Simon Jenkins; Bourgeois Historian

Simon Jenkins has entered the debate about exactly what should be taught in the teaching of history and his contribution is a contradictory one. On the one hand he argues, correctly in my view, against the hotchpotch approach to history teaching, whereby no discernible connection is made between each taught unit, so in the end students have no understanding as to how it all fits together and what actually is the driving motor of history. A dollop of Roman history followed by some marauding Vikings and some nasty Normans and lo and behold its time for the Tudors, who apparently had lots of wives. If that eclectic mish-mash hasn’t got our students sufficiently switched off, a predictable dose of twentieth century wars with jack-booted Nazis stomping around will soon be coming their way, but of course, any possible connections between all this historical blood and thunder is never made.

Jenkins professes to be, an unashamed chronologist, arguing that history cannot be told spasmodically. On this I agree 100%. Jenkins adds, I cannot see how any narrative can avoid starting at the beginning and running to the end, however hard it seems to tell it that way.Three cheers for historical chronologists!

So far so good from our learned Mr Jenkins, but then alas he lapses into the worst sort of English parochialism declaring that, No country (referring to England) has such an eventful past, from the time when Germanic Angles and Saxons first pushed westwards across ancient Britain. I think the Chinese, the Indians, the Ethiopians and the Greeks and Romans, to name just a few, would have something to say about that assertion. Jenkins then digs himself even deeper into the chauvinistic hole by claiming,

The English were, on any showing, a remarkable people, asserting their power first across the British Isles and then round the world. They showed a confidence, sometimes an arrogance, which in the 19th and early 20th centuries led them briefly to bestride the globe.

The Irish, and all those other teeming millions across the globe, who suffered indescribable brutalities at the hands of their British Imperial invaders, would most definitely see English history in a very different light.

This type of boastful imperialistic clap-trap we would expect from the school of imperial British history currently being propagated by Mr Naill Ferguson and his Tory backers, but one would have thought that a regular contributor to The Guardian might have had a wider perspective. Not so. What Jenkins singularly fails to appreciate in his two page promotion of his new book is that there really isn’t anything or anybody remotely resembling the English people. Such an historical construct doesn’t actually exist. We who inhabit these British Isles are all, if we chase our linage back a few generations, ‘travelling folk’. Jenkins would do well to take on board Robert Winder’s excellent text, ‘Bloody Foreigners’ to get a more realistic perspective on just who we English really are.

Even the so called original Britons – the Beaker people are said to have arrived from the tribes of central Europe and the much heralded Celtic peoples were themselves migrants, probably from southern Europe but possibly from beyond. In fact, what we should be telling our school students is that the most likely scenario is that all humans originally started off from East Africa in a succession of migratory waves over many millennia and so we might all legitimately call ourselves African.

Instead of filling our young people’s heads with myths about the remarkable English people and other nationalistic fantasies, we instead should be educating a genuine sense of internationalism one race- the human race. Virtually all problems facing humans are problems that derive from our persistent tribalism be it of a national, religious or ‘racial’ dimension, and the solutions to those problems can only now be international or transnational to be more precise. Jenkins’ narrow ‘little england’ perspective is of no use to man nor beast. What schools are crying out for are a series of succinct histories of the human story, a story that can never be bettered by even the best Hollywood script writers. Fact, as the old adage goes, is far more wondrous than any fiction could ever be.

Perhaps the most astonishing feature of Jenkins pre-publishing publicity, is that it appears to be totally devoid of a class perspective. Can you imagine that in an entire double page spread devoted to his nationalistic ramblings, not a single mention of that dreaded ‘C’ word. Class antagonisms, it seems, are to be airbrushed out of English history altogether. Astounding Mr Jenkins, truly astounding! Not for our Mr Jenkins the thunderous words of Karl Marx:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Not for our learned Mr Jenkins the encyclopaedic view of world history laid out by Messrs Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto:

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.’

Now that is what I call an historical overview that any student, of whatever age, and from whatever country could eventually, with the appropriate texts and teaching, make full sense of. Not for Marx and Engels the narrow chauvinistic world, albeit a chronological one, of our learned and cultured Mr Jenkins. Unlike our Mr Jenkins, they present a world view a genuine weltanschauung that can coherently take a student from the pre-class history of the primitive communal tribes, through the long and spectacular epoch of slave owning societies, then on to the thousand years of stultifying feudal servitude, and finally on through the various stages of capitalism to the present day, where a handful of giant global corporations are pitted against the overwhelming mass of humanity. That is a chronology that has a comprehensible beginning and a joined up narrative that is standing the test of time. How else can a student of history, which should be every single human being, make any sense of it all.

Mr Jenkins claims he wants to inform and empower debate but there can be no meaningful debate with those that would deny that class antagonisms are still the main motor of history. If Jenkins wants historical debate let him debate the following few lines written in 1848 concerning the true nature of the global bourgeoisie, or the ‘masters of the universe’ as they are now euphemistically referred to.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers. Communist Manifesto’ 1848, Marx & Engels.

Let Jenkins, in the face of capitalism’s latest global recession, debate that.

Mr Jenkins implores that, All history must start from the reader’s own standpoint in place and time. Otherwise it is just a blur. I wholeheartedly disagree. Social history is nothing but the history of the human race, and its true starting point is the beginning of life itself some three and a half billion years ago. It is, as Dawkins might have it, ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’, and our very recent ten thousand year history is perhaps the most stunningly interesting chapter of all. The fact that so many people, both children and adults, have such a limited grasp of the human story, both in its biological evolution and its social sense, is both an ongoing cultural tragedy and an indictment of our continued entrapment by philistine and oppressive class hierarchies. Only when we transcend this debilitating class imprisonment we will have truly transcended our tribal ‘pre-history’. Then we can be merrily on our way to writing the pages of the real and substantial human story. The prologue would have finally ended.

As for our Mr Jenkins, he will still be fussing about with the comings and goings of his beloved English parliament, totally oblivious to the real story unfolding all around him. Let him stew in his English parliamentary juices. Just keep him, Ferguson and their primitive, chauvinistic ilk away from our school children. They deserve a whole lot better.

And if we are going to teach history, let us teach the whole caboodle from the humble amoeba to the global corporations that currently bestride the planet, and do so from a secular, scientific, chronological and above all, internationalist perspective. That way the teaching of history will surely explode into life and become the bedrock for all further human learning.

Be the first to comment on "Simon Jenkins; Bourgeois Historian"

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.


*