Beast's library. Looks impressive? Bet it's all stuff like Chicken Soup For The Cursed Prince's Soul or Seven Habits of Highly Cursed People.
Like a lot of people who are interested in military history, I got my “start” in World War II. Way back in the Philippines, in my old school in Ateneo, I started reading the dribs and drabs I found in our library. Not a lot of stuff– like at all. I lost interest in World War II over the years and when I decided to try making a very minor career out of history, with a focus of sorts on military history, I directed my interest primarily to Southeast Asian history and Philippine military history.
Recently, though, I’ve had to teach more general military history classes. The jobs of being an ABD mean you get more freedom in topics to teach– and I decided to avoid limiting myself to Southeast Asian history because I don’t feel I can fill a term’s worth of teaching with it. I also decided to add a greater range of topics just for the sake of relevance and student interest.
So after 15 years, I went back to World War II. Wow. How could I have known what I had missed? First, I never really studied it with a particularly academic bent, and second, I didn’t have people to tell me what to read. This time around I both had a reason to take a scholarly approach and someone who could point me in the right direction. Like Belle from the picture above, it literally opened up a world of books and literature I had never even heard of. I got to read people like Omar Bartov, John Buckley, Richard Overy, David Glantz, Robert Citino, John Dower, and Geoffrey P. Megaree. And that’s barely even scratching the surface– I know there’s loads of others, like Carlos Este, Russel Hart, Dennis Showalter (yes, I haven’t read him yet) and a slew of others. It completely altered my view of that war– for instance, it showed how unbalanced the view was of German ability, or how underrated the Russians had been. It also reduced the importance of technology in my understanding of victory and defeat in that war.
Why do I bring this up? I love my old school and will always be extremely proud of it– it was responsible for a lot of my good qualities. My intellectual approach is also Atenean, and I have found it a good, solid one. HOWEVER, the problems with my school– I went to the Ateneo de Manila for both high school and college–is that it is not necessarily in touch with the latest scholarship in certain fields. I never would have known how much I was missing when it came to World War II historical literature because of my school’s relative isolation.
There are other, more practical reasons for this lack of up-to-date information, of course. Money is an obvious one– the Ateneo had one of the bigger and better libraries in the whole Philippines because of money and organization. Students and researchers from all over would go to our library to make use of it. But it is an absolutely tiny library in absolute terms– it has 180,000 books. My current school’s library has a collection that far exceeds the Rizal Library’s collection– just the science branch has 160,000. And my current school even has a small library in comparison to other institutions.
Being in the periphery of major educational systems and institutions– really, being in the Philippines– also burdens the library collection. The Ateneo, for instance, did not participate in SUMMIT or WorldCat when I was there (and still doesn’t from what I can tell). I don’t know why it doesn’t, but I can imagine money and logistics plays a role. I mean, both services use the postal service, and I just don’t see the Philippine postal service being fast enough or trustworthy enough to be a viable means of library book transport.
So just as a point of reference, the Rizal Library does not own a copy of Omer Bartov’s Hitler’s Army, Wolfram Wette’s The Wehrmacht or a single one of Citino’s works. When it comes to general military history, the Rizal Library owns only one of Azar Gat’s works and it does not have Russell Weigley’s landmark The American Way of War. Lest I be accused of being focused on American history or authors, the library does not own a copy of Jomini’s works or even David G. Chandler’s The Campaigns of Napoleon. I am gratified to know it at least owns Geoffrey Parker’s The Military Revolution, Overy’s Why The Allies Won and John Dower’s War Without Mercy.
Perhaps the bigger problem I had was the lack of someone to just keep me up to date on the state of the field. So perhaps the main reason why the Rizal Library doesn’t own some of those works I mentioned is because nobody ever told it to buy them. It’s a good library– it’s well-organized, well-maintained and its staff is very good at what they do. But they can’t own or buy something they don’t know about.
As for myself, I had very little guidance in college or after when I was trying to learn about military history. My first exposure to the “new military history” was John Lynn’s book Battle– very belated, as you can imagine. Hell, I still thought that V.D.Hanson was worth a damn (I now know better than to read his garbage). When I came here, I found myself having to catch up, reading all kinds of stuff that I had never heard of. Amazingly– I had never heard of the military revolution debate, for instance. That whole contentious field was new to me, although I at least had the experience of first being absolutely swayed by Parker– and then becoming more and more skeptical of him as I read more on the debate.
