Why History Matters pt.1

WHY HISTORY MATTERS

AND WHY CHRISTIAN HISTORY MATTERS IN PARTICULAR

By Ted Byfield

General Editor

The Christian History Project

© Ted Byfield, 2008

Any part of this booklet may be reprinted

without permission but with attribution

to the author and publisher

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"The democracies are losing the freedom

which gives meaning to democracy, because

they are losing that sense of direction which

gives meaning to freedom."

- Hilda Neatby

"When men stop believing in God, they don't

believe in nothing. They believe in anything."

-G.K. Chesterton

"Beware of false prophets, which come to

you in sheep's clothing but inwardly they

are ravening wolves. Ye shall know

them by their fruits."

--Jesus Christ (Matthew 7:15)

To John E. Hokanson

Friend, Benefactor, and Believer

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

THE 'SIMPLE RULES,' WITHOUT

WHICH WE PERISH

Please examine carefully the following five statements. They

represent the kind of thing that may be heard any day in

any office or job site, living room, board room, kitchen or

pub, spoken by wealthy people or street people, literate people or

illiterate, men or women, children or adults.

"Okay, so we'll meet there at five o'clock."

"I've got to return this shovel. It's Charlie's."

"She's been in hospital for a week and I haven't even visited her."

"No twelve-year-old should be out this late."

"But that's what he said happened."

The point to note is that each of these statements implies a kind

of expectation. The other person is expected to be there at five

o'clock. If you borrow a shovel, you're expected to return it. Just

as people are expected to visit the sick, to control the whereabouts

of their children, and to tell the truth. All five statements, that is,

take for granted a kind of code of conduct, or standard of behaviour,

that everybody can be assumed to recognize and respect.

Simple morality, one might say. Simple perhaps, but also indispensable.

A world in which no one could be expected to keep

promises, to return what they borrow, to comfort the sick, to care

for their children and to tell the truth would be a world that could

not function. In the long run, these rules of conduct are as essential

to our well-being as the food we eat and the air we breathe.

They are the glue or thread that holds a civilization together. Sustaining

them, which means sustaining their authority to guide and

govern what we do, is necessary if the civilization is to survive.

Something else is noteworthy. No previous civilization ever has survived;

all past civilizations have perished. And the chief symptom of

impending collapse was that respect for the rules began eroding. The

glue failed, the thread broke, and they were gone.

The rules of our own civilization--usually referred to as "the West"

- originate in the ancient world. From the ancient Israelites, we derived

our ideas about God. From the ancient Greeks, we derived our

ideas about government. And from the ancient Romans we derived

our concept of the civil law.1 These three strains were combined by

the Christians into a unified whole known as Western civilization.

Though certainly not without flaw, it has produced the most just,

the most technologically proficient, the most compassionate, and

the most prosperous society the world has ever known. And while

it has become intellectually fashionable to deplore and denounce it,

especially by critics living comfortably within it, the rest of the world

seeks fervidly to emulate it or, better still, to move into it.

However, this influx of other peoples does not pose the threat to

the West that is sometimes voiced. Indeed, Western society has

been receiving and accommodating peoples from without ever

since it began. Rather, it faces two other stresses, both of which

could destroy it, though the second is much more insidious than

the first.

The first has come as the product of its success. Technological

change, almost all of it innovated by the West, has been so astonishing,

so swift and so sweeping over the last two centuries of the

second Christian millennium that it threatens to sweep away

everything that went before as obsolete, including many of the old

rules for human behaviour.

And yet they are as essential as they ever were. People must still

be expected to do what they say they're going to do, whether

they're running a biochemical experiment or a trap line. They are

still expected to return what they borrow, whether it's a shovel or

a digital recording device. Their responsibility to the stricken is as

imperative as it ever was, and so is the expectation that they can

be relied upon to care for their family, and to tell the truth.

So the necessity for the old rules is still very much there. In fact, a

case can be made that it is more pressing than ever. The very complexity

of our new technological world makes it much more vulnerable

to subversive attack than was the old world. Knock out several

major power plants and you could paralyze much of twenty-first century

eastern North America. Computers would stop. Airports

would stop. Subways would stop. Elevators would stop. Gasoline

pumps would stop. Furnaces would stop. Lights would go out. In

northern cities in a severe winter, thousands would soon be in danger

of freezing to death. Such swift and vast devastation would have

been impossible in the nineteenth century. Technological society, that

is, depends for its very survival on a high degree of behavioural conformity

among the citizenry, something that terrorist movements

have discovered and effectively exploited.

