxity...

...Windschuttle leads us into the arena of historical interpretation, where theory battles traditional history on a variety of fronts...

...the world's authority on the subject turns out to be my former student...

...Next, our guide takes us to the Pacific, where Greg Dening and Marshall Sahlins have argued that the European discoverers of Tahiti and Hawaii were understood by the locals as the apotheoses of native gods...

...After all, the majority of unworldly theorists are patently worldly in that most left-wing literary critics like Frederick Jameson and Stanley Fish or metahistorians like Hayden White, despite their nihilism, demand high Victor Davis Hanson is the author of the recent The Other Greeks: The Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization...

...Conferences, grants, prestigious chairs, and appointments tend to be tribal in nature and are rewarded to those who toe the line...

...My children's history textbooks in the local public school have more about Zulus and Mesoamericans than about the Renaissance or Enlightenment...

...I answer not to worry, that these are just parlor games of the desk-bound class...

...He attacks bitterly the methodology of Francis Fukuyama's resurrection of Hegel's deterministic, all-encompassing theory of historical decline and the argument that, with the death of communism and the spread of capitalism and democracy, the real stuff of history is now about gone...

...Foucault's earlier work on the history of institutions is not so much anti-empirical as plain shoddy and wrong—and in the end silly...

...We need more Keith Windschut-tles, hundreds more of them...

...When on rare occasions I am asked about postmodernism by a few of my history students, it is usually from the very practical angle of, "Who are these people and why do they write these silly things...

...So why, Windschuttle asks, have modern university denizens shown more interest in defending the murderous Aztecs than in learning of the fate of the Huaxtecs and Tlaxcaltecs, who were not oppressors but genuine victims of a murderous Mexican culture...

...Keith Windschuttle is an Australian professor, and fortunately he lacks most of the cynicism and weariness of Americans like me...

...His is a passionate, honest, and hard-hitting expose...

...First, Windschuttle sees the astonishing spread of theory in the recent ethics and practice of scholarship itself...

...But Windschuttle, throughout his katabasis into cultural relevancy, reveals a number of more subtle and very disturbing ethical undercurrents, which we should all take very seriously...

...And because of the brutality of Mexican institutionalized mass murder, cannibalism, and ritual human sacrifice, there was to be no succor from allied indigenous tribes—most of whom quite logically welcomed the Spanish onslaught as a liberation...

...Not long ago, for example, columnists for our local newspaper argued that we must seek absolution for the sins of Western culture in the tenets of Aztec feminism...

...Instead, all they were producing, albeit unwittingly, is an English-language version of a French theory from the 1980s, which itself derives from a German thesis from the 1940s and 1950s that was originally developed by a group of ex-Nazis to lament the defeat of the Third Reich...

...If it were not for the systematic demolition of the "liar's school of Herodotus" by W. K. Pritchett—hard at work in his 80s—we would still be reading that the history of the Persian Wars is but a fictive discourse without any historical substance...

...For example, he shows that the Aztecs were obliterated by a tiny band of Spanish adventurers and thugs because they had no sense of sophisticated tactics, no steel weapons or gunpowder, no horses, and no science of siegecraft...

...the feuds of theorists and traditionalists over academic turf are of little interest to our students, who desperately wish to learn first something of culture, any culture, before they are taught how to tear it down...

...Windschuttle demonstrates that many theorists are not starry-eyed eccentrics, but actually quite adroit in the use of old-fashioned Western ideas like patronage and commerce...

...To address a group of high-school social-science teachers on the legacy of the West is now to be scolded that "we shouldn't judge...

...For relativists, who profess no belief in absolute values or humanism, Windschuttle shows that there is an awful lot of hand-wringing about Western exploitation— hand-wringing that exemplifies timeless and universal notions about human decency...

...In fact, Windschuttle, a traditional liberal humanist, shows that the islanders were more likely impressed with the wealth and technology of the European sailors—and thus quite logically fearful for their own land and material world...

