What I lost when I lost history

Losing my faith when I quit the history PhD

“That’s crazy that someone so long ago captured your exact thoughts.”

That was my partner last night. We were lying awake in bed talking about Ecclesiastes, which has become my new favorite book in the Old Testament. It’s a text about a narrator discovering emptiness, something that I relate to.

“It’s like everything the author wrote could have come from your mouth, word for word, and they didn’t even know it,” she continued.

I asked, “Are you so sure they didn’t know?”

When I read an old text, sometimes I realize that I’m not alone. Someone else so perfectly captured what I think and feel that the line between myself and the other, which even in the best of times has always been arbitrary, looks blurry. If only for one transcendent moment, I sense that the author is literally here with me.

The eerie, supernatural thing is that author knows it, too. If I can feel their presence by reading an old text, don’t you think that they were able to feel the same thing when they read an old text? And if they could feel it looking backward, don’t you think that they could feel it looking into the future, knowing that one day someone like me would read them and feel just as they do? Just as one day, someone will read this blog post and feel my presence, and they will think of me just as I’m thinking of them. I will have known them before they ever knew themselves.

To read Ecclesiastes, or any other old text that deeply resonates, is to transcend time. When I read, I sense that we share the same consciousness. I see the divine chain that binds us all.

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What could be more sacred than maintaining that chain? That was my worldview when I started my history PhD in 2010.

I saw what we were doing in the academy as holy, as the most important job that could possibly be done. We were the inheritors to the priests of ancient Egypt, keepers of transcendent knowledge and all that was good and important.

My colleagues didn’t see it that way.

I hesitate to recall my brief and painful stint in academia with any judgement of others lest I be judged. There are many things I remember doing and saying in my early 20s that I still cringe at almost 20 years later and individuals to whom, if I had the chance, I would apologize for some of the obnoxious and occasionally misguided things I said back then. I was rough character who needed a lot of therapy and didn’t know it yet. But my own sins, real or perceived, don’t cancel out the deep disappointment I felt going through the PhD.

Humanities departments in the 2010s were hotbeds of identitarian politics (for all I know, they still are). I remember a seminar in my first year in which everyone in my cohort went around and introduced themselves and why they were here. I explained, in all my naive earnestness, that I was here to seek the Truth with everyone else and that what we were doing was the most important job in the world. Everyone laughed at me, including the professor. They thought I was joking, but that’s how deeply I believed in our mission.

It wasn’t until some of my other colleagues spoke that I understood not everyone was here for such highfalutin reasons. A few mentioned that they were the first in their families to attend and graduate from college, let alone to start a PhD program. Fricking amazing stuff, bully for them. Genuinely, from the bottom of my heart.

But why did they choose to be here? More than once, I heard: to represent my people. To correct injustice. To be an activist.

Being an agent of progressive political change is a noble aim that I sympathize with, and part of being a good historian is to understand that there is no history without politics. But usually we would consider the politicization of history as a moral hazard of the profession, not as its end goal. I wanted to support my colleagues and their pursuit of justice, but how could justice or any political goal, no matter how laudable, be the supreme end—as I hoped was the case for all of us in a doctoral program—of someone dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth without agenda?

A few of these same colleagues made outrageous accusations with impunity. One time, I remember being publicly called an exemplar of white privilege just for saying that I felt that the aim of studying history should be to maintain and perpetuate civilization. This was before I understood that “civilization,” an important concept in the anti-imperialist Turkish political vernacular that I was raised in, is a shibboleth on the American left for white supremacy. Not that anyone bothered to ask what my priors were before lobbing such attacks; that kind of compassion was a privilege only reserved for those who towed the party line.

Then there were the courses. We were commonly expected to read three to four thick academic tomes, each usually around 250 pages, per seminar per week, typically while taking four classes at a time. So about 4,000 or so pages per week of dense technical historiography—or about 133 hours per week at 30 pages per hour, which would be a generous pace—on top of teaching and researching.