But the other strain on "the rules" has proven far more lethal. For

it strains them, not as an incidental effect of its activity, but because

straining them, indeed effectually abolishing their foundation, is

one of its central goals, what from the beginning it set out to do.

What am I implying? Some kind of secret conspiracy to destroy our

society? Not at all. No secret, no conspiracy. For what it has sought

to do, it has been utterly candid about from the beginning. Moreover,

it has taken over most of the levers that control the social machine,

recruiting to its cause some of our best minds and most

effective communicators. Curiously, however, very few of the latter

seem to realize what they are actually communicating. And as the

more astute among them become vaguely aware of this, their acute

discomfort becomes evident. They tend to push the thought aside

as something they do not wish to contemplate.

___________________________________________________

[1. See. W.G. de Burgh, The Legacy of the Ancient World, Oxford, 1924.]

A DECEPTIVELY

UNSPECTACULAR REVOLUTIONARY

To ascribe all this mischief to one man is, of course, excessive.

Yet one man undeniably played a major role in the social

and cultural revolution of America in the twentieth

century. True, he was powerfully influenced by others who came before

him--Rousseau, Hobbes, Darwin, Spencer--and helped by a

coterie of like-minded revolutionaries who worked diligently alongside

him. As in all revolutions, his message was carried by thousands

of disciples who often went beyond anything the original visionary

had proposed, though what they were doing was derived directly

from what he taught. To most of these, however, he is today little

more than a name. Very few have actually read what he wrote, let

alone approve of what he was setting out to do, though they have

often strenuously, if unwittingly, helped him do it.

The man in question is the educator and philosopher John Dewey.

The bare facts of his curriculum vitae are deceptively unspectacular.

From a family of modest income, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from

the University of Vermont in 1879, taught three years in high school

and quit, received a doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1884, taught

at the University of Michigan, then became a faculty member of the

University of Chicago in 1894, soon after it opened, and established

there experimental elementary and high schools. After a clash with

the university administration he left for Columbia University in 1904

where he taught philosophy until his death in 1952.

Creditable enough, but hardly the track record of a man who

would more profoundly affect the culture and thinking of Americans

than any twentieth-century president. However, that was

because he knew something that no president since Thomas Jefferson

has ever fully understood, namely that the way to fundamentally

reshape a society is not by changing its citizens, but by

changing their children--more specifically, by radically changing

those who teach their children. For the teachers could change

the children, and the children would become the citizens and

voters of tomorrow.

Dewey's agenda was not, in its ultimate goal, educational. It was

political. Like the founders of America, indeed of all the Western

democracies, he was obsessed with the idea of freedom. But his object

was to establish a new kind of freedom.While people were free

to vote and many were free to choose paths that could lead them to

wealth and comfort, they were not in Dewey's view truly free.

All but a few advanced thinkers were prisoners of traditionalist

thought and morality that prevented them from achieving genuine

freedom and becoming their "true selves." It was this kind of freedom

that he sought for all. He had achieved it himself; he wanted

to confer it on everyone. He envisioned a new civilization, liberated

from its ancient taboos and enslavement to outdated creeds

and codes of conduct.

Once delivered from this old morality, humanity would reach

through science destinies vastly beyond present human imagination,

he said. And the road to this nirvana lay not through some Marxist

or Fascist revolution, but through an educational one. To Dewey, you

didn't need the politicians. If you could change the way the people

thought, the politicians would have no choice but to go along with

the new order. Over his lifetime he published some sixteen books,

enunciating convulsive changes in education that would render the

new schools unrecognizable to those who had attended the old.

His vision was embraced, indeed devoured, not initially by teachers,

but by "educators"--those who teach teachers--a species that

Dewey's era virtually brought into existence. Decade after decade

a torrent of Deweyite disciples poured forth from Columbia University

Teachers College, skilfully administered by Dewey's senior

lieutenant in the revolution, W.H. Kilpatrick. What could be

more impressive than an education degree from Columbia? They

rapidly infused his ideas into the new "faculties of education,"

themselves largely a product of Deweyism. These gradually supplanted

the old and hopelessly hidebound "normal schools."

