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I haven't built any walls in a long time. Big Sunday morning breakfasts leave me wanting to wax philosophical and put off getting course work done. Maybe you'll appreciate these musings. I thank anyone who reads through all of this in advance.

So I'm not sure how esoteric or out-of-left-field this will come off as, but I've recently had the extreme misfortune of being introduced to critical theory in the practice of history. Basically, critical theory in the study of history is the study of history through a particular "lens." The Straussians, for example, will analyze primary sources through the lens of the 20th-21st century conservative. What that means is they'll try to find parallels and pass judgement on historical figures based on contemporary "conservative" values. On the other end of the spectrum, you have schools of "thought" like "Marxist Feminism" that looks at history through those two lenses.

I am a classicist and a philologist. My method of studying history is philological, which is to say I focus on primary sources and analyze the language in which they are written for etymology of the vocabulary and the nature of the syntax to uncover the motivations and cultural context of the people of a given time, in my case the classical Mediterranean. Basically, rather than speak for a historical people by retrojecting my biases on them, I look directly to the actual words they wrote to understand them.

Critical theory does the opposite. Take "feminist historians" for example. What they'll do is presuppose "patriarchy" as a universal content in historical societies, saying that women have been "oppressed for thousands of years." There's an obvious issue with this sort of vague blanket statement, which is to say it presupposes that the nature of worth in historical societies was measured as it is measured today.

Worth and dignity meant different things to different peoples. While sources indicate that women never held political office in Roman civilization, archaeological evidence (i.e. art) and primary historical sources suggest that women did own businesses, manage households, and exert their will on politics through their husbands, and furthermore that Roman women who excelled in virtue in their station were exalted. For example, the historian Suetonius commends Augustus' wife Livia for organizing fire and "police" brigades for the city of Rome and generally contributing to her husband's domestic policy reforms. Likewise, the Republican matron Cornelia was so dedicated to raising her sons after her husband died that she refused a marriage offer from the King of Egypt to raise them. Consequently, she was enshrined in Roman history as one of their greatest civil figures, with stories and artwork dedicated to her for centuries later.

The point I'm getting at here is that if we read these stories and actually listen to the words of the ancients, the women in their societies don't come off as oppressed. Rather, these stories expose the fact that the ancients had radically different notions of place in society. By piling our contemporary biases on these sources, we blind ourselves to the realities of the past, the realities of other cultures.

Now, when I talk about "patriarchy" as a false concept, I mean to say that the retrojection of "patriarchy" as it was conceived in the mid-to-late 20th century is a false concept, or a false premise. I do not deny that there were patriarchal systems in place in mid-to-late 20th century America, rather I do accept that there were such systems wholeheartedly.

What I am trying to say is that taking those loaded terms that refer to a very geographically and temporally specific cultural system and trying to throw them across the world in a blanketing way is destructive to a genuine understanding of history. It shouts over the past rather than listening to it. As a linguist, I practice and genuinely believe that listening to the past is the best way to understand it.

Why does it matter? You get the term colonialism thrown around a lot in the university setting nowadays and I think that Critical Theory, which presupposes certain universal theories and tries to jam history into those worldviews, is a form of intellectual colonialism masquerading as progressive "liberation" or something like that. In reality, what this practice is jamming a plethora of pegs of many shapes and sizes into the square holes.

Time for another riveting episode of:

I'm No Historian, But…

Studying history is much more than simply trying to find out what happened back when. You have to analyze. But every analysis we can make comes from ourselves, and our views. To claim an unbiased interpretation is impossible.

Let's say slavery. IS IT BAD? Well, if you went by what people who owned slaves said (from any point in history), then it's not that bad. But people nowadays say that slavery is just THE WORST. We use our modern sensibilities to make judgments.

There's nothing wrong with that. Indeed, since bias in interpretation is inescapable, perhaps it's better to disclaimer your interpretations by acknowledging that they come from a certain theory: e.g feminism or colonialism. That way, people will know what judgements you are making, and can take it with a grain of salt. If you have no "pet" theory in your work, then your biases will still exist, but simply be hidden. And that's a disservice to your readers.

Assuming you're writing. But, then, if you aren't writing, then history will forget you faster than you thought.

There's a difference between having biases and pushing an agenda. When you write from a place of philology instead of theory, however, you're lessening the risk of focusing on bias rather than truth. What I'm talking about is a ground-up analysis of primary sources.

To use the issue of slavery in the context of what I'm talking about, slavery has had many connotations throughout history. For example, the earliest forms of slavery in societies like Dark Ages Athens (approximately 700's-600's BC) or Neo-Babylon in about the same time period, was debt slavery, which is to say that people would borrow capital (food, seeds to plant crops) and offer their service/autonomy as collateral. If/when they couldn't pay it back, the creditor would take them into slavery for an amount of time deemed appropriate to pay off the debt. The poor didn't like this practice and saw it as unjust, but it didn't put them in a place of permanent dehumanization: their slavery would end and they'd go back to "life as normal." Compare this debt slavery to the slavery of the early modern period, where Africans were captured en masse and sent halfway across the world, to then have their identities beaten out of them, and you have two radically different systems.

Part of my original post that I think I could have made clearer was that the issue is when you don't factor philology into the study of history that comes from translated documents. An American writing about American slavery doesn't have to worry about this problem, but an American writing about slavery in an ancient culture certainly does.

The problem is, ultimately, that certain scholars are reading works in translation and making tons of judgements and presuppositions based only on their preconceived notions and the cultural and intellectual baggage that is associated with translated words. This process is profoundly destructive to the endeavor of learning premodern history.

The problem is, ultimately, that certain scholars are reading works in translation and making tons of judgements and presuppositions based only on their preconceived notions and the cultural and intellectual baggage that is associated with translated words.

I totally agree with this point. We ought to ask: who is doing the translating? No one contests that it is better to read texts in their original language. But since this is not always possible, then what is a "good" translation?

Even if I read something written in English, if it came from a people far enough away (by space or time), then it might have a very different meaning from how I read it.

But what DO words mean? Only what people mean them to mean. And how do we deconstruct how a word was used? By looking at the other words that go along with it. And how do we know what those words mean? By looking at the surrounding words.

But if this were the only source of meaning (from the primary source itself), then it would be circular and self-defining, which is to say, impossible for anyone to understand (besides the one who wrote it). You have to bring in interpretations based on modern ideas of language and society, or you have to throw out any source as "greek to me".