When we talk for any length of time, we inevitably reach a point where she makes a partisan assertion about a matter of public controversy as if it is self-evidently true. At this point I can either lock arms in solidarity with righteousness and be counted among the saved, or indulge my preference for seeing things in their complexity and from a variety of perspectives (preserving the uncertainty) and be counted among the damned. My friend is uninterested in considering what the world looks like through another lens, so all of the heavy lifting of syncronizing worldviews falls to me. Needless to say these are exhaustingly one-sided conversations, although when I’m tired and cranky my inner Stalin of perspective-shifting does come out and join battle, to no lasting avail.

It’s tempting to think that she’s just not very bright, but that’s not it. Within her box she’s very thoughtful and effective. It might be more fair to say that she has a very focused integrity to which her intelligence is entirely dedicated. She would not hesitate to go wading into those nasty Texas infidels with every weapon at her disposal, and no doubt they would all rejoice together in the opportunity to struggle for their faith.

Can a Rousseauian General Will cope with these folks? Only one way, I think. It’s always the Terror with them.

I would think that a good teacher could take the contingencies of mandated content in stride and use them as an opportunity to develop some historiographical reflection, in themselves and the students. OK, the Gold Rush seems random. What might be behind its inclusion? What piece does it add to this puzzle image we’re putting together? How does it connect and not connect with the other units?

If you need history to actually do something for you in the present other than entertain you or support your sense of intellectual superiority, then what it means to get it right changes. There may be political or therapeutic or identity-mything purposes that generate their own standards of reason and fairness. When these purposes run up against each other and the histories they produce are incompatible, it’s time for a street fight. The original generative standards are beside the point then, it’s about looking for rhetorical openings to land blows. This is what the conservos tend to understand better than the libs.

I do think, like Weber, that it’s possible to do both, but not at once.

A reasoned, fair-minded, methodologically transparent, standards-driven investigation of the past hasn’t given them the outcome they would like to date – from their view they’ve already lost to the other side of the political aisle on the important debates of american history.

It’s not like collecting quality data and doing quality analysis save us from debates that degenerate into shouting matches. But I still think it’s a hell of a lot better than starting with the shouting.

Dealing with a certain species of politically active evangelical Protestant* to some extent means that you have to just put the scholar aside. I mean, if I thought that the the folks on the Texas school board were seriously interested in showing how Christian thought relates to Anglo-American institutions, I’d be thrilled if they would address it. When you look at Samuel commentaries, and the fact that there’s often a strong degree of overlap between political reformers and commentators on tyrranical kings (this is especially the case in the twelfth and sixteenth centuries), it’s clear that you need to look at our political history with the religious element in mind.

But the folks in the Texas school board don’t have any of those concerns. At all. Even when they’re right, they’re right for the wrong reasons. So they need to be fought on basic principle.

Of course, it’s often militant secularists who are the only ones who’ll take up the fight, and they don’t really have much interest in honest historical scholarship either. And there I just fell into the on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand approach that the committed and wrong are able to exploit with such deftness.

Dammit.

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*And not all politically active Evangelicals. The guys of Stop Prison Rape, for example, are mostly evangelicals and doing work that no one else seems to feel necessary to bother with.