Squash Match

Deirdre McCloskey from the August/September 1998 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Landes takes a too simple view of the inevitability of what happened. It's the historian's vice: What happened happened, so it must have been. His main intellectual tool is hindsight. He claims, for example, that "one could have foreseen the postwar economic success of Japan and Germany by taking account of culture. The same with South Korea vs. Turkey, Indonesia vs. Nigeria."

I don't think so. If things that always eventually happen (from hindsight) are foreseeable and therefore useful for policy or journalism or politics, why wasn't Germany's success foreseen? Most economists and historians in 1945 thought Germany would take 50 years to recover. It took 15. The reason Germany's recovery after the war was called a "miracle" is because people very willing to take culture as "predictive" made wrong predictions. The error is well known in social psychology: the tendency to attribute to character what is in fact a result of conditions. Landes and I have been quarreling about character vs. conditions since 1966, historian vs. economist, S variables vs. P variables. You'd think we'd learn that it's both.

But these are learned quibbles. I can't fault Landes for not writing the book on What Happened in History that I would like to write. How can you not like a man so willing to play the game, and so willing to take on the politically correct?

To Landes, the Palestinian activist and Columbia professor of literature Edward Said is the Great Satan of Political Correctness. Of Said's charge of Orientalism, the West's misperception of the East, Landes writes, "Insofar as the critique holds that only insiders can know the truth about their societies, it is wrong. Insofar as one uses this claim to discredit the work of intellectual adversaries, it is polemical and unscientific." Landes concludes that "[t]he effort...has become an assault on knowledge." Zowie.

Landes never lets up. No region or body of scholarship is exempted. Wittfogel's "hydraulic thesis has been roundly criticized by a generation of Western sinologists zealous in their political correctness (Maoism and its later avatars are good). ...The facts gainsay them." The Aztec diet "embarrasses politically correct ethnologists, who see in such descriptions of cannibalism a justification for foreign contempt and oppression." He explains British success in India not by their violence: "[N]othing other than a reputation for unconditional honesty could have enabled Britain to maintain its empire in India at so little expense." So much for blaming an imperialism that ended 50 years ago for India's present problems.

On the still-poor Balkans: In the "absence of metics [those outsider workers], they war on one another and blame their misery on exploitation by richer economies in Western Europe. It feels better that way." Tsarist Russia: "Communist spokesmen and their foreign adulators rewrote history so as to blacken the reputation of the tsarist regime, while throwing favorable testimonies down the memory hole." Native Americans: "Many Americans are sorry now, while Europeans invite Indian chiefs to Paris and Zurich to recount the litany of white wrong-doing."

On American migration: "Some portray the great flood as a kind of huge kidnapping operation. (Europeans, especially, have trouble dealing with the repudiation implicit in this `massive exodus.') Nonsense." Latin America: "For many Latin American historians and ideologues, it has been vital to emphasize the wickedness of the gringos who came to dominate the Americas." Landes writes, "The failure of Latin American development...has been attributed by local scholars and outsider sympathizers to the misdeeds of stronger, richer nations. Of these ideas, he concludes in italics, "Even if they were true, it would be better to stow them." About the P.C. doubt that there is anything at all to Western progress: "This line of anti-Eurocentric thought is simply anti-intellectual; also contrary to fact."

You gotta love him, squash playing, Eurocentrism, quantophobia, anti-economism, and all. Read the book.

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