Theses on the Understanding History and Understanding Reason through Understanding History

 "You don't have to get a degree in history but you have to know it." Georg Bluhm, advice to me as a student

     I want my children to understand their history. I don’t think anyone who doesn’t understand their history can make competent judgment over a large range of issues, political and ethical. I don’t think anyone who does not have a grasp of history can really be said to know themselves. Most people and regimes turn history into a fantasy (which may be partly based on facts) that props up the ego or the regime. We tend to have a sentimental view of history: idealize this or that as innocent or evil to produce self-gratifying feelings, to be able to imagine ourselves as part of a story that features us as good guys. Most people who are interested in history are so for the same reason men with boring jobs and a tyrannical boss like Rambo: we seek compensation through fantasy, through vicarious living in socially constructed narrative, for what we lack in our real lives. I still remember the transformation that took place for me as a teen when I was being confronted with irrefutable evidence that to its shock and self-image my ‘I’ – my ego – was nothing special (not rich, that super-talented, not super-interesting, etc.) and then nationalism appeared: I was a equal member (as good as any rich, talented person) of the greatest, most powerful, and most morally righteous nation in the history of the world! Boy, that inflated by ego. And I defended all historical narratives that propped this fantasy up with a violence that would surprise me if I didn’t know my ego (i.e. my very “identity”) was at stake. The version that propped me and my “identity” up was true because it propped me and my “identity” up. It was “my truth”. Attack it and you cut the thread on which my ego was hanging, threatening to confront me again with the reality that I was just another person.

  

   So I can perfectly understand Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants that fanatically defend their version of the history of Ireland as their “identities” depend on it. Or history according to Israeli Zionists and Palestinians, the same. This is the kind of thing that makes true historical understanding impossible.

 

But what is that, to understand your history?

 

    Well, I would recommend that they read a variety of books, written by the best historians, different historians investigating different aspects of history from different perspectives. Histories of groups large (e.g. a nation state, a complex civilization) and small (a region, a town, a family, an individual). Histories of the state and histories of social groups. Histories of ideas and histories of technology in its economic applications. Anthropology and sociology may help in some cases. Also the complex interaction between culture and the nature of the place. You need a good understanding of what competent historians both agree and disagree about. Finally, some philosophical reflection on the nature of truth in history and its connection to different approaches to doing history. Though it is surely good to be able to discuss history with a competent practitioner and scholar, you don’t have to study history at the university. You do have to understand it to some meaningful extent. No one understands it completely – except God. Indeed, metaphysical speculation about the ends of history is important, but always necessarily speculation. (That is where Hegel and Marx went badly wrong.)

      So having given my advice to someone who wants to understand history, what does it all imply about the nature of historical reality, historical truth? Here some theses.

 

Thesis 1

History is analogous to a most complex text. While part of history deals with accumulating evidence and facts that are relevant to a particular understanding (explanation) – mostly only through the witness of people long dead – the understanding itself necessarily involves interpretation. History is like Shakespeare’s Hamlet: to reduce it to one narrative, one interpretation, is to become historically blind.

 

Thesis 2

As with written texts in general, and poetry in particular, the form the expression of historical truth takes is part of that truth. To choose narrative (storytelling) as a form of historical representation presupposes that history itself has a narrative dimension. Sociological, objective descriptions or an uncommented presentation of historical facts presuppose that another aspect of history cannot be captured by narrative. The representation of history in film or literature may capture aspects of history imaginatively. Imagination is surely essential to understanding people and place who are no longer present. The danger: to assert that only one form of representation, corresponding to only one aspect of history, is rational or legitimate; that all other forms necessarily falsify history. That leads to a kind of tone-deafness and color-blindness in understanding.

