Look at the remarkable structure of rationalizations you’ve constructed in order to blame the crimes of Mugabe and his ilk on the people who tried to prevent him from coming to power, and excuse the people (including yourself) who brought him to power. Needless to say, this is a narrative that could only exist in a reactionary-free environment. Otherwise, someone might be tempted to laugh.

Of course Mugabe inherited the Rhodesian state. You gave it to him. (Specifically, as I’m sure you know, South Africa forced Rhodesia to surrender in a misguided attempt to appease the “international community,” ie, you and your friends.) And I’m sure that you would prefer if, rather than having so rashly attempted to defy you, Rhodesia had surrendered earlier. The French have a saying: cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l’attaque, il ce defend. “This animal is very wicked; when you attack it, it defends itself.”

No doubt you’re familiar with the phrase “Exeter Hall.” Richard Francis Burton dedicated his Wanderings in West Africa to “the true friends of Africa – not to the ‘philanthropist’ or Exeter Hall.” Read his description of Sierra Leone, and ask yourself what he would make of Africa today. He would say: you gave all of Africa to Exeter Hall, and Exeter Hall turned it all into Sierra Leone.

A “vague, liberal do-goodism” is indeed an accurate description of the mood under which the Exeter Hall movement, and its modern successor the aid-ocracy, operates and has always operated. If good intentions guaranteed good results, Africa would have grown into a paradise under your loving care.

It has not. And what is astounding is that, when history records that figure X predicted that if policy P was followed, the results would be A, and figure Y predicted that the results would be B; P was followed, and B resulted, you have constructed a little cottage industry which devises explanations of why X was right and Y was wrong. (If you need names for X and Y, try Garfield Todd and Godfrey Huggins.)

Do I believe that the ideas and policies of Froude, Carlyle, Burton and their ilk were perfect? Or the governments of Verwoerd and Smith? Of course not. But if your goal in studying history is to represent the past as it really was, wie es gegentlich gewesen, rather than to fulfill the Orwellian dream that who controls the past controls the future – why not start with those whose analysis of reality was actually confirmed by actual events?

Moreover, there is another narrative that can be constructed around Exeter Hall. In this narrative, “vague, liberal do-goodism,” while still the sentiment in everyone’s heart, is not the real emotion that drew so many followers to the flag of “a man, and a brother.” The real emotion is the desire in every human’s heart, or at least every male human’s: to exercise influence over events in the world. Ie, to wield power. Surely you can’t deny that the philanthropic movement has wielded quite a bit of power.

As your example demonstrates, however, it is constitutionally unwilling to accept responsibility for the effects of its actions. If Ian Smith had brought the ANC to power, and used it (for example) as a pro-government militia which enforced order by burning its enemies alive, you would certainly ascribe its crimes to the RF. But this principle of contagion operates in only one direction. It works for Tories, but not for Whigs. And it allows you, in your reactionary-free environment, to present your hands as clean. No one at Swarthmore, certainly, will dispute this characterization.

Thus we have power without responsibility, the harlot’s famous prerogative. Are you still surprised that I use words like “guilt” and “conscience?” And if you believe that Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts, and the like are a substitute for Froude and Carlyle, you clearly haven’t read much Froude or Carlyle. Fortunately, it’s never too late.

As for “racism,” let me throw out a name again: James Watson. “Whereas all the testing says not really.”

If there is one premise on which the entire Exeter Hall narrative is and always has been based, it is the assumption that Africans are, to put it crudely, Europeans with black skins. Or to put it more technically, that the human species is neurologically uniform. There has never been a speck of evidence to support this assumption, which in the light of our 21st-century understanding of human genetic diversity is almost comical. It is entirely religious in origin – a product of Christianity, not science.

The result is that you’re designing political systems for populations with mean IQs in the 70s, based on the fact that they work (barely – like Carlyle, I am no fan of democracy) for populations with mean IQs in triple digits. And then, when these designs fail, you either are shocked and amazed, or invent some way to blame it on your enemies.

Could anyone be this naive? Actually, I think not. You are not a serious believer in democracy. You don’t actually believe that elected officials (ie, politicians) should be making public policy. Oh, no. You believe that all the real decisions should be taken by you and your friends – the competent ones.

In Africa, this translates into a system in which the Mugabes, the Mandelas and the Zumas are supposed to act as figureheads for Western-trained civil servants of African descent, the smartest 0.1% or 0.01%, who learned public policy at Harvard, Stanford, and maybe even Swarthmore. They will lead their countries into the new, bright future.

In practice, at its best, this system turns into the rule of the wa-Benzi tribe. At its worst, the Mugabes and the Zumas decide they don’t want to take orders from Harvard. They would prefer to interpret the word “independence” according to its literal meaning. And since you have been going up and down crowing that you brought this wonderful good, “independence,” to the benighted peoples of Africa, you have a tough time disagreeing.

