RIP, Howard Zinn
Historian and activist Howard Zinn (website, Wikipedia) died today at 87. The Boston Globe obituary is fitting, but I expect a great deal of passionate ink to be spilled over his passing as soon as the reactions to Obama's SOTU abate. Zinn was a formative influence on my thinking, and he inspired large swaths of two generations of intellectual dissidents. Here are my Quotes of the Day, a few favorites from the dozen or so of his books that I've read:
We who insist on looking critically at the Columbus story, and indeed at everything in our traditional histories, are often accused of insisting on Political Correctness, to the detriment of free speech. I find this odd. It is the guardians of the old stories, the orthodox histories, who refuse to widen the spectrum of ideas, to take in new books, new approaches, new information, new views of history. They who claim to believe in "free markets" do not believe in a free marketplace of ideas, any more than they believe in a free marketplace of goods and services. In both material goods and in ideas, they want the market dominated by those who have always held power and wealth. They worry that if new ideas enter the marketplace, people may begin to rethink the social arrangements that have given us so much suffering, so much violence, so much war these last five hundred years of "civilization." (The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy, p. 497)
...knowledge has a social origin and social use. It comes out of a divided, embattled world, and is poured into such a world. It is not neutral either in origin or effect. It reflects the biases of a diverse social order, but with one important qualification: that those with the most power and wealth in society will dominate the field of knowledge, so that it serves their interests. The scholar may swear to his neutrality on the job, but his work will tend...to maintain the existing social order by perpetrating its values, by legitimatising its priorities, by justifying its wars, perpetuating its class order. (Howard Zinn on History, p. 167)
[This book is] a biased account, one that leans in a certain direction. I am not troubled by that, because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction - so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements - that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission. (A People's History of the United States, p. 645)
The fact is, things are already unbalanced. The pretense is that things are balanced and you want to keep them that way. But of course they're already so far out of balance, we would have to put an enormous amount of left-wing weight onto the scales in order even to make the scales move slightly toward balance. (The Future of History, p. 39)
Think differently.