Now again– the Ateneo has an excellent faculty. However, we never had a mentor figure who could tell us about the mainstream of Western history. I don’t think that’s anybody’s fault– it was just a product of institutional history, focus and goals. I myself taught Western history there and I sometimes feel the urge to write to my former students to apologize and disclaim almost everything I taught. That would be wrong of me since I think I did teach them something worthwhile– as do all of us there who taught Western history. We might not have taught the newest ideas, but we taught them how to read Western history, taught them the narrative of it, and we taught them good ideas. We basically taught the students how to read and approach knowledge. I was probably the least talented teacher in that field, so my colleagues did a far better job than me in imparting these skills and paradigms. They were (are) rightly considered to be gifted and inspirational teachers by their students.
And just in general– this is why I was able to process new information when I did get my hands on them– the Ateneo taught me how to think and read, although it didn’t necessarily teach me the newest information.
After touching this monolith, the ape-man now knows about circles of kings and the theater state.
However, I won’t deny that we were all hamstrung by a lack of connection with the mainstream of historical current, and that perhaps we were limited by not having someone like a senior faculty member to tell us what was new. I suppose you could say that an Asian institution has no business trying to learn or teach fields like World War II history or European history in general, but I find that to be a very dubious proposition. Leave aside the fact that I get continuously frustrated by this colonial paradigm in academics– the seeming pigeonholing of minorities to area studies of their ethnic or cultural background while old white men are considered objective enough to study anything they want– knowledge is internationalized. The Philippines has to continually deal with America, yet the Ateneo has no American studies program or American history focus. In fact, nobody in the Philippines is really concerned with this field, and I would think it would be in the country’s best interest to acquire some academic knowledge of the USA. Or another example is Middle Eastern studies– the majority of Filipino Overseas Workers go to the Middle East, yet the Ateneo has nobody studying Islam or Middle Eastern history or culture. Surely it would be in the country’s best interests to have its premier educational institution to know about that stuff?
And it only takes one professor: I remember when my mentor for Southeast Asian history showed me all these new ideas from Benedict Anderson, Oliver Wolters or Anthony Reid. Because of him, there is an entire generation of young students and teachers in Ateneo now who know about concepts of men of prowess and mandala. Perhaps there’s even enough to form a self-sustaining tradition. As I seen by the picture from 2001 Space Odyssey, my mentor served as a star gate– opening up new information and ways of thought I hadn’t known before.
I talk like it’s easy, building a tradition, but obviously it’s not. It tends to require money and resources the Ateneo might not have. And there’s even a catch-22– so the Ateneo does get somebody to, for instance, jump start a World War II specialization. The problem is that person will have no books to work with. He or she might not have the money or resources to keep up to date or to go to conferences, or to publish or do all the stuff that maintaining a tradition or an academic field requires.
Truth is, I suspect it might not be worth it for the Ateneo to invest in such things right now. It might not even have to. Like I said, the system of education the school espouses tends to be more holistic and humanistic than specific. What this means is that it gave me the ability to read and understand new things and not get completely lost. So with this sort of education, you might not have specifics, but you can use it to discover what the new books or ideas are and understand them.
In many ways, I find this Ateneo approach to education much better than what I have encountered in some places here in America: systems of education or thought that produce people with knowledge of specifics, but who have a very poor grasp of knowledge as a whole, a lack of epistemology and philosophy. What ends up happening, I noticed, is that you have people who know “stuff” but don’t know what to do with it. Perhaps this is the effect of the “googling” or “wikipediazation” of information, which has lead to an increase in the amount of trivia and scattered factoids at people’s fingertips– but has not helped in sorting through them. This might be why public discourse here is a battle of absolutist viewpoints, or of ordinary people unable to frame debates beyond dualistic opposition. In a way it’s an irony– Americans tend to scoff at fields like history or English literature, and there is a cultural bias to the “hard sciences” or more “practical” fields. But then the most contentious debates in the public discourse usually involve things like history or culture. Even debates over supposed science are more debates about philosophy or culture than anything else. But these are all incredibly stupid debates because of a lack of critical thinking.
That being said, I’m optimistic that the Ateneo history system will one day grow to the point where it can expand its areas of expertise. The Philippines seems to be headed toward an upward trajectory and I think this will enable the study of history in the Philippines to more fully join in the mainstream of the academic world. And it’s not like the Ateneo is absolutely a backwater that’s completely isolated. I may have given that impression, which is stupidly false– a good proportion of its history faculty already does research and interact with scholars from all over the world, and it’s kind of amazing to consider actually. Perhaps what I mean to say is that the already excellent faculty of the Ateneo will one day be recognized as world quality– I think it already is, but it just has some gaps in certain fields. Maybe as the Philippines assumes a more international role, opportunities for academic engagement and expansion will also increase. The holistic system of education the Ateneo has will certainly mean it would be well-placed to do so when that time comes.
Posted by callitaweasel 