Meanwhile, Dewey himself carried his ideas to the world in what

he saw as personal "missions." He favoured such biblical terms,

sometimes referring to his message as "the gospel." It proved a

gospel eagerly embraced in the Soviet Union.

Its principles became the foundational assumption of the new educators.

2 The schools, they knew, must be used to work a wholesale

rejection of all the old ideas about human nature. The concept of

good and evil must be abolished, wrote Dewey. Such qualities as

honesty, courage, industry and chastity must no longer be cherished,

while things like malice, vindictiveness and irresponsibility need no

longer be deplored. Such conduct is merely the response of the individual

to the conditions around him. Indeed nothing should be

transmitted to students from the legacy of previous generations.

Whatever moral conclusions the student may reach, he must reach

solely on the basis of his own experience.

Most important, he must not see himself as somehow "judged" by

what he does or doesn't do. The idea of individual "blame" must

be eradicated. He must regard himself as part of a community, part

of "the public." If a crime is committed, the criminal must not be

considered responsible. The community as a whole must have

somehow failed him. So too must the idea of the "will" be abolished.

The concept that the individual "chooses" between good and

evil leads only to the defeat of "self hood." There is no such thing

as the human "will," he said, and the old moral boundaries between

good and evil have become obsolete and invalid. Moreover,

gender stereotyping must be stopped. There must be no such thing

as boys' books and girls' books, or boys' games and girls' games,

because such distinctions serve to perpetuate the old order.His ideas

would "destroy many things once cherished," Dewey allowed, but

that was the unfortunate price of human progress.

__________________________________________

[2. A comprehensive and understandable critique of Dewey's work was written by Henry T. Edmondson, professor of political science and public administration at Georgia State University and director of the Center for Transatlantic Studies. It is is entitled John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, published by Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Wilmington, Delaware, in 2006.]

THE CONVULSIVE CHANGE

IN THE SCHOOLS

As the 20th century unfolded, these concepts began taking

deep root in the education faculties and appearing in the

schools. Gradually, the teacher ceased being an authority

figure in the classroom. She must instead become a guide, a counsellor,

a friend, said Dewey. Student desks must be rearranged in

such a way as to overcome any suggestion of managerial leadership.

The students must learn to lead themselves. Any attempt by

a teacher to impose structure--pass/fail, good/bad, right/wrong--

must be viewed as a form of "pedagogical abuse."

Indeed, all semblance of superiority or inferiority must vanish.

Report cards must no longer carry grade standings. Anything that

suggests standards of performance must not appear. Children

must not be criticized for making "mistakes," nor be admonished

to "sit still" because this may thwart their inner impulses. Checking

those impulses must be considered another form of "abuse,"

for they are the means by which the child expresses creativity.

No student should be singled out for a distinctly good performance,

nor certainly for a distinctly bad one, because the whole idea

of good and bad must be removed form the child's mind. "Self-esteem"

must be encouraged in every possible way, but never predicated

on actual performance. The student should esteem himself

because he is a self, not because he has actually accomplished anything.

Learning to read must be considered a useful thing, but not

a primary essential.What ultimately matters is not what skills the

child acquires, but whether he is becoming a "social being."

Similarly, in the higher grades "critical thinking" must be fostered,

but it consisted of encouraging the student to question and challenge

the assumptions of the old order, especially those of his parents. A

young adult who had learned to challenge the qualities and morality

revered by his parents was deemed to be "thinking critically."

One who continued to respect and adhere to them was not thinking

critically. His education had plainly failed him.3

In the 1940s, an unforeseen development sharply checked the educational

revolution, notably the Second World War. Suddenly

qualities like honour, courage, duty, tradition and responsibility

became not only praiseworthy, but crucial. Without them, the

Western democracies would certainly lose. By the 'fifties, however,

the war was safely over, and the revolution in the schools resumed

with full vigour. Old teachers resisted. Indeed, some

courageously continued to battle the Deweyite revolution for the

next half century. But such opposition was soon swept aside by the

tens of thousands of young teachers pouring forth from the new

faculties of education. These saw themselves as the harbingers of

a new kind of society, with a new kind of citizen, that they were

commissioned to bring into being. Entire school systems embraced

the new ideas. Dewey himself, before he died, became a hallowed

figure, the man who had liberated America from the narrow intolerance

and vicious bigotry of its past. At his ninetieth birthday,

tributes came in from all over the world, for by now his works

had been translated into eight other languages.

