The Future of the European Past.

The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past, by Keith Windschuttle (Free Press, 298 pp., $25)

The Future of the European Past, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball (Ivan R. Dee, 233 pp., $26)

Mr. Anderson is the editor of Gentility Recalled: Mere Manners and the Making of Social Order (Acton Institute).

I LEFT my last job in academe at the end of the Seventies to go into the think-tank world. In universities, one mixes a lot with people in one's own discipline. In the new world in which I found myself, one met and had to give an account of oneself to rather more people from other disciplines and backgrounds. Kind, established folk in this new world introduced me to other inhabitants of it. I should add that they were, like me, of a generally conservative disposition. These introductions gave rise to one rather frequent exchange:

"And what's your background, Dr. Anderson?"

"I'm a sociologist."

Incredulity. "No, not really! Gosh, I thought they were all Communists."

"A lot of sociologists are, but not all," I would reply.

"But all that jargon and Germanic language?"

"Yes, there's a lot of that."

Sometimes there would be asides: "Did you hear that? He's a sociologist! Good heavens, a friend of R's [the gentleman who had introduced us], a sociologist!"

Sometimes I would try a bolder move: "Have you considered that it might happen to you?"

Astonishment would give way to disbelief plus confusion. "What might happen to me?"

"No, not you personally. Have you considered that your discipline might be overrun by Communists and relativists all spouting Germanic jargon?" There would be much head shaking. With supreme confidence they assured me that this could never happen to history, ethics, aesthetics, classics, biology, literary criticism, or theology because those were grounded variously in tradition, facts, and established procedures. Nor could the lunatics overrun newer subjects such as business studies because they were grounded in the real world: businessmen would not put up with theory in German.

These two books show, in case anyone had not noticed it, that the invasion has occurred. The Killing of History charts the occupation and subjugation of history. The Future of the European Past reveals the onward march into music (discussed by Roger Scruton), culture (David Pryce-Jones), classics (John Herington), history again, and much else. Keith Windschuttle in the former volume carefully analyzes and dissects the occupying forces. They are a grand alliance of structuralists, postmodernists, semioticians, cultural relativists, hermeneuticians, anti-humanists, historical fictionists, and radical skeptics.

Though Mr. Windschuttle writes about the occupation of history, the assault on it comes from a variety of disciplines, including what was English and is now cultural studies. The re-drawing of academic frontiers and the replacement of old academic nations with new territories is part of the strategy. In order to show how the assailants rewrite history, he explores their accounts of various events. They of course would deny that these are events: we cannot establish events; we can only look at the past through the distorting lens of our own culture with all the "interests" that incorporates. Mr. Windschuttle discusses their accounts of the Battle for Quebec, the mutiny on the Bounty, the British founding of Australia, the fall of Communism (also discussed by Anne Applebaum in the other book), and the Spanish conquest of Mexico. He shows precisely how the crazies have got it wrong historically. His analyses are too detailed even to summarize here but are very convincing. If you need to be convinced.

The second book is full of incisive analyses and examples of the nonsense. "It is not that pop stars want to be intellectuals, but that intellectuals want to be pop stars -- a uniquely contemporary crisis. The threat to the European past comes not from mass vulgarization, but from elite vulgarization" (Mark Steyn). "What we have witnessed is an epidemic of intellectual slumming . . . a new form of elite illiteracy" (David Pryce-Jones). The higher culture has come "to be analyzed rather than lived. . . . What passes for European culture is nothing of the kind, but entertainment of a mass nature . . . football matches, television co-productions, the Eurovision song contest (in which the recent British entry was called 'Ooh Aah Just a Little Bit')." Anne Applebaum talks of the total inability of modern political, moral, and historical culture to face up to the guilt of Communism and its fellow-travelers. We are, she says, "tired of the past. There is absolutely no attempt to point the finger at anyone." Young people know nothing of the events that shaped their nation and culture. Even trivial mention of the past is obliterated: "a pub in Kent . . . mentioned by Dickens . . . formerly called 'Guy, Earl of Warwick,' is [now] 'The Ferret and Trouser Leg"' (John Gross).

Roger Kimball is perhaps best at pin-pointing what this disaster in all about. It is not just about new, modern, or postmodern vandals assailing a wisdom and culture that were secure until the 1960s. It is about strands deep in the legacy of the Enlightenment. We are reaping the harvest of a movement that loosed reason from tradition. There is a problem, and if you seek to know its intellectual origins, read these books.

But more needs to be explained. First, these books do not go far, or rather wide, enough in terms of disciplines. They do not chart the invasion of medicine by epidemiological jugglery or that of the hard sciences notably by environmentalism and utopian risk attribution. Or the grand march of psychoanalytic derivatives, counseling and touchy-feely nonsense, through business studies and much else. But more important, some of us were already aware of this grand invasion. What we want to know is how it happened. How were the assailants able to conquer such vast territories so easily? More particularly, why were the territories so weakly defended? That is essentially the same question as that about the erosion of our moral and family structure. It is not: How competent was the attack? but, How incompetent was the defense? Why did Middle America and Middle England roll over in the Sixties and allow mantra-moaning youngsters to walk all over them? Why did the guardians of traditional culture in the universities and publishing houses give in so easily?

These books do not address this crucial question. Nor do they address another about the consequences of the invasion. They assume that it is a disaster for culture. It may be. But it need not be. It is certainly a disaster for universities. But there are signs that mass modern universities may not be the most appropriate carriers of good culture anyway. Let the crazies have their university departments. The real test is whether traditional culture can survive outside. Does modern society have the class, family, and religious institutions which can resist the nonsense? If not, and there is a chance that it doesn't, then we really are in trouble.