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"To be ignorant of what
occurred before you were born," Cicero declared, "is to remain always a
child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the
life of our ancestors by the records of history?" A good historian begins
with the hard facts on public events and fragments of cultural life. But
it takes more than what can be taught to become a great historian. He must
also possess sensitivity, imagination, depth of perception, distance, and
that uncanny ability to synthesize vast bits of knowledge, the kind found
in great novelists. He must attempt to enter the society he
studies, to see the world as its members saw it, and understand, to the
extent possible, what it was like to live in it. He must examine the
psychology, morals, aspirations, and assumptions of ordinary people.
The conception of man as an
actor, a purposive being, moved by his own conscious aims as well as
causal laws, capable of unpredictable flights of thought and imagination,
and of his culture as created by his effort to achieve self-knowledge and
control of his environment in the face of material and psychic forces
which he may use but cannot evade-this conception lies at the heart of all
truly historical study. [-Isaiah Berlin]
The present indeed
derives from the
past but its course
remains ever fluid,
non-linear, pliable
yet unpredictable.
However, it's not
entirely a
random walk in the
contingent-culture
renders some steps
more probable than
others. People come
into a world,
inherit ideas and
traditions, project
themselves in time,
and die. Cultures
consist of ideas,
beliefs, values that
shape people but
people shape these
same ideas, beliefs,
values. In this
sense, it is
simultaneously true
that history creates
people and that
people create
history (in doing
so, some are deemed
heroes and some
villains).
Inseparable from all
narratives is a
particular
instantiation of
politics, identity,
and culture. There's
no impartial and
omniscient
chronicler of
events, no
'scientific'
history. Facts are
one thing, their
interpretation
another; only the
former can be
objective. As in
Kurosawa's
Rashomon, there
are only particular
interpretations of
most facts, which
may, of course,
coincide at times.
The louder or the
more articulate
frequently prevail.
We are fortunate to
have Herodotus'
account of the
ancient
Greco-Persian war,
an account that
nevertheless led the
non-Athenians to
declare its Athenian
author a father
of lies.
'What the historian
says will, however
careful he may be to
use purely
descriptive
language, sooner or
later convey his
attitude. Detachment
is itself a moral
position. The use of
neutral language
('Himmler caused
many persons to be
asphyxiated')
conveys its own
ethical tone.'♣
History will
continue to be
rewritten, in
response to new
biases and
grievances. Howard
Zinn, for instance,
outlines his own
approach in
A People's History
of the United States,
... in
telling the history
of the United States
... we must not
accept the memory of
states as our own.
Nations are not
communities
[pretending to a
common interest] and
never have been. The
history of any
country, presented
as the history of a
family, conceals
fierce conflicts of
interest between
conquerors and
conquered, masters
and slaves,
capitalists and
workers, dominators
and dominated in
race and sex. And in
such a world of
conflict, a world of
victims and
executioners, it is
the job of thinking
people ... not to be
on the side of
executioners.
Thus, in that
inevitable taking of
sides which comes
from selection and
emphasis in history,
I prefer to tell the
story of the
discovery of America
from the viewpoint
of the Arawaks, of
the Constitution
from the standpoint
of the slaves, of
Andrew Jackson as
seen by the
Cherokees, of the
Civil War as seen by
the New York Irish,
of the rise of
industrialism as
seen by the young
women in the Lowell
textile mills, of
the Spanish American
war as seen by the
Cubans, the conquest
of Philippines as
seen by the black
soldiers on Luzon,
the Gilded Age as
seen by southern
farmers, the First
World War as seen by
the socialists, the
Second World War as
seen by pacifists,
the New Deal as seen
by blacks in Harlem,
the postwar American
empire as seen by
the peons in Latin
America ... to the
limited extent that
any one person ...
can 'see' history
from the standpoint
of others.
My point is not to grieve for
the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast
into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are
not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the
short run (and so far human history has consisted only of short runs), the
victims, themselves desperate ... turn on other victims ... as they are
jammed together into the boxcars of the system ...
In
The Idea of History, RG Collingwood wrote: 'All history is
contemporary history: not in the ordinary sense of the word, where
contemporary history means the history of the comparatively recent past,
but in the strict sense: the consciousness of one's own activity as one
actually performs it. History is thus the self-knowledge of the living
mind. For even when the events which the historian studies are events that
happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically
known is that they should vibrate in the historian's mind.' Does this not
render the very idea of a bygone golden age problematic? |
