The Politicization of "History"
A modest degree of reflection upon the incessant invocations of "history" to substantiate present policies — a habit of which partisans on both the Right and Left are equally guilty — readily discloses that the corrupted account of "history" bequeathed to us by nineteenth century (mostly) German philosophers remains as intractable today as ever.
The concept of "history" has achieved something of a sacrosanct reputation for itself in our day. Although the search for but a single person who would dare characterize history in terms of a set of ironclad, immutable "laws" couldn't but end in vain, it would be a gross mistake to conclude from this that the nineteenth century exponents of "the Laws of History" are without their contemporary successors. The idiom has changed, it is true, but just a modest degree of reflection upon the incessant invocations of "history" to substantiate present policies — a habit of which partisans on both the Right and Left are equally guilty — readily discloses that the corrupted account of "history" bequeathed to us by nineteenth century (mostly) German philosophers remains as intractable today as ever.
In an era when few in number are the issues that can be said to have commanded something approximating a consensus among intellectuals in a variety of disciplines, it says something indeed that thinkers as different as traditionalist Christians and the most radical of postmodernists are at one in their lamentation over the pinnacle to which our culture has elevated "science." Anyone desirous of securing for their beliefs even a modest degree of respectability, so goes this universally shared grievance, must either cloak them in the garb of science, or at least insure that they don't challenge science's pretensions to being at the apex of human knowledge.
Now, that there is indeed no inconsiderable degree of justice in this complaint must be acknowledged by even the most casual of observers. Yet more careful consideration reveals that far from being the Master who mercilessly subjugates all other voices, science is actually the slave that is tirelessly conscripted into the service of all manner of endeavor. Those entrusted with caring for science — its practitioners — have been responsible for its plight, it is true, but the guiltiest culprits have been the pliers of other crafts. When science is invoked to show, say, that abortion is or isn't immoral, that "global warming" is or isn't a real threat, or that the world was or wasn't created, then science's integrity as a distinct, autonomous modulation of human knowledge has been irreparably compromised, for the purposes that it is being deployed to serve aren't the purposes of science, but of morality, politics, or religion — i.e. the practical. And these, in turn, are compromised as well, for in resorting to the language of science, they insure the diminution, if not the outright loss, of their own distinctive voices.
Interestingly, for all of their complaints regarding the imperialistic-like role that science has been made to assume in our culture, neither anyone on the Right or the Left has noticed the exact same role that has been assigned to "history." In fact, precisely because relatively few people have much literacy with the quantitative terms constitutive of the language of science while everyone is familiar with just that notion which, in the popular imagination, is vaguely thought to be the sole province of the historian — "the past" — it is with significantly greater ease that invocations of history can exploit the credulity of those to whom they are made than can those of science.
And this is the problem. Those who ought to know better have not only done remarkably little to rectify popular misunderstandings concerning history, they have exacerbated them.
While it is true that the historian references "the past," it is no less true that non-historians do so as well. For example, in celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary recently, my wife and I recollected the circumstances — our first date, our wedding day, etc. — that drew us to our present. Yet although we recalled our past, would anyone seriously suggest that we were "doing history?" When the scientist looks through the Hubble Telescope to determine the ages of stars and, hence, the age of the spatial-temporal universe, is he forgetting science and embracing the study of history? Is the detective or the prosecutor who attempts to reconstruct a crime scene providing an historical analysis?
"The past" with which the historian is concerned, not unlike any other "past," is a creation, or more accurately, a reconstruction, of his own making. It is the product of a self-chosen process of selecting, editing, translating, and speculating upon present items interpreted as evidence of the past event to which he has given birth. To put it simply, "the past" of the historian's is as much an artifact as any other "past" and any other "relic."
Although we speak of "events" as if each had its own intrinsic identity that objectively delineates it from every other and a nature that subsists independently of the perspective(s) of those who either partake of them or recount them after the fact, the concept of an "event" is a classificatory category of which human beings avail themselves for the purposes of ordering their experiences, and each specific "event" — each specific conception — is a construct. When can "the event" of "the American Revolution" be said to have begun or to have ended? Can it be said to have ended? Who can legitimately be said to have been actors in this "event?" What kinds of acts can appropriately be said to belong to it? In recounting the "event" of "the American Revolution" would it be proper to allude to the sexual activity of the founding generation or their favorite plants and animals?
Whatever has occurred has done so only once: the "events" we recollect, whether in the capacity as an historian or in any other, are distinct from "the happenings" to which they relate.
So it isn't a concern with "the past" that distinguishes him from others, but the historian's attitude toward "the past": his is an interest in the past for its own sake — not for the sake of the services in which "the past" can be conscripted for present purposes. Thus, the terms of "good," "bad," "right," "wrong," "just," and "unjust" constitutive of moral and political discourses have no proper place in a real history text, for historical study is oriented toward the determination, not of the justice or injustice of events, but of events. It is just as inappropriate for the historian to address the rightness or wrongness of, say, the French Revolution or the slave uprising led by Nat Turner, as it is inappropriate for him to speak to whether Jesus of Nazareth was God incarnate. There are, of course, types of inquiry to which questions of these kinds are welcoming; historical inquiry, however, is not among them.
Indeed, the historian's "past" is a different kind of "past" altogether from that in which the non-historian assumes an interest. The "past" of the non-historian — the moralist, the ethicist, the theologian, the Biblical scholar, and the political partisan — is an immanent "past," a "past" valued for the sakes of the present and the future. Hence, A Patriot's Guide to American History, America: The Last Best Hope, The Real Lincoln, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers, A Peoples' History of the United States, and legions of other contemporary texts whose authors and publishers pass off as works of history are in reality nothing of the kind. This isn't to say that they are bereft of truth, but only that what truth they contain is not historical. The propositions "America is the most virtuous nation on Earth," "America is the most oppressive nation on Earth," "Abraham Lincoln acted honorably and courageously as president," "Abraham Lincoln acted tyrannically as president," "The Founders were 'racist,'" and "The Founders were the wisest men who have ever lived," can meaningfully be said to be either true or false. But we must be on guard against the moralist or political partisan who, posing as an historian, would have us believe that such statements embody anything other than moral, not historical, judgments. Similarly corruptive of the historical enterprise is the religious scholar who would tempt us into thinking that he has succeeded in excavating "the historical Jesus" from the "distortions" of "faith." One account of America, its founders, Abraham Lincoln, or Jesus may very well be more plausible and persuasive, and even more accurate and truthful, than another, but all such accounts are equally worthless as history if they are cast in the terms of morality and political-morality.
It seems to me that if we seek to preserve our shared notion that the historian has an intelligible identity that distinguishes him from others, then we have no option but grant that the foregoing analysis is correct. If not, then everyone, by virtue of concerning themselves with "the past," whether their own or others, is an "historian." But as they say, if everyone is an historian, then no one is.
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