Date: Tue, 28 May 1996 13:46:43 GMT
Subject: Fantasylands
From: jya-AT-pipeline.com (John Young)


   The Washington Post, May 28, 1996, p. A11. 
 
 
   Fantasylands [Op-Ed] 
 
   Amy E. Schwartz  
 
 
   Some book publishers try to nudge sales by sponsoring 
   reading groups. The Internet-savvy HarperCollins, ginning 
   up publicity for the book "Not Out Of Africa" by Wellesley 
   classicist Mary Lefkowitz, did something wilder. It created 
   a "place" on the Internet called "Athena-Discuss," an 
   e-mail exchange at the address "lists-AT-info.harpercollins. 
   com," where, for the past month or so, I have been 
   eavesdropping on a rollicking, sometimes raging debate over 
   history, Afrocentrism, the classics and ancient Egypt. 
 
   The Lefkowitz book is an attack on another recent book -- 
   Martin Bernal's 1988 "BIack Athena" -- and more generally 
   on Afrocentric versions of history, which mostly argue that 
   ancient Greece has been unfairly credited with all of 
   civilization's greatest breakthroughs in philosophy, 
   science and mathematics. Most versions attempt to remedy 
   this supposed injustice by insisting that ancient Africa, 
   in particular ancient Egypt, was in fact the fount of 
   wisdom from which the Greek philosophers and mathematicians 
   drank. 
 
   The evidence adduced for this argument runs from the 
   intriguing and seemingly plausible to the ludicrous. Just 
   to make things livelier, the classical Greeks themselves 
   made a lot of statements about Egyptian wisdom, and 
   Herodotus, Pythagoras and Thales were all said by 
   contemporary sources to have gone there to study -- 
   assertions that modern classicists mostly shrug off as 
   metaphorical. The Bernal book made a stir because it stuck 
   to the Egypt argument and was fairly convincing about the 
   idea that the Greece-Egypt nexus (the "ancient model" the 
   Greeks themselves subscribed to) had been obscured by 
   racist 19th-century, principally German, scholarship. But 
   little of the debate is this tame or even this focused. 
   Some Afrocentrists -- not Bernal -- assert vast unspecified 
   intellectual debts to sub-Saharan cultures and reject 
   "Eurocentric" calls for evidence, a stance that properly 
   drives classicists like Lefkowitz up the wall. 
 
   The issue is ideal for the Internet -- lots of good, bad 
   and nutty evidence, lots of close reading, misreading and 
   accusations of intellectual dishonesty on both sides. It 
   shouldn't have surprised anyone (though HarperCollins seems 
   startled) that the list has turned into a thundering 
   free-for-all. Two thousand long and short essays have been 
   posted, a hundred or so a day. Amazing, epic insults have 
   been exchanged. Historians of mathematics have accused 
   Cameroonian archaeologists of ignorance, undergraduates who 
   dropped out of classics departments have told tales of 
   racism by their professors, peacemakers have been pilloried 
   as gutless liberal hypocrites. One man with an African name 
   has calmly posted quote after quote from supposed ancient 
   sources about the Egyptian travels of Herodotus, drawing 
   crescendoing howls of rage from a classicist who considers 
   them spurious. Arguments that sound plausible to outsiders 
   have been met by such withering, personalized scorn from 
   the pros that you can see why some people consider the 
   field racist (or just unbearably arrogant). 
 
   Having hung on gamely through all this bad behavior, I 
   ended up without the foggiest idea whether Herodotus 
   visited Egypt or whether the Greek word "sophos" comes from 
   the Egyptian root "seb." You could say this makes the 
   Internet a relativist's fantasy, a place where no fact can 
   be relied on as true, and any structure may be a hoax. Or 
   you can step back and accept that it reflects a much wider 
   and more ordinary human phenomenon: This is how human 
   beings tend to organize their impressions of a history they 
   can never completely know. 
 
   As it happened, that unavoidably selective sense of the 
   past was a pressing topic at a conference recently at 
   Dumbarton Oaks, where a hundred landscape architects spent 
   the weekend talking about theme parks -- not just Disney, 
   everybody's durable obsession, but all the world's 
   different prefabricated "fantasy landscapes" and the state 
   fairs, court gardens and Expos that were their precursors. 
   "The past is a theme park," suggested David Lowenthal, a 
   noted geographer now retired from the University of London, 
   in the keynote address. Like theme parks, he suggested, a 
   lot of popular assumptions about history owe "more to 
   imagined than to actual landscapes, and especially to 
   felicities seen through nostalgic or apocalyptic lenses." 
 
   Lowenthal offered three ways that theme parks and 
   "envisioned pasts" both succeed in their efforts to reflect 
   "present ends and aims": They are vague, with "an aversion 
   to specificity and precise knowledge"; they use 
   "conflation, a habitual merging of various times and 
   locales into a single landscaped experience" and 
   "contrivance, a deliberate defiance of the authentic and 
   the verifiable in favor of emotion and immediacy." 
 
   These are not, of course, characterishcs of the scholarly 
   pursuit of history as an academic discipline. But if you 
   assume, as the Dumbarton crowd seemed to, that theme-park 
   building and enjoying is a perfectly natural and 
   non-nefarious human activity and indeed one of the ways 
   people take in history and culture most comfortably, then 
   you begin to appreciate the factors that would drive the 
   passionate amateurs on the Internet to handle their history 
   this way without being guilty of the kind of viciousness, 
   dishonesty and idiocy of which each side accuses the other 
   in the Athena debate -- or, for that matter, in the 
   broader, war-torn landscape of ethnocentric studies. 
 
   Scanning backward in the now corpse-strewn terrain of the 
   Athena list, I came across an early message whose author 
   approvingly quoted one of Lowenthal's own earlier writings, 
   this one pointing out the difference between "history" and 
   "heritage." Looking for one's "heritage" in history is 
   likely to produce versions, however rigorously accurate, 
   that tell a chosen story about the values that the present 
   culture holds dear -- Colonial Williamsburg, for instance. 
   Less rigorous practitioners will end up with, say, a 
   Disney-type version of the American frontier, which 
   converts vaguely shared notions of what the Wild West was 
   like into the much more easily shared landscape of 
   Frontiertown or a rodeo-theme ride. 
 
   People who peddle distorted versions of history, such as 
   Afrocentrism that says Egyptians invented the calculus, are 
   letting heritage overwhelm history until there's none left. 
   But classicists who have all the facts on their side and 
   yet behave as badly as some have done on Athena-Discuss -- 
   shrieking "relativism," for instance, at someone's mild 
   observation that it's odd how little the fields of classics 
   and of biblical or ancient Near East studies say to each 
   other even today -- are refusing to admit that feelings of 
   heritage about ancient Greece shaped their field too. 
 
   You can insist that only a horrible, politicized, 
   relativistic jerk would allow heritage to fog history, and 
   let the fantasy landscape deteriorate further into a brawl. 
   But it might be better to look at it as a simple and shared 
   temptation, something scholars must try, but may fail, not 
   to do. 
 
   ----- 
 
   The writer is a member of the editorial page staff. 
 
   [End]