posted by Hugh Burling on St Edmund King and Martyr’s Day

Forewarning: when I use “speech marks” I am quoting somebody. When I use ‘inverted commas’ I am putting scare quotes round words used in ways I distrust.

Towards the end of May there were rumblings about Michael Gove’s overtures to the historian Niall Ferguson (“Empire”: How Britain Made the Modern World” etc., the Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard), inviting him to play a key role in revising secondary school history curricula. This is now very old news, but I have been rather busy since the end of May with Tripos and then in my wonkshop. This is not an article condemning Ferguson and/or Gove for “Imperialism”, nor endlessly trawling through the relative kill-counts of historical regimes, in the style of Johanne Hari, to prove how horrible my country is. There is something deeper at stake in Ferguson’s and Gove’s approach to history teaching: something more serious has happened in the last three hundred years than various massacres and technological developments. Those were just like any other massacres and technological developments.

This more serious historical development is often called the “Enlightenment”. It is something which, I understand from his writing, Michael Gove has a worrying penchant for. When Michael Gove says that he wants to “celebrate” Britain’s ‘acheivements’, what he is talking about is the development of constitutional monarchy, or rather, liberal democracy without bloody revolution (except in Ireland and Scotland…). He is talking about the development of the Church of England as a via media which criticizes society from within it, evolving with it. He is talking about Mill and Newton and Hume and Darwin and Adam Smith and the rest of them, who taught us so many ‘self-evident’ truths (I hope the contradiction here is clear) about the nature of the world and ourselves and our place within it. And he is talking about how we exported these ‘acheivements’ across the globe. Gove does not mention these things, because to mention Britain’s ‘acheivements’ and ‘traditions’ is, for him, to automatically imply them: his Enlightenment rationalism-liberalism is encoded in the what he opposes in his opponents. I am afraid that the Times paywall and time in general prevent me from finding you a juicy paragraph of his on Islam to show you what I mean.

When I read what he has written on religiosity in general, however, and on British culture and the (amusement?) value of tradition, it becomes clear that Gove is not just a rationalist-liberal. I am not convinced from his writing that he has ever read Mill, Hume or Adam Smith’s own writing; nor do I think that the complexity of his views stems from the skepticism and confusion brought about by serious study (unlike some English graduates he did not have the benefit of studying something else for Part 1). I think Mr Gove has internalised a set of prejudices about “liberty”, “rights”, and (boo, hiss and look behind you!) “Progress”, the word now used to refer to the triumph and to laud the truth of our new prejudices, just as “Enlightenment” was written about self-consciously by boring Germans in the late 1700s. And at the same time he has internalised (or retained) a set of prejudices about the greatness of Britain. The combination of this latter set with any other set of prejudices will lead to those prejudices determining what specific things one believes makes/made Britain great. The combination of that latter, patriotic, set with his former prejudices leads to a worldview which has a name; it is what sets the British (then American) political expression of the Enlightenment apart from its European counterparts. It is called Whiggery.

What is wrong with Whiggish understandings of history, from the historiographical perspective, is what is wrong with ‘Enlightenment’ and what is wrong with ‘Progress’ and a subset of the general problem of Historiographical Whiggery (over-politely termed ‘Whig history’, as if the Whig ever does anything except different kinds of Whiggery), ‘Empire’. What is wrong with these is that they are grand narratives which interpret the complex, confusing and often apparently arbitrary events of human history as chapters in a story which lead to a happy ending which is either here or near at hand. Worse, this happy ending may be understood as both near at hand and threatened by the political enemy: the “lunatic fringe” (pace Adornot), “forces of conservatism” (pace Blair) or “counter-revolution” (pace God knows how many ghastlies). There are several problems with this approach to historiography which I haven’t space to explore here, so for now I want to focus on how Historiographical Whiggery undermines conservatism (and ultimately Conservatism). Shorn of the prejudices that make it Whiggery and not just British ‘Enlightenment’, it leads logically to Progressivism. Bold claim, you say: surely all the classical liberals became neo-liberals? Surely the Wealth of Nations leads to the Road to Serfdom? But no: unfortunately the painting of the movement of thought is a very big one: if you are focussing on how the huntsmen gaze lovingly at their ladies you will miss the ditch the artist has placed before their horses.

Historiographical Whiggery and Progressivism are both grand narratives of change: history is a series of developments from inadequate states of affairs that, being inadequate, could not have remained how they were. The status quo is a pregnant invalid: she serves no purpose but to birth and nurture the future, and in giving it strength she will exhaust hers and die. Niall Fergusson sees the benefits to humanity of empire as continuing ever onward in new and more liberating forms: he vets America to take up the torch now the British Empire is fallen. Moreover, within grand narratives of change, the values that we have now are the right ones and so different ones in the past must be wrong, and so the process by which we reached ours must be improvement.