In reality, there is one independent country in Africa. Its name is Somaliland. It is independent in the sense that “in” means “not,” and “dependent” means “dependent.” If Zimbabwe had truly achieved its “independence” in 1981 – consider, for a moment, the remarkable Orwellian quality of this interpretation – we would have seen a return of the traditional patterns and structures of government in that area of the world. I believe you are familiar with these patterns and structures.

Instead, “independence” in sub-Saharan Africa meant the destruction of every remnant of traditional African society, and aggressive Westernization across the board. In an independent Africa, rulers would have titles like “Sultan” and “Sheikh” and “Chief.” Instead we see presidents and prime ministers galore. Ah, independence.

If you read the writings of the Exeter Hall crowd from, say, the 1940s, you’ll see that their main critique of colonialism is that it has actually retarded the economic development of Africa, by preserving agrarian cultures and failing to create a modern, socialist, industrial state. With public-policy experts like these, who needs liars?

I suspect that when it is finally written by honest and disinterested historians, the story of “decolonialization” will be written as a sort of second Scramble for Africa. In the aftermath of WWII, the more or less responsible and more or less Tory administrators, merchants, settlers and soldiers to whom Britain and France had entrusted colonial government were divested of their conquests, in favor of American and, more generally, Whig missionaries, diplomats, journalists and academics. The strong take from the weak, as always.

The winners in this struggle devastated Africa to a point that made King Leopold look like a piker, in exchange for a rich and permanent supply of jobs in aid, diplomacy, public policy, etc. Africa employed more white men than ever, although fewer of them actually lived there. And, of course, they called it “progress.” The Whig never changes.

Ever seen the documentary Africa Addio? You can get it on DVD these days. Sometimes video is just the thing for breaking through a stale narrative.

Now I would not class among our shortcomings an insufficient appreciation of Godfrey Huggins saying these people are not ready for democracy. That’s also screwed up in various ways. Eugenia Herbert has an interesting, very short book on the Central African Federation, which she argues was a genuine alternative to standard-issue nationalism rather than a simple interregnum. You could look for a similarly interesting and complex case of successful transition in Botswana, which I think is about the “deep history” of late 19th Century Tswana state formation and its particular intersection with British colonialism. It’s not “these people” as in all these people, it’s “this history, this process, these structures, these particular individuals, these bad and venal decisions and actions”. More importantly, I’m struck not by the discontinuities between the late Rhodesian state and the Zimbabwean state but the continuities. Mugabe took most of the capacities of the post-UDI Rhodesian state for censorship, police surveillance, suppression of civil liberties, propaganda and violence and extended them while removing whatever few inhibitions the Rhodesians still had about their use. Most of the administrative culture of that state were eventually undercut, but the RF had already set about undercutting a lot of the capacities and professionalism of the bureaucracy from pre-1965, replacing a lot of long-term administrators with its own political loyalists. So even there ZANU-PF was given a tutorial.

If you want an ardently pro-imperialist figure today, you don’t have to look any further than Niall Ferguson–a prolific historian who is widely read. You can even find a few racists here and there, though they’re not exactly regarded with respect and admiration. Is your point that they should be? That we should have a healthy admixture of racists in our professioriate? If so, I’d be curious about why, and if that’s your vision of ‘reactionary’, why stop there? Why not have intellectual projects from the 15th, 12th, 9th, or 5th Centuries represented intact in the contemporary academy? Even if you don’t believe that history is progressive (and yes, I do believe in progress, if that’s the crime of which you mean to accuse me), surely you believe that history is *change*.

“[Gloucester, Mass.] officials have been reeling for a week since Principal Joseph Sullivan told Time magazine that girls had gotten pregnant on purpose, celebrating with high-fives and plans for baby showers when they learned in the school health clinic they were expecting.” (AP, June 24, 2008)

Laura at 11D notes this as well:

“What were these middle school girls thinking when they posed topless for cell phone pictures?

“Some say they weren??t thinking at all.

Pascack Valley High School??s recent discovery of racy photos of more than 20 girls on school laptops has caused a furor of discussion over why students would do something so degrading and potentially dangerous.”

Can we pick out a latter-day Wertham targets ahead of time?

IMHO, it’s very easy to say what a reactionary in the academy today would believe. There is already an adequate supply of antiracists, anti-imperialists, and anticolonialists on any university campus today. There is perhaps a slight shortage of racists, imperialists, and colonialists. Wouldn’t you say?

Forget Froude. Let’s try a more recent figure – Godfrey Huggins. Dr. Huggins once observed that it might not be the most prudent policy in the world to entrust the political franchise to a population which still seriously trusted in the entrails of goats. “Obviously, Dr. Huggins,” one might reply, “you’ve been proven quite wrong about that. This is why, where I work, we refer to your position as discredited.”