 

Thesis 3

Of course, every form, every approach that is grounded in this reality of history – some may not be, but I don’t want to say which here – is subject to a critical vocabulary. To be truthful, imaginative works of history must avoid the temptation to sentimentality or to sacrificing historical truthfulness for cheap plot effects. To be truthful, narrative accounts must not smooth over ruptures and discontinuities for the sake of a coherent narrative. To be truthful, descriptive presentations must not falsify the data in the service of a political agenda. Indeed, using to history to promote a present political or a religious agenda is a terrible sin against history, in effect killing historical understanding by turning it into propaganda, by weaponizing it. That is perhaps the original sin against history.

 

 

Thesis 4

Obviously, if truth in any form is nothing but what is in the interests of the power of groups or individuals, then there is no truth, no reality, but power – a dark, nihilistic view. History presupposes a love of truth, truthfulness as a spiritual demeanor, an openness to a variety of possible forms of understanding and interpretations of reality.

 

Thesis 5

I think it presupposes a profound love of the world, which may seem farfetched given the horrors to be encountered in history. But imagine the kind of history that would interest a person who thought of himself as an individual and nothing but an individual – say a narcissist like Donald Trump. It would be autobiography through a beauty filter; fantasy in other words, revolving around the sovereign individual, others or a community coming into play as less-than-real sentimental constructions that in some way glorify the hero – the backdrop or stage on which he acts. That is the anti-thesis of history. And the anti-thesis of the heroic individual are people who are rooted in a community and tradition that find worth preserving. (And if you are not involved in history, have no interest in historical truth, then that could be evidence you are such a sovereign individual.)

 

Thesis 6

History is a complex reality, but it is a reality. Different versions of history do not implies different historical realities – each version in effect giving birth, or constructing its own reality. That would only be true if we were nothing more than a collection of borderline psychotic narcissists. History gives rise to a plurality of forms and interpretations because we are in it, and we are who we are: a perspective on the world, a perspective within history, within a culture with conceptual space for history. We each have our own set of histories that make sense only with the larger set of possible understandings of the larger history of which we are a part. This is the precondition that any of it could be meaningful or valuable. If our intellects could be disconnected from our reality, we could be no more historical than, say, the artificial intelligence that designed the Matrix (in the film of the same name). That intelligence sees no history in the virtual ‘world’ it constructed. It is important to me to understand the Civil War, for example, in all its complexity. It would not be vitally important for someone from Mongolia, say, except as a curiosity or as food for understanding history as such. It would not be important for any being outside human history – excepting God.

 

 

Thesis 7

History can disappear from human consciousness, leaving us less than human. When I read in Orwell’s 1984 how the state simply rewrote history depending on its present interests – deleting some from existence, etc. – I misunderstood it. I though Orwell was talking about the dangers of one power being able to construct history to fit its needs. But I think what he was pointing out is this: if you can construct history arbitrarily, truth itself disappears, becomes unintelligible. And so history itself disappears along with the rest of reality. If Marx is right, and historical, philosophical, political ‘truth’ is defined as anything that advances the power of a group – be it the proletariat or any other group – then we lose history along with the rest of reality.

 

Thesis 8

History presupposes a free space for conversation and thinking in a real community. This space is clearly threatened by media developments in modern times, developments which promote narcissism and unreality on a scale never before seen. The printed word, the lecture, the conversation, and even (despite the dangers) the film, all connecting people who are connected to one another through care for some community: that is the ideal in which historical understanding thrives. To be uprooted is a terrible thing, because it means losing one’s history. Corporate capitalist society uproots. Therefore, corporate capitalist society tends to erode history.

 

 

Thesis 9

The point of history is not to make you feel good or proud of your group – contra the populist nationalists. History is not a fantasy novel, with your country as the hero. Nor is it a platform to debunk heroes. It has nothing to do with heroes one way or other, unless it is the understanding of some cultural figure as a hero. History is about truth, judgment, wisdom. It is about understanding where your community has been so that you know where you are and what you need to do to get to where you would like to be.

