omg. it is super rare to find very good threads on history which are not just explanatory.

you could probably find plenty that showcase beautiful manuscripts, documents and photographs. i don’t blame people for not writing more details on what they have discovered in their research because twitter has very limited characters unlike a blog.

BUT that is not the point of this post. i think that twitter is mostly a socio-political space but ironically you don’t find historians engaging with polemics or the politics of their research areas.

i find that strange because as historians, we should be always engaging with transformations of historiography. given that history is not a linear process, we should always seek ways to understand the marginalized, the complex, the underrated – the downtrodden. this would mean that there must be more experimentation with methodologies and approaches to our objects of study.

i came across this twitter thread by an american historian of greek classics, matt simonton which i believe is a must read:

A short thread on the “Classics and its relation to ‘Western Civilization'” brouhaha. There’s already been enough said about the relatively recent development of the concept of “Western Civilization” and its ideological uses. I would focus instead on relating past and present. /1— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

before you think, since when netusha ever reads anything pertaining to white peeps and their history. well, i do okai, especially because if you want to be a good historian you would need to try to learn a breadth of literature. plus, i would totally want to be one of those historians who are able to support a project for writing more inclusive global histories. that can only be done if i were to have better knowledge about other continents, nation-states and communities.

back to simonton (2019) anyway (and yes i just in-text cited him because this is some legit criticism of classicism):

As @Twhittermarsh has already said, most classicists seek to historicize the ancient past, i.e. to understand it on its own terms and not in the service of some teleological argument that makes the present the straightforward inheritor of the Greeks and Romans. /2— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

this is where the tea spilling begins:

I wholeheartedly agree: One thing that emerges rather organically, I would say, from having my students read the ancient sources is their sense of alienation from the Greeks and their “weird” practices (bloody animal sacrifice, pederasty, etc.). /3— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

This kind of distancing (“the past is another country” etc) seems to me one purpose of any good history course: to “de-naturalize” or make unfamiliar something the students previously thought straightforward. /4— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

By the same token, if something does appear at first glance familiar, it is useful to dwell on it and work through the complexity. My students see, eg, the Spartan Great Rhetra as a kind of precursor to US divided government. But is it? /5— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

The Rhetra (eternally argued over by scholars, of course) encourages, IMO, a system in which the mass of citizen males in assembly are conditioned to give assent to policies devised by an elite class (gerontes + kings). The US Constitution differs in important ways. /6— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

simonton seems like a pretty dope lecturer. it’s nice that he is engaging with his students on the potential longue duree approach that can be taken to see the american constitution. i mean, my only exposure to studies of the constitution seems to be pointed to the world bounded within the legal text which is… not so much of a world at the end of the day.

And in any case it is important to highlight the extent to which the US founders intentionally rejected ancient Greek models of government, finding them too direct and unstable. The Rhetra and the Athenian constitution played almost no role in drafting the Constitution. /7— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

In part, of course, because the Aristotelian Ath Pol had not yet been discovered. But even if it had, I seriously doubt the Founders would have found it attractive. And this gets to the supposed inheritance of Greek ideals of equality, freedom, and democracy by “the West.” /8— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

this is just the pretext for what he is really getting at. that being the problems faced with conservative historiographies rooted in classic studies. and oh gurl, he got so real with us:

IMO, any account that tries to draw a straightforward connection is seriously lacking in historical accuracy and nuance. Early modern republicans did not typically look to the Greeks for models (Rousseau and Sparta being an exception). /9— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

Indeed, the whole idea that “the West” unproblematically took up the Greek mantle of democracy is just wrong: (Greek) democracy was largely a dirty word until people like George Grote began its rehabilitation in the mid-19th century. (@Kleisthenes2 knows this well.) /10— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

In general, see Jennifer Tolbert Roberts’ book on “Athens on Trial”: it was a long, hard process for the idea of the Athenian democracy being a positive model to gain acceptance, and for quite contingent historical and political reasons. /11— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

This brings me to a final point: proponents of a “pro-Western Civilization” narrative in Classics seem to me to engage in a rather sloppy, selective reading of the historical record, in which “freedom+democracy+capitalism+the West” comes in a too-neat and tidy package. /12— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

After all, for the century between 1815 and 1915, the Conservative Order in Europe defended what it thought of as the values of Christendom (God, family, property, monarchy) against the rising tide of liberalism, sovereign parliaments, written constitutions, etc. /13— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

To say nothing of socialism! Which even liberal orders attempted for a long time to stave off using property requirements for the franchise. Universal male suffrage was only begrudgingly bestowed. There is nothing inherent in “the West” that made this inevitable. /14— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

And anyway, as I hope I’ve already made clear, there were developments in Europe that the proponents of “Western Civ” conspicuously leave out: socialism, first and foremost, but also feminism, nationalism, even environmentalism, etc. /15— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

One can assess these developments however one wants. But whittling them away to leave a supposedly natural core of “freedom+democracy+capitalism” is a political choice, not one attuned to the complexity of history. /16— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

What does it mean for these proponents that some of these other developments in European history, such as national, racism, and fanatical anti-Bolshevism, led “the West” to tear itself (and many others) apart in the conflagration that was WWII? /17— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

The world is too complicated, and the stakes are too high, to formulate a self-serving conception of “the West,” its achievements, and its supposed connection to Classical antiquity and to pat ourselves on the back. In fact it protests too much. /19— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

What a lot of these proponents seem to want, IMO, is reassurance that their own particular (assumed) identity remains valid, in fact remains at the top of the political pecking order, in a time of uncertainty and change. /20— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

What a lot of these proponents seem to want, IMO, is reassurance that their own particular (assumed) identity remains valid, in fact remains at the top of the political pecking order, in a time of uncertainty and change. /20— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

In that respect the demand that Classicists somehow make clear and even celebrate the present’s debt to the ancient past strikes me as reactionary in the most literal sense: they are reacting (negatively) to a world in which other groups and identities are gaining a voice. /21— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

no tea no shade to attasians but.. this thread is amazing! so relevant to islamic studies as well, which is fixated on theological explanations of history without getting it touch with archives that reveal more complex aspects of the muslim world.

when i embarked into an interest in philology of malay manuscripts, i was quite unsettled by the strange aversion to read manuscripts beyond the narratives that contain within them. i’ve come across many writings, mostly dominated by islamic studies scholars who are often trained with an orientalist lens, largely neglecting the historical and cultural contexts of which these texts exist.

thank goodness i had someone like my supervisor teach me about the radically different approaches that can be taken to interpret malay manuscripts from the precolonial period.

i would like to go into why i find syed naquib al-attas’ views on the islamization of the malay archipelago somewhat problematic, and requires further discussion. this is because i am not inclined to the perspective that you tell the entire history of religion in a region by just linguistic analysis and orientalist tropes about other religions like hinduism and buddhism.

back to simonton (2019), i liked that he ended his thread with some references to authors.

A final thought: this thread, fwiw, benefited from the work of (i.a.) Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Simon Schama, Eric Hobsbawm, Richard Evans, Donald Sassoon, and Ian Kershaw. So it’s not that historians aren’t reading and appreciating European history: just different lessons drawn.— Matt Simonton (@ProfSimonton) March 1, 2019

i am quite glad i’m not in the social circle for islamic discourse because i don’t know if i can hold conversation with people who are quite set on al-attas’ convictions. i for one believe in the continuities of the past and that not everything gets entirely displaced into disappearance. perhaps they evolve into something else, but history is far more resilient than that.