Sorry to take so long to reply,
TD, but here’s my piece. I’m not a historian and I didn’t study history, so if that shows, sorry, and please point out my ignorance
. But here goes!:
I am somewhat sceptical of how history as a discipline works for us, but that’s not the fault of the discipline itself, instead it is shortcomings among people that shouldn’t be taken as reflecting on the actual desire to study the past. I think the study of history is quite necessary and wonderfully rewarding, but the way it is approached troubles me. I think many historians tend to undercut their own mission as a consequence of their difficult position in deciphering the past for an entire society.
History, in my view (and I acknowledge I don’t study it myself) is the construction of a concept of societal self-identity but distanced from the present self, a resource accessible to all as a picture of human experience and actions to date, the events and the threads of culture, religion and philosophy that ran through them and connected them. We are informed by exploring this resource and evaluating it in terms of what it can teach us about our present and future. Simple knowledge of “this happened then to this person” is not enough. History is a concept where facts must be augmented by analyzing what they mean for us and who we are. The mission of “History”, I’d suggest, is in creating a sense of the collected sum of human experience and action that we can all examine and contemplate to find meaning from. We look at the sum of who we are and were, draw patterns, identify unifying concepts that we feel must be enhanced, re-examined, challenged, or linked in new and intriguing ways.
Here lies the problem. Ultimately, many historians undermine themselves, the study of history undermines itself, because the historians frequently aren’t interested in truly constructing the big picture. Why not? Because society cannot handle it. On an individual scale, we can study the past to help understand ourselves better and give us pointers for the future. This is immensely rewarding. It should be the same on the larger scale the historian works on, but often it’s not. Society does not like individuals coming to their own conclusions or understandings. Always society as a collective entity wants to remain cohesive by promoting certain ideologies it does not like questioned, imposing on the individual. In serving the collective rather than the individual, the historian cannot escape the need to further that cohesiveness, to close off inquiry lest the foundations of the society be damaged by what is exposed and freely analyzed. The historians’ job is therefore to decode the past to justify and explain the present. Anything too threatening to that present, too earth-shattering that threatens to destabilize the self-identity society holds at that time (as most necessary radical change does) is therefore seen as antithetical to the “mission” (and I’m not saying this is a conscious act), and is dismissed or ignored. Most historians are evaluating humanity’s sum of experience and constructing the concept of history using their own ideologies and biases, those most common to the age they inhabit.
This is not to say they aren’t trying to be objective. We all know that the view that “history is just interpretation” is nonsensical. Facts are facts. But facts are meaningless in isolation. They must be
given meaning by the relevance they hold to humans, the effect they have on us, how knowledge of these facts is evaluated and incorporated into our beings. It is this that historians must either struggle to control (by publishing and promoting their opinions and theories, the basis of the intellectual debates and disagreements of the profession) or ignore in the interests of their objectivity. Saying "in 1256 Bob the Black defeated King Whatisname at the Battle of Blueberry Hill" is fine. If the evidence is convincing enough, no-one will argue. Saying "Bob the Black ambushed Whatsiname in violation of the era's codes of honour" is also fact, again, providing you can give the evidence both for the ambush and for the prevalent social ideologies. But for events of the past to have meaning to us, to construct the concept of “history” as something engaging and relevant to the people, we must evaluate it in terms that move it out of the simply “factual” and into something more fluid, albeit still grounded in what can be demonstrated through evidence. As we all know, history is constructed more frequently like this:
“Bob the Black’s actions at the Battle of Blueberry Hill had great consequences for popular perception of chivalric or related codes of conduct in Thingyland, and the resulting wave of (some feeling or new philosophical understanding) helped contribute strongly to a prevalent cultural trend the following century of (whatever), which in turn, evidence from (whatever) suggests, led to the formation of the Whatsitcalled Society by disaffected (some social group), which itself formed the foundation of the (organization, etc.) today. Or not, if you believe (this theorist)”.
Deciphering these threads and links, and debating the significance to the wider picture of each battle, marriage, publication, proclamation, etc. is a worthy endeavour and it is here historians do great service to our people. They help us understand where we come from, what led us to our current status. Here, however, is where it goes wrong too often in my view. Our current status consists of certain biases and ideological shortcomings (same as in any age), and all too often the historian (who is only human) notes only certain threads, only certain paths of development and growth through the mass of humanity’s prior “life”, and ignores completely other aspects, other “stories” in making us who we are that his or her society does not, in their own time, wish to contemplate. History is a wonderful discipline that sadly seems to me to often stumble at the last hurdle, undone not by anything wrong with the discipline itself but by the shortcomings of people- by their inability to escape the biases of the time and place in which it is written. The omission of entire “threads” of human development and experience from popular consideration, simply because society does not wish to confront them, is all too common, as becomes clear to those who make a point of questioning or condemning the status quo in unconventional ways. Historians are serving the wider society, but societies and those in them are very, very good at ignoring or forgetting what they don’t want to confront. They hide defining aspects of their identity in one hand, gripping tightly while the other hand tries to force it open. Meanwhile, the head is refusing to look at either hand and the mouth is saying “thing in my hand? What thing in my hand?”. Ultimately, in my judgement, the potential in, and great importance of, constructing the concept of “history” is all too often undone by the historians being conscious of the pressures of their position decoding the past for everyone. They therefore are left sifting through the sum of human activity and experience in a manner too consistent with the current ideological prejudices and above all, fears.
