Santayana’s commonplace observation that “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it” is not popular with professional historians, who suffer from chronic disagreement about what the past means, or whether it means anything at all. Such embarrassment is understandable: Since the First World War, the most salient lessons of the past have been systematically obscured in the academy, for reasons that are both structural and political.

The ever-increasing specialization of scholarly disciplines has lead to a continuous refinement of knowledge in many fields, but it also works to discourage the large conceptions that are inherently necessary to treat large topics.

Who profits? In the short run, clearly the ever more segmented guilds of Americanists, Europeanists, medievalists, and classicists. Specialization confers authority in proportion to arcaneness. Lacking the empirical tests of hard science, the study of history dissolves into a kaleidoscope of specialties, whose only common feature is their mutual exclusivity. While knowledge proliferates, understanding decreases.

Historians, most of whom would do far better to spend their time assimilating a past fewer and fewer of them know well, and transmitting this distilled knowledge to their students, who desperately need such background, are under constant pressure to demonstrate “originality.” They have responded through countless publications in a growing welter of ever more inconsequential journals. Interpretive revolution, which can only come from individual genius or the convulsive pressure of long-prepared events, is institutionalized, trivialized, and finally vitiated. In the meantime, true originality, which consists in discerning useful relations between apparently disparate facts, is structurally discouraged. A few oddball generalists resist the tide, but in general, historians have less and less to say to the public because they have less and less to say to each other.

The universal refrain is fast becoming, “It is so complex we cannot know.” Every obvious connection is severed: between the bourgeois ethos and the Industrial Revolution; between the French Enlightenment and the Reign of Terror; between German anti- Semitism and the rise of Nazism. The structure of academia systematically rewards scholars for destroying the connective tissue that makes knowledge intelligible and thereby useful.

Deconstructionism is the logical end result of all this. As the high priests of intellectual disintegration, deconstructionists have come to enjoy a certain aristocratic status in academia, like murderers in a prison. (It is an analogy they would relish.) Those who sacrifice continuity to change, simplicity to complexity, and certainty to doubt relinquish half the basis for sound judgment and become the camp followers of whatever revolution is currently in vogue. In the extreme case of the deconstructionists, like the anarchists before them, they succumb to a parricidal hatred of the very bases of civilization.

Academics tend to dislike answers, for there is no profit in them. They provide no rationale for further grants. Worse, by making human experience intelligible to ordinary people, they threaten the hegemony of specialists, “experts.” Such is the sociostructural impulsion to moral relativism. Sociobiology, which threatens to discover a biological basis for morality, is demonized. Economics, ethics, and sexuality become formless grab bags of “choice.” The professionals have still not forgiven Schliemann for discovering Troy: the City of Priam was far more congenial as a myth.

The destruction of limits, whether they are valid or not, also serves a more specifically political function. Extreme environmental determinism persists in the social sciences years after it has been empirically discredited, because it usefully obscures the social imperatives that social reforms violate at the price of creating predictable misery. For instance, no person with an even moderately open mind can be conversant with recent work on fetal masculinization and tomboyism or on sex differentiation in brain structure, yet still take seriously the unisexist doctrine that constitutes our current national philosophy of gender. Ironically, in light of the continuing progress of knowledge in many areas, we live today in a time of intellectual impoverishment, fueled by the deliberate neglect of the obvious.

The new obscurantism performs the same politicized function in history as in the behavioral sciences. If the past is too complicated to grasp, if each period is so unique that there are no general principles to be deduced, the way is cleared for every fanciful social reformer and every hate-driven would-be revolutionary who comes down the pike. The vociferous 60’s rejection of history as “irrelevant” rested on precisely this reasoning. To people dazzled by visions of Utopia, nothing fixed and certain is of interest, even if it is central to the human condition. Like the Victorians before us, we live estranged from our own advancing civilization, in an intellectual universe whose attempts at wisdom and morality are cut off from the very empirical sources of its knowledge.

The modern left cannot study history and still remain a left. In history as in behavioral science, facts are fatal. No wonder “objectivity” is despised; no wonder Ranke’s famous ideal, that historians should strive to understand the past Wie es eigentlich war, “As it really was,” is dismissed as a naive conceit, to be left behind with the dross of the 19th century.

It has consequently become a standard superstition of the late 20th century that the causes of events are obscure and inscrutable—so complex “we may never know what really happened.” In the course of the past generation, concepts like “facts,” “evidence,” “human nature,” “truth,” and “reality” have fallen out of fashion and out of use. In the social sciences in particular, a scholarly line of reasoning is no longer said to “prove” anything. It is at best “suggestive,” as if Science were an insincere suitor determined at all costs to avoid intimacy with the putative object of his efforts.

The argument that things are inherently obscure itself becomes a new form of obscurantism: important events are so complex that only experts can even begin to grasp them. Too, the defensive pettifogging such a notion encourages is highly congenial to the insecure personalities who notoriously flee to the protection of the academic grove in disproportionate numbers. The cause of social reform and the exclusivity of the guild are reinforced at the same time: What “progressive” academic could possibly resist?

The only victim is public understanding. By refusing to diagnose the causes of major phenomena, social scientists behave in the manner of a coroner who, confronted with a corpse shot through the chest, writes “Cause of Death: Unknown,” because he cannot be entirely sure whether death resulted from cardiac arrest, respiratory failure, or massive internal hemorrhaging. Mark Twain’s observation that “scholars have spread much darkness” so that “soon we shall know nothing at all” is singularly descriptive of the state of social science in the late 20th century. Excessive specialization artificially ranks the small over the large, the parts over the whole, and the obscure over the intelligible. As a result, modern scholars are often unable to progress beyond the conceptions of the great founders of modern history—Gibbon, Guizot, Ranke—in light of the knowledge that has accumulated since. Like modern American literature, with its addiction to the cult of the Significant Detail, modern history has long since lost sight of the wood for the trees.

In the newly darkened universe of thought, scholars stumble about over the dim shapes of questions whose answers might once have been considered obvious: the destruction of classical civilization by the unchecked growth of the Roman state; the elimination of famine in 18th-century Europe by the lifting of feudal barriers to free commerce in grain; the apotheosis of omnisexuality and the disintegration of the family. Cause and effect are severed, and the only tie still binding American academics is a limitless appetite for government funding. Those, like Allan Bloom, who expect modern civilization to be redeemed from such a corrupt source are in for an indefinite wait.