There’s simply no way to ingest that much text that quickly. If we were really serious about our work, we would have been looking up every footnote, tracking down every primary source, and cross-referencing every argument. Each book would have taken an entire year to get through, let alone cramming 12-16 every week.

Predictably, no one actually did the readings, sometimes including the professors. We skimmed, caught a few catchphrases and trendy references to Foucault, and regurgitated them in seminar to sound intelligent. More than one colleague confided in me that they smoked weed before class just to get through it.

Outside the classroom, there was a pervasive bitterness that everyone felt about being a marginalized underclass, a self-identification as an intellectual lumpenproletariat. People were angry with the conservative—or fascist, depending on the day—politicians and administrators who kept cutting our funding. I was angry, too.

So when I showed up to a union meeting, I said let’s fight back. I proposed pooling our savings to hire a lobbyist and create a marketing campaign for the humanities, creating an outreach campaign, hiring billboards, grabbing TV spots, infiltrating the schools, pressuring politicians. If the system plays dirty, let’s cover ourselves in filth. Let’s dominate the system. Let’s develop our own political machine as humanities graduate students and make them pay.

My proposal was met with confused stares, and the meeting quickly moved on to discuss yet more injustices and grievances, how the academy had become subsumed into the capitalist system, yada yada. It took me years to realize that so many of my colleagues were engaged in a tribal status game. The point wasn’t to solve our problems, the point was to identify with them as bitterly as possible.

The nakedly identitarian politics, the unrealistic course load, and the self-identification as an underclass were parts of a broken social system. Instead of getting paid a reasonable wage, we paid ourselves in wages of moral status. The more we claimed to read and the more voluminous our output, the greater our glory, even though some days the only thing we could afford to eat was $0.50 day-old bread from Jimmy Johns. The poorer we got, the more we identified with the Marxian theories of our professors—the ones who showed up to class in a Corvette and earned six figures in corporate taxpayer money—even as we hoped that we, too, would tenure into the same class. We mocked the idea of a young historian pursuing Truth as dangerously naive, as we trashed our predecessors whom we hardly read for destroying truth with their grotesque biases.

This was the factory where history sausage was made. I was disgusted, and after 2.5 years, I quit.

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Quitting the PhD tore out a piece of me.

There were some people there whom I’ll never forget. My advisor was a hero and I can’t imagine what stress I put her through in my early 20s. She didn’t deserve that and I hope that she forgives me. I deeply admired her integrity and I always will.

I had another colleague at a different institution who worked on my same research topic and whom I looked up to. When I told him that I was quitting, he was so generous and understanding. I’ve tried reaching out to him a couple of times in the past decade but I never got a response. Is he too busy—or did I hurt him in some way?

There were also a handful of professors who, I suspect, really saw me on a deep level, and maybe even saw that I was one of them—a dying breed who thought of education as a higher purpose unto itself. They were so kind and gentle toward me. I’m sorry if I disappointed them by quitting. And there were some fellow students with whom I still feel the embers of camaraderie even though we haven’t talked for years.

But the deepest rupture of all was the faith that I lost in what I was doing.

For years after I quit, I couldn’t bring myself to read any history. I joined the tech industry and I’ve been disturbed ever since at what I’ve seen: a culture that fawns over the intellectual prowess of leaders whose philosophies wouldn’t last a day in the rigor of a graduate seminar, who spout corporate slogans that would be deconstructed to shreds within 0.2 seconds.

Yet I couldn’t go back. Having my faith destroyed disabused me. There’s nothing wrong with history, but in the end, isn’t it just as empty as tech?

My younger self wanted nothing more than to be a high priest in history’s temple, a caretaker passing down the flame. I wanted to perform this sacred duty and enter communion with the dead. I wanted them to see me as I saw them, so that they would know that they weren’t forgotten, and I would know that I wasn’t alone.

As I look at the Bible in front of my keyboard, open to Ecclesiastes, I wonder: maybe I still could.