On one level grand narratives of change can be seen as unconscious apologies for the accidents of yesterday. When good men and women did and said too little and virtue failed, and vice became normal…everything’s ok because vice was really virtue and those men and women had to fail for us to see this ‘self-evident’ truth. By this mechanism we justified the chaos wrought upon British society by the Reformation; by the Glorious Revolution; by the Industrial Revolution. And by Whig values today Thatcherites, Libertarians and neo-liberal economists still justify the chaos wrought upon global society by globalisation, citing all sorts of ‘self-evident’ truths about individual liberty and the choosing, knowing agent, ’self-evident’ truths that had to be laboriously argued for during the Enlightenment. By this mechanism, also, Progressives justify the chaos wrought upon society by the unexpected perverse incentives of the Welfare State; by the Cultural Revolution (of the 1960s in Britain); by ill-planned withdrawal from colonies not yet ready to produce peaceful stable governments, ect. ect. By this mechanism, every time the Whig fails to win an argument against the Progressive, the truth of his political eschatology is threatend, yet every time the Progressive fails to win an argument, that is just Progress taking its time against the Enemy of the status quo.

Now, the shared approach to historiography means that in situations of Whig defeat the Whig must become the Progressive, because what is now is right and what was is wrong; what is now is Progressivism, so my Whiggery (he says, in his rasping nasal voice) can only be right insofar as it is ‘progressive’. Hence all this babble about “progressive conservatism” (when modern Conservatives say conservatism they usually mean virtuous Whiggery). “Progressive conservatism” (i.e. progressive Whiggery) means accepting the new sens commun as right and as always having been right, and sticking to one’s conservatism/Whiggery as merely a practical method (the sin of the Peelite). David Cameron: “the ‘progressive’ half of progressive conservatism represents the ends we are fighting for…a society where opportunity is equal…a planet that is environmentally sustainable” (speech to Demos). The conservative (not the Thatcherite or the American conservative, that is) understands that equal opportunities are a distraction; the Tory recognises them as potentially destructive. I hope this made sense as I have to move on.

Historiographical Whiggery is wrong for all the other general postmodern boring reasons that grand narratives (and especially grand political narratives) are wrong. But as I said, I am attacking it here because it is incompatible with conservatism. Now you know what Whiggery is, at least historiographically speaking; I think you can work it out what Wiggery as an ideaology or set of prejudices is from the carefully placed allusions above.  I’ll try to show the nature of conservatism more briefly by describing how it entails a history curriculum more like what we have now and certainly not like Fergusson’s and Gove’s “big story”. Cameron attacked “tapas history” taught in schools, in which syllabi involve lots of isolated circumstances and incidences without pupils learning a chronological story through their years. My parents had to pay through the nose so that I could start with the Ancient Egyptians at age eight and get to the trenches by year nine (the Princes in the Tower were my fav). But the advantage of “tapas” history, for those schools which cannot afford to pay teachers for the same level of commitment, nor self-select well-behaved middle-class children through fees, should be obvious to the conservative.

The conservative wants to defend institutions which we can trust to make sense of the complexity of the world because they have endured through the vagaries of human history (the family, the monarchy, the covenant between God and man as expressed in concrete forms changed only at moments of clear revelation). What better way to highlight the vagaries of human history, the limitations and ephemeral nature of unworthy cultures and structures, than a “smorgasboard” (Fergusson) of different societies and thought structures? When we study in the space of four years in GCSE and A-Level a little bit of the Slave Trade, a little bit of  Suffragism, a little bit of the trenches, a little bit of Churchill at Yalta, we can see how what is ‘self-evident’ to one generation is pretty obscure and unwelcome to the former and the next; and we can see in the background those prejudices which are reliably and hence truly our own as British people, those institutions which see us through the bombs and the chains. As for “smorgasboard” European history, anyone who can pay attention in class when being taught 20th Century European history and still come out believing in “Progress” is clearly a moron lost to us. They are not clever enough to be a threat.

Yes, there are problems with the Smorgasboard Curriculum in its repetitiousness: too much Nazism and not enough China breeds pinkos; too much Slave Trade and not enough Missionaries breeds self-haters. Yet this is no excuse for basing an entire secondary school curriculum on narrative history. I’ll repeat, as I finish, that my concern is not Fergusson “getting empire in by the back door” (Brotton). I don’t really know what I think of the British Empire and as I said earlier comparative kill-counts are less interesting than what may well have been three centuries of the unravelling of Geist or even Being’s-Self-Disclosure. My concern is that by trying to ‘traditionalise’ the curriculum by introducing “a more connected sense of narrative history – of how Hitler and Henry VIII fit into the rest of history” (Gove, Hay Festival May 2010) we will inculcate bad and credulous historiographical habits in our children. Michael Gove is worried about the barbarians at the gates, and normally I would say good luck to him. But I’m worried about the reds in our heads, and I think I have shown how Whig histories lead there.