This can be quite irritating to those of us who see how historians breeze over certain aspects of human thinking and behaviour (and means of constructing society and its outlooks) that are important to our individual understanding of self. What makes it worse is that some of these aspects are age-old and near universal. That’s the problem, though- because of this, people don’t “see” them. They accept them without question. Lines of thought that question or challenge some of these assumptions offend the current ideological standards, however. Therefore, history, rather than crafting for our enhancement an overview of shared humanity from which we can identify patterns and confront our traditional ways, instead serves to hide the bigger, collective picture, turning us away from a self-confrontation as a planetary civilization by breaking humanity down into pieces placed in conflict. History should serve to build, to construct for us a vast, complex and diverse picture of who we are, so we can paw at it and consider it and pick at bits we think need changing or re-evaluating. But history is not doing this, not really. I think it is hiding, afraid to allow humanity access to such a resource, afraid to present them with the big picture lest they notice and meddle with the bits those conforming to the status quo
don't want noticed, or meddled with. Historians are not yet fully committed to their mission, or are not being allowed to become fully committed, because society in general is still cautious about allowing us to take a good long, full look at ourselves.
History should be a means by which the whole sum of human experience is acknowledged, in both its diversity and its unity, so it- and humanity- can be challenged. But all too often history does not challenge, it justifies. Rather than showing us what we can identify about ourselves, examine and perhaps overcome, history justifies the present by constructing our concept of today as either a pinnacle or as a dangerous cliff-top where we risk teetering into repeating “the mistakes of the past”. The present is evaluated in terms of the past, while, as described, the past is evaluated in terms of the present. So we go around in circles. We should be allowing the past to inform the present, but that means thinking outside our preconceptions so we can see what the past is truly offering us.
All too often, the person on the street’s view of history disguises our responsibility in the now by placing responsibility on our ancestors, applauding their implementing change while they refuse to change their own outlook. As the saying goes: every society honours its dead troublemakers and its living conformists. The human story continues around us right now. “History” is being made. Today, like never before, we are deciphering and constructing the story of humanity into something accessible to all, on many levels. But, as I’ve described, it is the present conformists who write it. Will future generations celebrate those of us who are “troublemakers” and called for change? Or, because the study of history has been so promoted (and with good reason, lest we forget), will they instead celebrate their dead conformists who wrote it above the troublemakers and progressives and oddballs who feature in it? I can’t help but fear that as we indoctrinate our children into an appreciation of history (quite rightly), and teach them the same history we were taught, we run the risk of creating a society where the conformist is always promoted, and the troublemaker, the progressive, he or she who calls for change, is never acknowledged. I myself have seen, even in my few years, how history is being rewritten and twisted by those who buy into prominent ideologies so that the past conforms with their ideology relating to the present. I have seen myself how conformity to present ideology is becoming more important in our evaluation of past figures than their own “stories”, and how these figures are promoted, twisted or ignored based on whether they can be used to support those current ideologies. To be fair, this is usually those dealing with history from “outside”, not historians themselves. But historians only serve the wider society, and if the trend becomes too dominant, who knows what will happen? Our present is assimilating our past, and our future is slipping away. That’s what I fear, because I see it progressing that way at some speed. I personally believe history is a great and necessary discipline, but if handled incorrectly- and in my experience most things are, but that’s people for you- it undermines itself. Rather than showing us the big picture to allow a true self-understanding for humanity, history shows us what we want to see, because we
make it show us what we want to see.
Anyway, that’s my piece.
"You can have it in any color you want, as long as it's black"
). All those people, exotic and mundane, and all the wondrous and trivial things that they did excited my imagination. I'd look at pictures of ancient ruins and realize that it was somebody's house, they lived and slept there, they had a favorite snack and they told jokes, they cried when their friends died, and they did it all hundreds or thousands of years before I was born. I'd walk the streets of my neighborhood or go into Boston and realize that this is where it happened, Minutemen and Redcoats, fighting and dying on these streets, long before I was born. It's the Human Adventure. It still never ceases to amaze me.