What I mean is: does anyone take Froude seriously? Or Carlyle, for that matter? Is anyone interested in the problem of explaining to these gentlemen in what way their positions, which were of course racist, colonialist and imperialist, were wrong? “Well, Professor Froude, we did give Jamaica a constitution – you Nazi, you – and nowhere on the island today is there anything like a ditch full of rotting garbage, the sight that so appalled you when you spent a few hours in Port-au-Prince. No! In Jamaica is all sweetness and delight, mon. So much for your racist, colonialist imperialism.”

And along the same lines, I certainly can’t accuse you of being a defender of Zuma, or of Mugabe. I do think I can accuse you, however, of being a part of the movement whose result was the accession to power of these fine gentlemen. Were you in a shantytown on a college quad somewhere, in 1989 or 1990? What would you say if your older self had come up to you and whispered deep in your ear: we will kill for President Zuma…? Come on, I can’t believe you haven’t had a few twinges of conscience along the way. Your blog is practically littered with them.

I’m going to try and blog about the situation in Zimbabwe later today if I get time: that might be a good opportunity for you to take up some of your comments about racism. I’d appreciate it if they were taken up as part of a conversation rather than an indictment.

I do think your comments on J. Anthony Froude (which could just as easily extend to Froude’s best known interest, Thomas Carlyle) are interesting. A few modest thoughts, some of which may strike you as pedantic. I don’t think there are *any* late Victorian or Edwardian British historians or intellectuals who are in a straightforward or linear fashion the progenitors of contemporary scholarly practice. There are philosophers like Mill or Bentham who certainly have scholarly “disciples” even today but even in those cases there are many intervening layers of later writing and study which more immediately shape contemporary work. And Froude, whatever else one might say about him, did not really write in a way that was broadly theoretical or philosophical. I’d also suggest that there is a complicated intellectual history that connects postmodernism/poststructuralism with what Berlin called “Counter-Enlightenment”, of which I think Carlyle and Froude might be said to be a part.

What you may mean more is, “Does Froude have any admirers”, to which I would say, “Just about anybody who ever wrote anything in the past probably has a few scholarly or intellectual admirers today”. Or perhaps you wish he had stylistic descendants, and this is why you ask, “Where are the reactionaries in the contemporary academy?” If you regard “reactionary” as a fixed set of beliefs that were established by Froude or other past thinkers (say, as an orthodox Marxist might apply a purity test to contemporary leftist activists to ask whether they’re ‘really’ Marxists), then I don’t know how to answer that because I don’t know quite what you would sum up as the fixed or essential beliefs of a ‘reactionary’ in that mode. (Froude strikes me as a hard person to systematize.) If you mean, are there any people who stylistically strive to be ‘reactionary’ in the academy, I’d say, sure. Not a lot, but there are both people who I think have a fundamentally negative take on contemporary American society and see a past social or political order as strongly preferable and people who are eccentric, unpredictable, iconoclastic, and so on.

One of the reasons there are not more of the latter, I’ve argued here many times, has less to do with any specific political dogma and more to do with professionalization and careerism in the post-1960 American academy. But maybe there were always more Mencken-like writers outside the academy than there were inside of it, and maybe it’s never really something we’ve expected of the professiorate since 1900 or so. Think about the really memorably iconoclastic or even politically reactionary intellectuals of the last century. Not a lot of them were full-time professors.

Unfortunately WordPress also does not provide a thread in which one can criticize a blog as a whole. So I thought I’d simply insert my lumps on the latest, which displays all your usual “narratives” if in a minor form.

But I find it odd for a professional historian to be so unconcerned about whether he’s on the right side or the wrong side of even the smallest issue. If you’re not willing to defend your perspectives, what’s the use in having them? If small errors in moral judgment are permissible, large ones can hardly be far away. “We will kill for President Zuma!”

Also, since I’ve criticized you several times from afar (google “Unqualified Reservations”), it strikes me as only fair to give you an opportunity to respond. Indeed you make an excellent example (why say “synecdoche” when one can say “example”?) of your ilk.

I will say I’m having a hard time doping out how this particular post triggered the degree of antagonism in your comments. I kind of get the feeling I’m acting as a synecdoche for a complaint you have about a larger group of people, institutions or positions.

——–

Doug, the lyrics controversy is another good example (Tipper Gore!) and Zappa’s a great example of the dilemma someone faces when they have to try and figure out what to say back to a cultural panic. Zappa was a smart guy, so he may well have known that history tends to vindicate those who stand against censorship and prudery, but that’s not much comfort when you’re trying to hold off the creation of laws or bureaucracies which will be a burden for years or decades to come.