An Overstatement...

“America has been and remains the greatest force for good in the history of the world;”

 This is statement made by in the The Principles of the New York Republican State Committee. I have to take issue with this as a student and teacher of history:

I retort to this not by a vagrant disregard for the certain good that America has done. However, I believe that platitudes such as the aforementioned are simply such, and need to be confronted more deeply. As a history teacher, I struggle to have students understand the complexities of history, not to be intellectually reductive in their thinking (i.e.- Soviets were the "bad guys" in the Cold War, Rome was great, etc). My goal is to have them examine, analyze, and interpret the complexities and various nuances of the history of a people or nation and examine the good with the bad.

I leave my final retort to James Loewen, Professor of Sociology, History, and author of the book "Lies My Teacher Told Me. In his specific thesis he discussed the absence of race relations in the teaching of American History. His point is related to mine in that students, who later become adults, are taught generalities which omit the complexities of true history: He writes:

"The closest they [textbooks] come to analysis is to present a vague feeling of optimism: in race relations, as in everything, our society is constantly getting better. We used to have slavery; now we don't. We used to have lynchings; now we don't. Baseball used to be all white; now it isn't. The notion of progress suffuses textbook treatments of black-white relations, implying that race relations somehow steadily improved on their own. This cheery optimism only compounds the problem...

" 'The U.S. has done more than any other nation in history to provide equal rights for all,’ The American Tradition [a high school textbook] assures us. Of course, its authors have not seriously considered the levels of human rights in the Netherlands, Lesotho, or Canada today, or in Choctaw society in 1800, because they don’t mean their declaration as a serious statement of comparative history- it is just ethnocentric cheerleading.” (pg. 171)

I find this so profoundly true not because I’m a revisionist historian, or someone content to find all the flaws in the Untied States of America, disregarding the positive aspects of our great nation. However, as a teacher I believe statements like this are dangerous in their lack of perspective. Loving one’s country is fine; declaring it the greatest force for good in history is foolhardy. I challenge anyone to make a strong case from a comparative history viewpoint: Tell me about civil rights in Hittite society, tell me about ‘good’ in 14^thcentury Korea.

And the phrase “good” in this context creates a meaningless standard because it’s the easiest thing to claim and the hardest to prove. Did the Incas create good in history by their farming innovations? Did the people of the Mohejo-Daro create good by their advances in indoor plumbing? Did the Greeks create good with the creation of democracy? Did Columbus or Marco Polo create good by opening up east/west relations? Did Islamic society create good by providing Europe with technological innovations far superior to anything seen prior during the Crusades? Certainly all of these events have multiple facets and perspectives from which to be analyzed from.

I think America being the greatest force of good in history is a statement devoid of historical perspective.