 

 

Thesis 10

History is an analogy for understanding other aspects of reality, as well as reality as such. I could substitute philosophy for history in the preceding theses, and with only minor adjustments it would ring true. Or the study of literature. This is not accidental. History, like reality is bigger than our finite (and fallible) mind’s ability to comprehend it as a whole – from the outside looking in. We thus only have a limited perspective from within history – and reality. The very idea of ‘reality’ is bound to our finitude. In a literal sense, God is beyond reality – at least as we humans can only imagine it.

 

Thesis 11

Without a profound understanding of history we have no moral starting point: my relations to African Americans are conditioned by history. To be blind or indifferent to that history is to be morally obtuse. Like being a character in a story in which the previous chapters have been erased from your memory. Like amnesia.

 

Thesis 12

Without a true understanding of history, you are not real, you live a lie. The most obvious example of this are the Trump cultists who must accept the “Big Lie” that Trump won the election of 2020 to hang on to the “identity” they (with the help of the whole propaganda machine behind Trump) constructed for themselves. Indeed, the MAGA cult is premised on a full-blown myth that has replaced history. There you can see how important history is. 

Interpretation and Subjectivity in History

There are two kinds of relation between our deeper attitudes towards self, others, world (and nature), and the moral, political, together with the metaphysical or religious convictions that arise from them, and historical reality (what really happened and why; or how things really were in a certain context). The first is analogous to the position of a scientist studying global warming. Either the climate is warming due to the human burning of fossil fuels or it is not; the answer to this vastly complex question is ‘out there’; the subjective needs and wishes of the scientists are irrelevant to the answer – at best they may serve as a kind of external incentive to get to the truth of the matter; at worst, they may skew their judgment: the Republican activist may be tempted to interpret the data in self-serving ways that hide the industrial impact on climate change; the Greenpeace scientist may be tempted to exaggerate the situation to promote change. In either case, the reality of the matter is the same for both camps; it is independent of their attitudes and convictions.

          Clearly, part of history involves a relationship like this: no more than one can change the basic plot of a Shakespeare play when interpreting it – Macbeth and not Banquo must murder Duncan – can one change the historical record; Truman and not Stalin ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And even in the vastly more complex task of giving explanations, the historian cannot ascribe to Truman a sadistic lust for blood as an explanation of his order if no evidence speaks for this explanation and everything speaks against it. Even complex questions like the relation between social and organizational structures, ideology, and individual actions involve realities that no matter how seemingly impenetrable are not a blank canvass onto which we can paint our fantasies.

            The second kind of relation seems to involve an intimacy between one’s attitudes and convictions and what one takes to be real. Perhaps this is best illustrated by an intractable moral debate: abortion. Whereas one person, when confronted with the image of a living fetus, sees an unborn child or baby, an intelligible object of love, a precious new life, another sees nothing but a biological fetus. Some see the fetus as utterly precious, a ‘gift of God’; others see it nothing but part of the biological material of the mother’s body. Some pregnant women are filled with joy, tenderness, love, and expectation upon receiving news of the pregnancy; others, under much different circumstances, might be filled with bitter resentment. Behind all these different attitudes towards this reality are not only differing ‘conceptual frameworks’ but different lives in all their particularity. So imagine all are viewing an image of the fetus: what is it, really? Can we ‘see’ that it is precious or nothing but biology? Does the image tell us the answer to that question? Does a medical textbook tell us the answer, even if it included everything possible that science could know about it? It seems not; we can only see it as precious or biological, as making claims on us or not, given who we are and what attitudes towards life we bring to the seeing.

