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hawkwing_lbThe difference between fiction and life is that fiction has to make sense, or no one will find it credible.
That's a simple statement, and one easily transposed onto the writing of history with very little alteration. Historical - even semi- and pseudo-histiorical or mythological - narratives are the construction of sense and credibilty out of the sometimes scarce, often conflicting, and potentially arbitrary set of events and evidences which we know, intuit, or deduct concerning things which have happened in the past. To create a causal narrative, even when we have the expressed reasons or interpretations of some of the players, is to accept postulates, deductions, and intuitions. What, how, who, and when may perhaps be recoverable: why remains ephemeral, relative, malleable.
As a result, history is a layered narrative of choices, interpretations, and interesting lacunae, not only in the archaeological record and in the historical sources, but in the mind and works of the historian. The best that a historian might achieve is the adequate justification of their choices and interpretations, to be, convincingly, not wrong as far as we know, much as a barrister for the defence might aim for a convincing verdict of not guilty or not proven in a court of law.
"The past" is the totality of everything which has happened. "History" is a constructed narrative, a set of interpretations that aim to fit, more or less, what we know about what happened; what we can deduct, model, and intuit.
As such, history is relative. Where and when it is written, and who writes it, have as much bearing upon the construction of its narrative - its internal architecture - as do those debatable things we like to call "historical facts."
It is postmodernist of me to claim that there can be no objective truth, no Truth in an absolute form. But it is also true.* In the best case, we may prove event, action, even motivation, beyond reasonable doubt. But the doubt remains - indeed, must remain, for doubt is what permits us to challenge received wisdom, received truth, and find new ways of thinking and of interpreting the world and its past.
Academic humanists might long for the functional certainties of the physical sciences - certainly, today, they long for equivalent funding, and often envy their prominent place in the discourse of modern higher learning. But the historian's concern is not with general laws, repeating phenomena, regularity: the historian studies particularity, similarity, contradiction - but not regularity.
Put more simply, the historian studies people and the contexts which they inhabit and create.
If objective truth is unobtainable, then, why should history matter? If we reject out of hand - and I do - the idea of history as presenting a set of moral exemplars to imitate or to abhor, or as describing (in that old Whig view) a progression towards rational modernity, what does it give us? Does it give us anything of use? Aside from the fascination - often great indeed - which history exerts upon the imagination, why should we read it, write it, endeavour to preserve it?
It's a truism that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. "Doomed" is a good word, there, for ultimately, history matters because people matter. The ghosts of history deserve no less respect than our living peers. They deserve to be valued and remembered, the dead, the lost, the forgotten: the nameless mayor of Egyptian Oxyrhynchus who coughed from his lungs attested in papyri of the second century CE and the infant buried underneath the hearthstone of a Tudor house no less than a consul, an archduke, or a king.
The one virtue above all others which the student of history cultivates is empathy. Without it past events are no more than names and dates, devoid of meaning. But with empathy, we strive - often, indeed almost always, falling short - for understanding of these strange people who lived long ago, so like us - loving and fearing, triumphing and failing, struggling and playing - and yet so unlike us in the lenses through which they viewed the world. We learn to understand that the histories - the mythologies of the past - which form their - and our, for that matter - identities are not necessarily true, that the answers to the questions we ask of motivation and meaning and the interleaved system of relationships which form a society are frequently more complicated than we imagine, or than they appear.
People matter. People - individually, in groups, in societies - do fascinating things, beautiful things, incredible things, and people ought to be valued and remembered, even if they are, as individuals, anonymous. Even terrible people ought to be remembered, for they, too, are human like us, and like us shaped by and shaping their contexts.
Ultimately the historian studies the past not from duty, nor from ambition, but for love. Love and fascination combine to drive us to seek understanding: it is the compulsion of eros, spurring us across vast distances in hope of consummation. This love, which is close kin to empathy, makes us better people: it seeks not possession, but comprehension.
This is why history matters. Because nothing that contributes to the sum of human understanding is ever without use.