As the American public system embraced the new "progressive"

aims and methods, Canadian educators were at first nervous. They

feared that Canada's natural conservatism would sharply resist

such innovations. They soon discovered, however, that Canada's

supposed commitment to conservatism was actually a commitment

to conformity. Canadians would do whatever respectable authority

approved.When it became evident "reputable educators" were

urging these changes, that's all they needed to know.

________________________________________________

[3. Lest anyone conclude that children today are no longer under such influence, he should observe the current books for young people by Neale Donald Walsch, regularly on the New York Times best seller list, with such titles as Conversations With God and Conversations with God for Teens. Typically, "God" is represented as approving pre-marital sex, sexual deviation, and whatever other sexual conduct commends itself. In one instance, a girl asks about God's forgiveness of sin. Walsch portrays "God" as replying: "I do not forgive anyone because there is nothing to forgive. There is no such thing as right or wrong and that is what I have been trying to tell everyone." However dubious the Divine credentials,

it's certainly what John Dewey was trying to tell everyone. Conversations With

God is currently being made into a Hollywood movie.]

PLEASANT YOUNG MEN

OF MEDIOCRE INTELLIGENCE

From the start, it is true, there were discordant voices in the

U.S., some of them authoritative. Parents and students, said

one, "must be induced to abandon the educational path that,

rather blindly, they have been following as a result of John Dewey's

teachings." That voice belonged to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

A more raucous note was sounded by the acerbic Christian

novelist Flannery O'Connor: "My advice to parents is...Anything

that Wm. Heard Kilpatrick & Jhn. Dewey say to do, don't do."

Canada produced its critics too, first and foremost among them a

notable historian, Dr. Hilda Neatby of the University of

Saskatchewan whose critique of Deweyism, So Little for the

Mind, (Clarke, Irwin, Toronto, 1953) stirred rage across the

Deweyite establishment, already securely ensconcing itself in various

provincial departments of education.

Dewey, wrote Professor Neatby, "is not only unintentionally anti-intellectual,

he is, it seems, quite deliberately anti-cultural...even ferociously

amoral in his method and discipline." Deweyism "is not

liberation; it is indoctrination both intellectual and moral." Dewey

had translated the mantra "education is life" into "an injunction to

the school to take over every part of a child's life and every function

of society. The family and church are ignored or patronized."

Moreover, she continued, there is strong evidence that Deweyism is

being ruthlessly forced into the school system, and any challenge

to it is harshly rejected in the education faculties. She quoted one

Canadian student's impression: "The atmosphere there curiously

prefigured the authoritarian state. Any independent thought, any

deviation from the Moscow line (for Moscow read, Teachers' College,

Columbia) is criminal non-cooperativeness and sabotage...

Native common sense has no validity, and the candidate for certification

who attempts to use it is warned of the consequences with

a candour and directness which Molotov (a senior Stalinist lieutenant)

could not have improved on."

The result, said Professor Neatby, was that the most competent

students were discouraged from the teaching profession: "The

soldier, the doctor, the business executive and the technician

who wish to get on can do so by continued study and practice

in the field which they have chosen. This is not true of the

teacher. He must bid farewell to culture and genuine intellectual

pursuits, and concentrate upon the endless minutiae and

jargons which we dignify with the name of pedagogical studies."

The result was sadly evident in the departments of education:

"The stars of the educational firmament today are too

often bright young men of neat appearance, pleasant personality

and mediocre intelligence."

Her book was studiously ignored in education circles, where she was

personally shunned. Searching the Canadian news media of the day,

she could find almost no interest in the changes being implemented

in the schools - a couple of editorials in the Victoria Times Colonist,

a protest from one columnist in the Globe and Mail, little more--the

absence of criticism suggesting a general acquiescence with the new

methods. Canadian newspapers would have grave cause to rue this

20 or so years later when their "penetration" of the market (meaning

the percentage of the population who buy newspapers) began a

slide which has never been arrested. They resignedly blame television.

That was certainly one factor. But the other was the general illiteracy

which the new schools were engendering and which the print

media did nothing to resist. Too late, they discovered, people who

can't read, can't read newspapers.

