Roger Kimball on Keith Windschuttle

Mourning the loss of Keith Windschuttle, New Criterion editor Roger Kimball laments not only the death of a courageous and uncowed historian, but the mortal illness afflicting the discipline itself. Below, a few words from an appreciation that deserves to be read in full -- rf_______________[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he Killing of History is a kind of intellectual Baedeker. It provides readers with a lively tour of the exotica that has come to predominate in the humanities and social science departments of most English-speaking colleges and universities.

Having lived among the natives, Windschuttle has sampled much local fare; he knows all about curiosities like semiotics, and how they got to be that way; he understands the chief local dialects, and can discriminate nicely between structuralism and post-structuralism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, and social constructivism; he knows the best way across the desert of Michel Foucault’s “anti-humanism” and is adept at extricating himself from the swamp of postmodern literary theory; above all, he arms his readers against the cranks, charlatans, and intellectual shysters that populate these environs: he has sage advice for dealing with purveyors of radical skepticism and scientific relativism, as well as commonsense tips for avoiding those who pretend that history is merely a species of fiction.For all this, however, Windschuttle is right that The Killing of History is not “yet another boring book about theory.” His focus throughout is firmly on the discipline of history: on what it should be and how those who deny the claims of empirical truth undermine the core of historical analysis.



“For most of the last 2400 years,” Windschuttle writes in his preface,the essence of history has continued to be that it should try to tell the truth, to describe as best as possible what really happened. Over this time, of course, many historians have been exposed as mistaken, opinionated and often completely wrong, but their critics have usually felt obliged to show they were wrong about real things, that their claims about the past were different from the things that actually happened. In other words, the critics still operated on the assumption that the truth was in the historian’s grasp.

Today these assumptions are widely rejected, even among some people employed as historians themselves. ..

. The newly dominant theorists within the humanities and social sciences were asserting that it was impossible to tell the truth about the past or to use history to produce knowledge in any objective sense at all. They claimed that we can only see the past through the perspective of our own culture and, hence, what we see in history are our own interests and concerns reflected back at us.

The central point upon which history was founded no longer holds: there is no fundamental distinction any more between history and myth.As Windschuttle acknowledged, this attack on historical knowledge is not new; in essence, it goes back at least to Nietzsche (“no facts, only interpretations”). What is new is the prestige and currency that such ideas now enjoy.

Over the past several decades, highly contentious ideas that once subsisted at the fringe of academic speculation (where they belong and can even do some good as a kind of intellectual irritant) have been embraced by the heart of the profession. No longer is the attack on factual knowledge confined to a handful of disgruntled metaphysicians: it has become common coin among mainstream historians and their academic publishers. And if there are still plenty of historians who quietly uphold traditional standards of historical inquiry in their own work, precious few are willing forthrightly to criticize the assault mounted against their discipline.

This is due partly to the vice, endemic among academics, of pusillanimity; but it is also due partly to the fact that many historians whose basic outlook is traditional have themselves begun dabbling in the stew of anti-empiricism, blithely unaware, as Windschuttle notes, that they are “embracing assumptions that have the capacity to demolish everything they stand for.”[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]hat statement is not hyperbole. The idea that observation and inductive reasoning provide no legitimate grounds for historical knowledge; that truth is relative; that language is a kind of “prison house” referring always to itself, not reality: Windschuttle is right that “if historians allow themselves to be prodded all the way into this theoretical abyss, they will be rendering themselves and their discipline extinct.

”The attack on factual knowledge is no longer confined to a handful of disgruntled metaphysicians: it is common coin among mainstream historians. As is the case in literary studies, a common feint is to say that the whole controversy is merely evidence of “generational conflict,” that objections to “new methods” are just the bleatings of old fogies resisting the “innovations” of Young Turks. As Windschuttle points out, however, most of the so-called “new ideas” were put into circulation by scholars in their forties and fifties; “the movers and shakers of this movement,” he notes, “are the old New Left crowd from the 1960s .

.. obviously not so new these days but just as addicted to the latest fashions as they were in the days of hippy beads and flared trousers.

”The difference, of course, is that in the 1960s such figures occupied the periphery of academia. Now they dominate its center: “Since 1985, the dissidents have expanded their territory enormously. Although they still like to portray themselves as embattled outsiders, they are today the ones making all the running—devising new courses, contracting the publishers, filling the new jobs, attracting the postgraduate students.

” Those professors whose intellectual and moral convictions might lead them to fight against these developments are generally “too busy, too tired or too bemused” to object; their inaction has conferred unwonted legitimacy upon their opponents, allowing them to consolidate their authority and perquisites...

[embed]https://twitter.com/JohnLawson_TNO/status/1671265919908339712[/embed]..

.And this brings Windschuttle to the important insight that those who deny the claims of empirical truth in the name of cultural relativism and of overcoming “Eurocentricism” merely replace one European perspective — traditional empirical historiography — with another: cultural relativism. “Those who accept cultural relativism,” Windschuttle points out, “argue that Western ways of knowing do not deserve any privileged status.

” But at a time when what Windschuttle calls “the return of tribalism” threatens many parts of the world with a descent into barbarism, to embrace cultural relativism is also to embrace the “charnel house politics” that has brought such misery and destruction to the Middle East, much of Africa, the Balkans, and elsewhere. This indeed is where the arcane theories of Derrida, Foucault, and their epigoni collide with the real world. They abandon the constraints of empirical truth in the name of liberation.

But what they wind up with is not freedom but a new and more terrible servitude.In pointing all of this out so eloquently, Keith Windschuttle deserves the thanks of everyone who cares about the integrity of our cultural life. RIP.

____________Funeral arrangements for Keith Windschuttle have now been confirmed.Funeral Service: Thursday, 24 April 2025 at 2:15 pmat All Souls ChapelHawthorne Avenue, Rookwood Cemetery, SydneyFor those unable to attend in person, the service will be live-streamed at the following link:Watch the livestreamThe post Roger Kimball on Keith Windschuttle first appeared on Quadrant..