Bits and Pieces from an Old Life -- Back When I Was a Scholar


I was working on my dissertation, which is about how theories of human agency underpin the way historians go about doing the business of investigating and writing history. Specifically about journalism history, since that was purportedly my field, as a doctoral candidate at the School of Journalism at the University of Iowa. This, however, applies to all.

Found this — I think something I cut from my dissertation — while cleaning out the duplicates and other unwanted stuff from the files I transferred over from my old Mac.

Suppose we are historians writing in the year 3001, at a time when (miracle of miracles) human beings have somehow established a society in which virtually all relationships are characterized by nurturance and equality, where differences among human beings are regarded as offering a wonderfully rich variety of human possibilities rather than as a significant means of organizing hierarchies of power. The possession of specific reproductive organs does not constitute a fundamental category of relationships in this society; indeed, reproductive roles consitute such a relatively small portion of people's daily lives that distinctions according to reproductive roles are considered virtually irrelevant. The first question asked when a child is born is not "is it a girl or a boy?" but "what potential might this child hold and how can we enable the realization of that potential?"

In this society there are a variety of ways of organizing responsibility for enabling that realization. For instance, one person may bear the child and go off to do other things while three others have chosen to share primary responsibility for the child's daily care. One of the three may have provided the sperm required for fertilization, or the sperm may have been obtained from someone who is not part of this "family." Most important in this organization of childbearing and childrearing is that neither the potential for nor the actuality of childbearing fixes the relationships among members of the "family" nor the roles played outside of it.

This society, like every other, has a set of cultural narratives that justify its particular organization of social relationships. Both scholars and artists in this society seek to understand how society came to be organized this way in order to find out what directions it might (or should) be heading, and they often question whether "common sense" notions of reality are accurate. There is one primary set of values, however, that are unquestionable because they form the very foundation of social relationships. Acts of nurturance and care for others are taken as the sine qua non of a rational social order. By corrollary, acts of violence and efforts to subordinate others not only violate the victim(s) but also rend the very fabric of society, because society itself is defined as society by the absence of hierachical relationships. When the rare act of violence occurs, the perpetrator is thought to be at the mercy of unconscious drives rooted in what was understood to be male biology before the species and society evolved into its present characteristically pacific form. All hierarchies that previously existed have been virtually eliminated -- or so the story goes -- through genetic engineering and social conditioning. Now those persons born with the biological capacity to provide the sperm needed for the reproduction of the species are no longer "at the mercy" of their hormones. In short, they are no longer primarily defined by their sex, but have entered history.

How might we as historians in this society reconstruct history "as it actually happened?" How would we make sense of the categories "man" and "woman" and the organization of relationships between them? How would we understand wars and political battles? Who would appear as the primary Subject of history in our accounts? No doubt history "as it happened," verifiable by close attention to documents and other forms of archival evidence, would look vastly different, and historians would construct vastly different kinds of narratives in order to make sense of the data. The primary historical actors would not be the kings, warriors, politicians, nor even revolutionaries who engaged in violence to bring about social change. The figure of Jane Addams, for instance, would likely overwhelm the historical landscape of the early 20th century in what was known as the United States (i.e., before the world became a global community), while the names of presidents and prime ministers and monarchs and generals and captains of industry who produced World War I would be remembered, if at all, as exemplars of the worst of the species.

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This is where the file ended.




Posted: Wed - January 25, 2006 at 06:25 AM          

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