Fifteen years after the Neatby book, Deweyism made its greatest

advance in Canada through an Ontario study co-chaired by Mr.

Justice Emmett Hall 4 and a former Ontario high school teacher

and Education Department consultant named Lloyd A Dennis.

The "Hall-Dennis Report," issued in 1968, became a Canadian

beacon of Deweyite philosophy. Children are portrayed as invariably

good; punishment as invariably bad. Poor performance

by children is the fault of the system or the teacher, not the child.

Learning should never be an unpleasant or arduous experience.

Democracy should begin in the classroom. The teacher's chief task

is to understand the child, not to convey knowledge or skills.

Exams must go, grade standing must go, punishment must go,

and the child himself should a have a considerable voice in

whether he passes or fails.

The report was thoroughly eviscerated by Dr. James Daly, an associate

professor of history at McMaster University, who in his book,

"Education or Molasses?" challenged nearly all its recommendations,

concluding that it was founded on an astonishingly naïve view

of human nature, that it evaded the central problems of teaching

morality in a pluralistic society, and encouraged rebellion against

existing authority, while offering nothing whatever to replace it.5

____________________________________________

[4. Emmett Matthew Hall (1898-1995), one of Canada's foremost jurists and left wing reformers, was a socialist in conservative clothing. After a youth spent on a Saskatchewan dairy farm and a long career as a Saskatchewan lawyer, he became known as an admirer of rough frontier values and the spirit of free enterprise. Opponents of medicare rejoiced in 1964 therefore when he was appointed to head an inquiry into a possible state-run health care system for Canada. To their horror, he recommended that socialist Saskatchewan's system be extended to cover the whole country. Though certainly not without

its detractors and problems, Medicare has enjoyed substantial public support in

Canada ever since. Mr. Justice Hall's infatuation with Deweyism is harder to comprehend and would hasten the educational catastrophe.]

[5. Alberta had a parallel for the Hall-Dennis Report that emerged in 1971, the year the Conservative government of Peter Lougheed took office. Written by the University of Alberta's dean of education, Walter Holmes Worth, the "Worth Report" directed the new government's education policy for several years until, it was said, one of Lougheed's children brought home from high school a book on "The Future." Examining it, Lougheed asked his son what it was. "It's about the future," came the reply. "We're studying the future." "The future?" gasped Lougheed. "You hardly know anything about the past!" Inquiring, he found the book had been chosen to help fulfill the recommendations of the Worth Report. So for the first time, he actually read this document. Concluding it was "sheer nonsense," he ordered changes in Alberta's education policy, and the province was soon leading the country in efforts to repair the chaos created by its venture into Deweyist education.]

THE INCONVENIENT OBSTINACY

OF MATHEMATICS

Such negativity was, of course, dismissed as the death moans

of a dying culture. Not so easily dismissed was the system's

inability to cope with such formidable obstacles as reading,

spelling, English grammar and mathematics. Spelling was particularly

distasteful to the Deweyite because it suggested a "right

way" (and therefore "wrong ways") to compose a word. There

were such things, that is, as spelling "mistakes." These, said the

Deweyites, should be either overlooked by the teacher or observed

in passing but not "judgmentally."6 The new kind of citizen didn't

need to bother about spelling, even if what he sometimes wrote

began to resemble gibberish.

Grammar posed a further challenge. Ostensibly, it was taught to

enable a student to write confidently. He knew the rules so well

that they became habitual. But to Dewey, a student's confidence

should not require such a prop. Grammatical rules were part of

the past and could be ignored. The objective, remember, was to

cleanse the youthful mind of the whole concept of "rules."

But grammar had always been taught for another reason. It was

analytical. It required the student to know whether a group of

words was or was not a sentence. It required him to break sentences

into their component parts, to detect the function of each

word, to discern how it worked with the other words to create a

rational whole, the sentence. Its function, that is, was to introduce

the process of reason. But to Dewey this kind of exercise was destructive.

It conveyed the idea that there was a valid structure, the

rational, to which acceptable human thought must conform. Irrational

thought must be rejected. In other words, reason and the

rules of reason were in fact authoritarian--to the Deweyites a very

bad thing. So the study of logic was abolished from the post-secondary

curriculum, and grammar, its introductory discipline, all

but disappeared from elementary and secondary schools.

