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The Historians' Dilemma
Elliott J. Gorn
| Against a backdrop of routine dishonesty from America's leaders, it seems like academic navel gazing to discuss "the ethical crisis in history." Recent corporate corruption—Enron and the rest—certainly dwarfs our poor power to add or detract. Indeed, the scandals in the Catholic Church over sexually abusive priests make us seem by comparison like, well, choirboys and -girls. Then there was the last presidential election, an ethical breakdown that would have made Richard Daley (the elder) blush. And of course since the election we have been subjected not just to lies—the phantom weapons of mass destruction, the absurd linking of Saddam Hussein with Al-Qaeda—but to an ongoing degradation of democratic political discourse. |
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And these are the easy ones. We have not gotten to the ethics of corporate executives' salaries, new tax laws that will surely bankrupt the nation, money-soaked elections that drown democracy, a prison system that makes China look like the human rights poster child, a so-called Patriot Act that shreds our Bill of Rights, etc., etc., etc. Historians' ethical dilemmas are small by comparison. But they are not unrelated to these larger crises. |
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A recent New York Times article described a study conducted by psychologists exploring the values and ethics of selected young professionals. The researchers bemoaned the lack of good mentoring for scientists, journalists, and actors, by which was meant, I think, that no one ever laid a fatherly hand on youthful shoulders and said do not tell lies, my son; cheat not, my daughter. But read a little deeper. The young subjects of the study were well aware of ethical issues. In fact, their so-called mentors were the problem. Senior scientists and managers in highly competitive (and lucrative) fields such as genetic engineering pushed their charges to publish findings prematurely, and sometimes young scientists interpreted the pressure to produce as an invitation to bend the protocols of good research. Similarly, youthful journalists spoke eloquently about fairness, objectivity, and their profession's mission to keep the public informed, but they saw themselves as not living up to these ideals. This was not merely a matter of personal failure: "They feel under the thumb of powerful editors, whose concern to best the competition all too often seems to dominate traditional journalistic values of fairness, objectivity and serving readers."1 |
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From the mentors' point of view, what others might call ethical lapses, character flaws, or personal weaknesses were in fact great strengths. The only real rule for them was "don't get caught." We live in an age when the marketplace has been raised to transcendent, almost holy, status. Winning is everything, and winning often means cutting corners to outsell the competition. But unquestioned faith in the virtue of markets often blinds us to their corrosive impact on ethics. |
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What does any of this have to do with the history profession? Historians do not compete in the same marketplace as genetic engineers or newspaper journalists. But our lives are enmeshed in job markets, tenure markets, course evaluation markets, publishing markets—places where competition allocates scarce resources—which can have deleterious effects. In point of fact, the scholarly realm is a good place to think about ethics because, though some may like to believe that we live in ivory towers, colleges and their employees never wholly escape the pressures and corruptions of the larger world. |
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