Hi, Historian Here

How Much Should We Esteem Historians?

I.

For reasons of culture war, history has been trending in the blogosphere. The question seems to be “Should historians have as much authority as they do speaking about contemporary events?” I’m a lover of history, especially intellectual and cultural history. I’m a sucker for a good history book, whether it’s Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms or Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre or Grafton’s The Footnote. I did my M.A. in History. So I have some skin in the game. My answer is that historians have no special authority from which to weigh in, but should also be free to weigh in, provided they are humble about the authority they have (which is not much). In my view, the ultimate task of history is moralistic—not narrating the past as it happened, but telling good stories that can inspire culture to flourish into the future. Reasonable people disagree about what stories should be told and how to tell them, but we should give the future some credence when writing history. We should ask ourselves “Is this a story that can lead to longevity or is it one that will end in nihilism?” This is the question raised by P.D. James in Children of Men: “Why tell history in a world with no future?”

II.

One of the reasons I switched course to pursue a doctorate in Theology is that I wanted to have ideas myself and not just describe and analyze causal sequences. I’m more interested in the metaphysical assumptions of historians about how change happens, what details in the past are salient, and at what scale we should be looking at days, months, years, and centuries, than I am in “recounting what happened as it happened.” I have no problem with historians weighing in on political affairs of the day, and am also comfortable with the postmodern revisionist idea that the stories we tell about the past say more about us than they do about anything objective, but for reasons I’d like to describe I think historicism—the reduction of phenomena to their developmental story—is often a sucker’s game.

III.

Is the most interesting thing we can say about the idea of the Platonic forms something about how Plato got the idea from his environment or why he was positioned to put the idea forward? Or is it about the idea itself, regardless of who discovered it and when?

Historical analysis allows us to see patterns and trends, ideological conflicts, technological and demographic shifts, but at some point we have to ask ourselves what do we value and why? What is true? And how do we know? Historical analysis can work as a form of skepticism—don’t be so cocky, because these people in the past also thought they had it figured out and now we see how biased they were. But historical analysis is also a form of disassociation—we get to stand superior to what we analyze, as if exempt from having to choose or commit to anything.

I’m not saying there aren’t facts. But I don’t think the reason to study history or to care about the past is self-evident or self-explanatory, as if a desire for facts just because they are facts is somehow sufficient. We turn to history not to learn lessons, not to avoid repeating past mistakes, but to connect our own moment to previous ones—to assert identity and continuity. This is history as Walter Benjamin describes it: history as the process of drawing new constellations, of finding new patterns. Of course, historians disagree when we put it this way—they are in the business or should be in the business of identity creation. And identity is highly politicized. There is no avoiding it.

IV.

Great civilizations don’t endure because they have good annals, good records. They endure because they tell good stories. This insight is prone to misuse, as though the only task is to tell a good story even if it means fibbing or fabricating. But there is a middle ground between fact denial and fact worship. Myth and history needn’t be opposed. Nor should myth necessarily mean falsehood. But yes, literary and moral embellishment are required in storytelling.

The problem with many historians is that they have a story about discontinuity—look at how different we are from this previous era, as if time were a sequence of disruptions. Sure, they stand on the authority of Heraclitus when they emphasize flux, but to what end the deconstruction? Here’s an example—I enjoy the study of the Bible from a historical-academic point of view. I even find religious and spiritual insights from this perspective. But is this approach sufficiently devotional? Will the average seeker find meaning and inspiration in noting how the Levitical source responds to the Deuteronomic one? I think not. The reason is that most people seek cohesion and unity and academic approaches, especially historical ones, do the opposite—they highlight discontinuity and dissensus. The word analysis means break-down. Most of us most of the time want to be built up, not broken down.

V.

Analysis is a weapon of resistance against myths that are seen as oppressive. History, like journalism, thus sees itself as a way of exposing the lie in common sense and received knowledge. But like all things “anti-” this style of history as challenge, it is only provisional. For we need myth, ritual, and tradition to bind us. An identity formed in reaction to something else is shallow. The problem, however, with positive identity, is that a historian (or any social scientist, for that matter) will challenge it as mere “cope.” But pointing out other people’s cope is probably the biggest cope (and now I, too, am guilty of it).

In a thousand years, I know we will still have philosophy. I know we will still have Midrash, fable, commentary, and self-help. And I know that we will have record-keepers and storytellers and moralists. But I think we will look back upon the phenomenon of “Hi, historian, here” with mild bewilderment. Our future historians will have to ask how we came to fetishize the occupation of historian, how we came to turn the screen-shotted archive into our new digital sanctuary.