The Uses of Scholarship and Historian as Citizen Notes

The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy

The Uses of Scholarship

Howard Zinn reflects on Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement, emphasizing the need to re-examine the role of universities and scholars in driving radical change.
Scholars are privileged to produce inconsequential studies, lectures, and term papers, thriving on public innocence, unlike politicians who are paid for pretending to care.
Scholars often detach themselves from social issues, maintaining neutrality in their scholarly work and celebrating achievements like space travel while ignoring suffering on Earth.
The author critiques the irrelevance of scholarly work by comparing doctoral dissertations and scholarly journals with real-world issues like war deaths and income inequality in Latin America.
The gap between scholarly activity and the needs of the world was tolerable when the nation seemed to be solving its problems, such as the race question and wealth distribution.
However, the author claims that these solutions are no longer effective. Examples include the Black Power revolt and anti-Vietnam War protests, indicating that the United States has run out of time and rhetoric.
Liberal reforms like the Fourteenth Amendment and the U.N. Charter are insufficient, necessitating revolutionary changes. The challenges to revolution is that power and wealth are concentrated in government, corporations, and the military.
Zinn discusses the knowledge industry (universities, colleges, and schools) as a crucial form of power, representing a 65 billion investment. While force is a direct form of power, social control relies on consent achieved through education and values.
The rise of democracy equates to replacing force with deception (education) to maintain societal norms, making knowledge a vital tool.
Knowledge can counteract deception, making the knowledge industry a sensitive locus of power that can either maintain the status quo or drive change.
Powerful entities attempt to commandeer knowledge, enticing talented individuals into executive roles in business and government, such as physicists working on H-bombs or historians recording events that echo their own agenda.
Most knowledge is squandered on trivial pursuits, turning universities into playpens that distract favored children, with examples like studies on Hurricane Betsy's impact on mayoral elections and research on poverty in ghettos:
Zinn clarifies that he is not against all scholarship but emphasizes the need for proportion. He contrasts discussing problems of the Ming Dynasty with the absence of sessions on Vietnam at an Association of Asian Studies meeting.
Knowledge is wasted on pretentious conceptualizing in social sciences, where catchphrases stimulate endless academic discussions that remain detached from the real world.
The author notes the rising student demonstrations for black studies programs and radical critiques of society. Also noted is increased dissenting behaviour by professors at scholarly meetings (e.g., denouncing U.S. policy in Vietnam at the American Philosophical Association).
There is a cluster of beliefs stuck to the scholar, that even the most activist cannot cleanly extricate themselves. These beliefs are roughly expressed by the phrases \“disinterested scholarship,\” \“dispassionate learning,\" \"objective study,\" \"scientific method\"-all adding up to the fear that using our intelligence to further our moral ends is somehow improper.
He challenges the arguments for \"disinterested, neutral, scientific, objective\" scholarship, advocating for a revolution in the uses of knowledge to correspond with societal changes.
Rule 1: Challenge the concept of \"disinterested scholarship\" as naive, because powerful interests, such as businesses and political entities, seek to mold universities to fit existing social structures that maintain their own power.
The university should declare its interest in eliminating war, poverty, and hatred,
Rule 2: Reject \"objectivity\" as the ultimate goal.
Accuracy in reporting is essential, but it is only a prerequisite. A scholar's values should determine the questions asked, not the answers.
Rule 3: Overcome extreme Specialization. To tackle significant problems, we must cross disciplinary lines, combining historical analysis, economic theories, and political insights.
Specialization prevents a comprehensive understanding of problems and isolates scholars from urgent social issues by separating facts from theory.
Rule 4: Understand that true scientists do have values, they aim to save human life, and to make people happy.
The misconception regarding "scientific" neutrality ignores scientists' long-held values, of saving lives and extending human control for happiness.
Social scientists have not openly accepted their role in promoting life, equity, and freedom, therefore social scientists need to direct their efforts towards these ends.
He further explains that the concept of social science being \"different,\" because its instruments are tainted with subjectivity, ignores new discoveries in the hard sciences: that the very fact of observation distorts the measurement. Physical scientists don't talk about certainty anymore, but rather about \"probability\".
Rule 5: Rationality requires refusal of emotionalism. Even negative emotions like anger, frustration, or resentment can enhance our rationality, because the intellect sharpens our perception of what is outside our own limited experience.
Scholars can expose hidden facts, challenge logic and deceptive slogans, and critique culture instead of perpetuating it.
The university, with its leeway and tradition of truth-telling, can be a spokesman for change by presenting forgotten visions and unfulfilled dreams.
Specific schemes are needed to achieve important purposes, such as economists planning for free food or political scientists developing insurgency tactics for the poor.
A revolution in the academy will be a gradual process of transforming institutions from within, liberating patches of ground on which we stand.
Scholars should act on their beliefs, defy professional mythology, and emulate great poets and philosophers, working for those who lack the opportunity to study them, so that they can strive to stay warm in winter and stay alive through the calls for war.

Historian as Citizen

Zinn reflects on the changing role of the historian, from passive observer to activist-scholar, driven by deeply held values, becoming a citizen in the Athenian sense.
He acknowledges the limitations on individual freedom but emphasizes the need to act on behalf of one's beliefs.
The more we work on the data of the past, the weightier the past seems. But thinking has become professionalized and \"disciplined\" in modern times, with a crushing effect on the propensity to act.
History can warn and inspire by countering myths and suggesting possibilities, revealing that realities are not fixed.
The author suggests to behave as if we are freer than we think. With such uncertainty, and recognizing the tendency toward overestimating the present, there is good reason for acting on the supposition of freedom.
The leaps that have made in social evolution came from those who acted as if they were free.
Nietzsche attacked the bullying nature of history and the sterility of academic historiography, advocating for freedom, action, and responsibility.
Sartre advocates for total freedom to challenge limitations, emphasizing that acting as if we are free is the only way to break the bind.
Tradition holds past events to be moral judgements, rather than focusing on the present/future.
Moral indignation over Nazism illustrates the point. When such judgment becomes focused on an individual, it buries itself with that person and sticks to no one else. It follows that Germans who obeyed orders during the war may now weep at a showing of The Diary of Anne Frank, blaming the whole thing on Adolf Hitler.
Erikson suggests that gaining health, not revenge, from insight should be the focus.
Kennan opposes a moralistic approach to other countries, arguing that it looks backward rather than forward, limiting future flexibility.
Moralizing through defining evil in terms of a specific group allows others to remove responsibility from themselves.
Both history and art should reveal the relationship between evil and ourselves, showing how atrocities can emerge from ordinary circumstances.
Blame in history should be based on the future, focusing on present responsibilities rather than past guilt.
The crucial element in finding blame should be \"what is our responsibility now?\"
Art is useful if it shows how Hitler could emerge out of a boy playing in the field. Or to show (as in Lord of the Flies) how innocent children can become monsters, or (as in Bergman's film The Virgin Spring) how a loving father can become a vengeful murderer or (as in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) how an \"ordinary\" man and wife can become vultures.
If a work like The Deputy asks not "Why did the Pope remain silent?" but "Why do people everywhere remain silent?", it breaks the silence of the stage, urging historians to break theirs.