Down the Memory Hole

Last fall John J. Miller observed that military history is dying out in our nation’s universities.  There are still a few old codgers left, aging professors close to retirement, but they aren’t being replaced.

On this Memorial Day Rich Lowry adds his two cents worth.

John A. Lynn recently looked back at the past 30 years of the prestigious academic journal The American Historical Review. He found no articles on the conduct of World War II, the American Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars.

We know why wars and military history are marginalized in the modern university.  It is bias, pure and simple.

New Republic contributing editor David A. Bell locates that bias deep in the social sciences: "The origin of these sciences lie in liberal, Enlightenment-era thinking that dismissed war as primitive, irrational and alien to modern civilization." This represents a fundamental misapprehension of human nature and thus the nature of history.

That is to say, it goes beyond bias to the fundamental understanding of the world held by Enlightenment-era thinkers and their adepts.

The odd thing is that, in its revolutionary subculture, the Enlightenment folks understand conflict completely.  They understand that marginalized peoples must elbow their way into history or be ground underfoot.  The racism-sexism-classism-homophobia folks experience everything in terms of power and conflict.

And Saul Alinsky famously wrote his Rules for Radicals to teach lefties how to battle the reactionary establishment.

The good thing is that men love studying wars and conflict so much that plenty of military history can go forward outside the academy.  It shows up on the groaning shelves of military history at the local bookstore and on cable’s History Channel which has so much programming about World War II that wags have renamed it the "Hitler" Channel.

Chances are that in the near future we’ll need a generation of leaders well versed in military arts and military history in order to deal effectively with radical Islam.

It’s a pity that our universities won’t be of any help.