...To Windschuttle, the massive reaction to The End of History is ironic: Fukuyama draws on the same godheads, Hegel and Nietzsche, as the Left, but comes to exactly the opposite conclusion—that Marxism, not capitalism, is dead and the tragedy is not that the masses of the planet will be hungry and exploited, but that they will sink in a stupor of material surfeit and crass affluence...

...No one culture has any thing over another...

...After acclaiming these clearly human intruders chiefs—not gods—out of both respect and fear, they quickly learned of their potential danger and, like human beings anywhere in time and space, fought back...

...The Decline of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, which will appear in January...

...Out here in the heartland (I live and teach in Fresno, Calif...

...In the field of classics, if it were not for the two recent volumes of refutation by Mary Lefkowitz, we would still be subject to the untruth of Martin Bernal and his glitzy pseudo-history of an African-Asiatic origin of Greek culture...

...Thus he is the ideal knight to hack through the coils of postmodernism, because he takes it very seriously, understands it perfectly, explains it clearly, and is shocked that such false knowledge has swept the Western university...

...Derrida got his honorary degree at Cambridge, or who does and does not get invited to the Princeton Institute...

...The shoots of untruth and false knowledge sprout forth in ever more disturbing shapes each season, but they always must be identified and cut back...

...But, alas, there are practical and very important ramifications for most Americans in this rise of academic nihilism, and they need to be addressed systematically and cogently...

...like Edmund Burke, Windschuttle believes that there is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue, and he reached his own long ago...

...For example, Windschuttle is critical of Karl Popper and Simon Schama, whose work has impugned the notion of inductive inquiry and universal truth...

...Windschuttle also reminds us that our generation of theorists is not really novel but has a predictable—and frightening—intellectual heritage: They thought they were participating in an exciting and new theoretical movement...

...For those who do not believe in the "truth," there is an awful lot of narcissistic back-scratching among this new cohort: blurb my book jacket since I praised you inside...

...He and John Heath are co-authors of Who Killed Homer...

...Concerning the European conquest of the Americas, Windschuttle painstakingly reviews—and it is actually rather painful to read—the arguments of David Stannard, Kirkpatrick Sale, Stephen Greenblatt, and Todorov...

...Be that as it may, The Killing of History would be a good, though a redundant, book if it simply described the various tenets of relativism and postmodernism, showed how they have corrupted historical studies, and then warned us of the danger...

...And there are more heads to the hydra of theory...

...Postmodernists believe that they are on a crusade, and thus turn out to be every bit as intolerant as any anti-Communist of the McCarthy era...

...The violence that ensued was a result of the explorers' not conforming to what islanders thought their deities should be...

...salaries and do little undergraduate teaching in the here and now...

...We are introduced to the debate over the conquest of America, the arrival of Europeans in Australia, and the death of Captain Cook on Hawaii, interspliced with synopses of the pseudo-historical work of Foucault and H. White...

...As Windschuttle shows in a moving final chapter called "The Return of Tribalism," the ideas of Michel Foucault, Tzvetan Todorov, and Jacques Derrida really do filter down to places like the outskirts of Fresno...

...Thus "bourgeois" European historians must learn to understand the mind of the Other and his alternative universe where "reason" as we construct it has no sway and absolute "truth" is a Western myth...

...The Killing of History is not a political tract, for not all theorists are on the left...

...This endless and often tedious work, like pruning vines, is no fun, but the alternative is a rank and savage wild...

...Theorists like Michel Foucault often expropriate hard data and "facts" from earlier scholars without citation and trash the source to cover their tracks—and even then they can't get it right, skewing dates and coming to ridiculous and unsupported conclusions...

...While Windschuttle demonstrates how Fukuyama's methodology is ahistorical, I am not sure that he refutes the latter's gloomy prognosis of growing materialism and spiritual decline in America and Western Europe...

...He demonstrates quite conclusively why they are wrong on nearly every count...