         Anything that would count as evidence for one view of the other, moreover,  has already been conditioned by that view. To see the fetus as an unborn baby might be based on evidence of mother’s loving their unborn child, and our refusal to call this love sentimental. But other women can have an abortion with little or no ability to find remorse an intelligible response, which would be the case had they been able to see the fetus as a baby. What such responses ‘prove’ is already conditioned by the way one sees the fetus, and so from the perspective of the opponent will always seem circular as an argument. Some woman do feel remorse over the aborting of their fetus, but that will count as evidence for the reality of the fetus to a convinced pro-choice person only if that person can see it as non-sentimental; and her ability to see it as non-sentimental is conditioned already by how she sees the fetus. If she is a convinced pro-choice person, then she must see the remorse as sentimental, whereas the pro-life person would see it as evidence that the fetus is ‘bearer of human dignity.’ There is no independent perspective from which the only kinds of evidence available must count as evidence for both sides; such ‘evidence’ will always be interpretable in incommensurable ways from both perspectives. There are no ‘facts of the matter’ that are just there to see independently of one’s core convictions as there are in the case of global warming.

            Now this in itself does not constitute an absolute gap between the two kinds of relation. We are all familiar with the temptation in cases like abortion to skew our ‘seeing as’ through wishful thinking, rationalization, ideological blindness, or opportunistic spin-like ways of avoiding truth. In the case of abortion, a pro-lifer’s seeing the fetus as a precious gift may be heavily influenced by an unconscious desire to feel morally superior over the opponent; may reveal resentment against the intellectual pretentions of ‘liberals’ or ‘feminists’; may reveal lack of empathy or a failure to grasp of the difficult situation many women find themselves in; or may involve any number of infantile fears. A pro-choicer’s seeing the fetus as nothing but biological material may likewise hide a bad conscience, functioning as a rationalization for something the deeper heart speaks against but the narcissistic self requires. In the case of the history of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fervent patriotic may be incapable of criticizing anything his country has done; racism may color the seeing; or the horror of the event may be relativized by the need to see the country as a source of good. All these attitudes may, at another level, arise to deal with inferior complexes the individual sublimates by identifying himself with the greater collective. One could imagine many such ad hominem explanations for seeing something as something – interpreting it as something – on any side of almost any issue.

           The point is that we can also recognize such ways of seeing as deeply flawed, in a similar way that the Greenpeace activist or the Republican Party activist may skew their scientific work on climate change. Good interpreters of whatever convictions are aware of such influences and minimize their influence by valuing truthfulness and knowing how to get deeper into the truth of things. That is not to say that their attitudes and convictions are irrelevant: what they see is conditioned by these attitudes. But it is one thing uncritically to project one’s attitudes and convictions onto reality; it is quite another to enter into a kind of metaphorical ‘dialog’ with reality in which one makes sense of what one sees in terms one’s deeper commitments on the one hand, and allows one’s commitments to be challenged by aspects of reality – and the way others see it – on the other. Considering the way of seeing the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an act of mass murder carried out for reasons that had little to do with military necessity or even saving American lives forces the patriotic historian to reevaluate, to question whether his ideological commitments skew his view, to consider evidence that challenges his own view, or to judge from a more universal human point of view. If his original way of seeing withstands this probing, honest scrutiny, then the patriotic historian has deepened his view; if he must qualify his view, then that is also a deepening. Reality is ‘talking back’ even if reality turns out to be morally charged.

           Of course, at the deepest level, only some congruence on attitudes and convictions makes common ground in interpretation possible. If the patriotic historian sees the world as did the Roman Cato, who cold-bloodedly advocated genocide for Carthage and eventually had his policy put into terrible practice, then there will be a deep incommensurability between his way of seeing the use of the atomic bomb and those historians, patriotic or not, whose sense of human dignity has been inherited from parts of Christianity and above all from the Enlightenment. Can reality give rise to standards of judgment at this deep level? Not morally neutral ones, that much is clear. But it is at least plausible that there is something about human reality that makes those who respond with moral horror or outrage more in tune with it than Cato and those like him. To contemplate, plan, and perhaps witness the kinds of horrors inflicted on human beings of all kinds – the old and the young, men and women, children and even babies – at least prima facie indicates a blindness to the meaning of horrible pain and death in human life; or it indicates cruelty, evil. In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fact that the perpetrators were far away – emotionally and physically – from these consequences in no way vitiates that they brought that about.