And here ends my polemic in defence of history. For today.
*That was indeed a pun.
That's a simple statement, and one easily transposed onto the writing of history with very little alteration. Historical - even semi- and pseudo-histiorical or mythological - narratives are the construction of sense and credibilty out of the sometimes scarce, often conflicting, and potentially arbitrary set of events and evidences which we know, intuit, or deduct concerning things which have happened in the past. To create a causal narrative, even when we have the expressed reasons or interpretations of some of the players, is to accept postulates, deductions, and intuitions. What, how, who, and when may perhaps be recoverable: why remains ephemeral, relative, malleable.
As a result, history is a layered narrative of choices, interpretations, and interesting lacunae, not only in the archaeological record and in the historical sources, but in the mind and works of the historian. The best that a historian might achieve is the adequate justification of their choices and interpretations, to be, convincingly, not wrong as far as we know, much as a barrister for the defence might aim for a convincing verdict of not guilty or not proven in a court of law.
"The past" is the totality of everything which has happened. "History" is a constructed narrative, a set of interpretations that aim to fit, more or less, what we know about what happened; what we can deduct, model, and intuit.
As such, history is relative. Where and when it is written, and who writes it, have as much bearing upon the construction of its narrative - its internal architecture - as do those debatable things we like to call "historical facts."
It is postmodernist of me to claim that there can be no objective truth, no Truth in an absolute form. But it is also true.* In the best case, we may prove event, action, even motivation, beyond reasonable doubt. But the doubt remains - indeed, must remain, for doubt is what permits us to challenge received wisdom, received truth, and find new ways of thinking and of interpreting the world and its past.
Academic humanists might long for the functional certainties of the physical sciences - certainly, today, they long for equivalent funding, and often envy their prominent place in the discourse of modern higher learning. But the historian's concern is not with general laws, repeating phenomena, regularity: the historian studies particularity, similarity, contradiction - but not regularity.
Put more simply, the historian studies people and the contexts which they inhabit and create.
If objective truth is unobtainable, then, why should history matter? If we reject out of hand - and I do - the idea of history as presenting a set of moral exemplars to imitate or to abhor, or as describing (in that old Whig view) a progression towards rational modernity, what does it give us? Does it give us anything of use? Aside from the fascination - often great indeed - which history exerts upon the imagination, why should we read it, write it, endeavour to preserve it?
It's a truism that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. "Doomed" is a good word, there, for ultimately, history matters because people matter. The ghosts of history deserve no less respect than our living peers. They deserve to be valued and remembered, the dead, the lost, the forgotten: the nameless mayor of Egyptian Oxyrhynchus who coughed from his lungs attested in papyri of the second century CE and the infant buried underneath the hearthstone of a Tudor house no less than a consul, an archduke, or a king.
The one virtue above all others which the student of history cultivates is empathy. Without it past events are no more than names and dates, devoid of meaning. But with empathy, we strive - often, indeed almost always, falling short - for understanding of these strange people who lived long ago, so like us - loving and fearing, triumphing and failing, struggling and playing - and yet so unlike us in the lenses through which they viewed the world. We learn to understand that the histories - the mythologies of the past - which form their - and our, for that matter - identities are not necessarily true, that the answers to the questions we ask of motivation and meaning and the interleaved system of relationships which form a society are frequently more complicated than we imagine, or than they appear.
People matter. People - individually, in groups, in societies - do fascinating things, beautiful things, incredible things, and people ought to be valued and remembered, even if they are, as individuals, anonymous. Even terrible people ought to be remembered, for they, too, are human like us, and like us shaped by and shaping their contexts.
Ultimately the historian studies the past not from duty, nor from ambition, but for love. Love and fascination combine to drive us to seek understanding: it is the compulsion of eros, spurring us across vast distances in hope of consummation. This love, which is close kin to empathy, makes us better people: it seeks not possession, but comprehension.
This is why history matters. Because nothing that contributes to the sum of human understanding is ever without use.
And here ends my polemic in defence of history. For today.
*That was indeed a pun.