Which left mathematics. For the Deweyites, this was an awkward

area because it was difficult to teach without allowing for the concept

of "the mistake," or even more dastardly, "the wrong answer." Five times-

five would equal twenty-five, however much Johnny would

prefer that it equal something else, and even the Deweyites could see

that Johnny might get into serious trouble later with his own personally

developed multiplication table. So it was finally resolved that

the child must himself "experience" the multiplication table, discovering

that when he multiplied five times five, things generally turned

out better for him if he took the answer to be twenty-five. However,

great care must be taken to assure that some other answer was not

in any sense "wrong" because "right" and "wrong" did not exist.

Beyond all these problematic areas there remained one other "subject"

7 which, unless very carefully manipulated, had within itself

the power to undermine the entire Deweyite construct. That subject

was history. Though in the past it had often been taught badly

-often limited to the laborious memorization of dates, names and

dull data-Dewey knew that history could also be taught with such

compelling effect upon the student that it would renew in his mind

all the pernicious old ideas (as Dewey saw them) that must be destroyed.

"It is possible to employ it as a kind of reservoir of anecdotes

to be drawn on to inculcate moral lessons on this virtue

or that vice," he wrote. "But such a teaching is not so much an

ethical use of history as it is an effort to create moral impressions

by means of more or less authentic material. At best it produces

a temporary emotional glow."

Notice the implication. It is possible to use historical films on, say,

the Nazi Holocaust to "create the moral impression" that such

things ought not to happen. Or in Canada to tell the story of Vimy Ridge

or the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway to inspire admiration for

courage or human enterprise and ingenuity. But this is "the practice of

an earlier age." Since it "is not useful to contribute to the development of

the social intelligence," it is pointless.

History, however, could not be simply dropped wholly from the curriculum.

Its absence would be noticed and this would have to be explained

to an audience that might not understand. So instead it was

amalgamated into "social studies" and restricted to what Dewey called

"the relevant." Thus fragments of it could be summoned here and

there to reinforce a social cause8. But it must not be taught as a coherent

story, unfolding era by era across time, because this would confer

on it a dangerous credibility, in other words an authority. So a coherent

presentation of the history must be discouraged. Above all, History's

uncertainties must be emphasized. Since all the existing records

were ultimately somebody's viewpoint, biased, subjective, essentially

fictional, we can learn little from the past. That was the message.9

____________________________________________

[6. It's interesting to examine the way the Dewey era has changed the moral value placed on two English verbs - "to judge" and "to discriminate." Where we once commended a man "of judgment," we now denounce "judgmental" people. Where we once admired a "discriminating" person, we now deplore and even prosecute "discrimination." Behind this philological change, of course, lies the Dewey doctrine that good and bad, true and false, right and wrong do not exist.]

[7. Dewey opposed the entire concept of "subjects" in education. Learning, he said, must be "a whole," and things experienced rather than taught. "Subjects" were purely a man made and man-imposed contrivance to establish a "structure" to knowledge. But knowledge is best conveyed without structure, he said.]

[8.When I taught in a boys' school, I remember asking an applicant student: "Who was Sir John A.Macdonald?" The boy replied, "Why, he's the man who ordered the hanging of Louis Riel." Did he know anything else about Macdonald, I asked. No, replied the boy, he did not. This puzzled me. Macdonald was the chief architect of the Canadian confederation, and our first prime minister, who spread the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific and largely achieved its independence

from Britain. Why did the boy not know any of this, yet did know of Macdonald's decision to execute a convicted insurrectionist leader in the West? The boy had a ready explanation. Riel led a minority group, the Metis, he said, "and we studied minorities in social studies."]

[9. The contention that all historical records are somebody's "viewpoint" has been used to discredit history as a criterion of established fact. However, the contention is flawed. Here are four historical statements: 1. "Martin Luther King died. 2. "Martin Luther King was killed." 3. "Martin Luther king was assassinated." 4. "Martin Luther King was martyred." The fourth may be a viewpoint; the other three are not. The contention that since the fourth is a viewpoint, they must all be mere viewpoints is irrational. The historical record, like our memory, is certainly subject to error. What we recall happening and what actually happened can differ. But we can scarcely go from there to conclude that our memory is therefore useless and we're all no better than amnesiacs.] Cont.