 

           It makes all the difference whether extenuating circumstances were involved and perhaps could justify this horror, and in practice these are what historians disagree about. It is true: nothing external to moral attitudes that are intertwined with ‘seeing’ the horror and responding to it with horror justifies a criticism of a Cato-like historian; only an insider can see that reality. And given Cato’s cultural background and what I would like to think of as the moral progress since the Roman Republic, we might be justified in judging Cato’s genocidal policies in a different way that we would our contemporaries. The important point to hold on to is that if we saw the horrors we all know happened when the atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities, some of us might just  sentimentally project their own image of themselves as morally refined human beings onto the blank screen of history, but the more serious people among us may also be responding to the reality of that suffering and what it means, or ought to mean, to those with eyes to see it – eyes given us not by neutral facts but that a grasp of what that horror really means. But not everybody has those eyes, and this does not necessarily imply condemnation when due to conditions over which they had no influence. That fact does not negate the deeper relation to reality held by the historian for whom the horror inflicted on people matters, no more than the limited views about Macbeth of a high school student with only the most superficial knowledge of the play imply that the views of a Shakespeare lover, scholar, and talented interpreter are just subjective prejudices projected on the blank canvass, the neutral facts of the play.

        None of this implies that a historian who, for example, sees the photographs taken in the aftermath of the bombings – for example, of a little girl with her skin hanging off – and, filled with horror, cannot write a distorted view of that history overcome by the emotional impact of the photo. Or that a historian who has more moral distance to the events might not write a truthful history. Even the Cato-like historian, blind to the moral meaning of the events, could give us a history that at least did not falsify what happened, even though we may loath the spirit in which he recounts the events. Or, to take another example, a Nazi historian may be able to give us an accurate account of the outbreak of WWII – seeing through the façade of the official story that Poland attacked first and using documents to show that the German attack was premeditated. What I want to stress, however, is that what actions and events the historian deems significant, how a historian interprets those events has nothing to do with a flat field of neutral facts which the historian then through the lenses of his values and epistemological commitments sees some but not others, and sees those visible to him in the colors of the lenses; there are no facts in this sense, and there are no such lenses. Both a decision to drop atomic bombs, and the actual horrors that ensued in the aftermath of the bombing are infused with moral reality, and part of the historian’s job is to allow the true significance of this reality to show. 

       And I hope it is becoming apparent that the whole problem lies with taking a distinction between facts and values – which makes sense in many contexts – and making it into a kind of metaphysical absolute. In some abstract, logical sense, the number of hairs on Truman’s head, and the precise chemical composition of the toilet he sat on during the morning he gave his order have no less, or no more significance that the order to drop the bombs. Or, viewing the photograph of the little girl after the bombing, it is equally a fact that the sky is gray, that her hair is black, and that her skin has been burned off and that she is in agony (though I suppose one would have to state that last fact in more scientific terminology to make it really flat). And so in an equally abstract, logical sense it may seem coherent to view the greater significance we attach to the decision to drop the bomb and to the girl’s agony as merely ‘subjective’ projections onto a neutral screen, with their source in our ‘values.’ It is on this absurd distinction that the problems of ‘relativism’ and skepticism in history arise.

            The problem of the subjective in history – values, ideologies, worldviews, practical interests, etc – is fundamentally no different than it is in interpreting literature, law, or scripture: it is the necessary lens through which the ‘text’ or history becomes visible and important on the one hand, and the framework which can either uncritically or manipulatively predetermine the outcome on the other. Thus it is of the essence not to make the vain, foolish attempt to extract oneself from the web of meanings that power one’s need and interest in history in the first place, except to the minimal attempt necessary to determine what happened and what did not happen. But it is equally crucial to value truth – depth – over the preservation of the subjective commitments at any cost, and have the integrity to allow reality to ‘talk back.’

 

      But an interpretation is a function of the virtue and profundity of the interpreter. There is no way around that.