Five Problems with the Use of History in Public Discourse
We are bombarded by people attempting to justify their political agendas by appealing to the past. I’m a historian, not just a history buff, but a professional. The argument about the value and purpose of history by political activists is typically naive. As a professional, I think its important to write and teach about history in a methodical, competent, ethical, and verifiable manner.
“The History of Science Fiction” by jurvetson is licensed under CC BY 2.0
I have practiced thinking as a historian for a few decades now. As I worked my way through graduate school, I focused my attention on a few specific fields/topic areas. These included environmental history, history of science and technology, US history in the period 1865–1920, Latin American history — particularly the colonial period, western and frontier history, and the history of medieval Europe. I’ve taught university level history classes for more than 30 years, so, I’ve given the topic of “What’s Good History” some thought. Observing how people use history is public discourse, today the buzz is with Critical Race Theory, I think its important to point out some pitfalls that people fall into when appealing to history. Here are a five of them.
Problem 1: Personal History Conditions Professional Identity and Interpretation
Above I listed some fields of history that I have studied more deeply than most. A good question is — why did I choose those? In short, my personal history conditioned me to be interested in those topics.
I’m not sure that I would ever have put it this way before, but looking back I think it was an act of self-discovery and identity formation. The choices grew in large part out of wanted to dig deeper into the roots of my identity. I wanted to know more about the peoples and the places that had formed me.
I suspect this is true for many professional and amateur historians alike. Some people take up genealogy to scratch that itch. I decided to get a Ph.D. in history. Was that smart? I don’t know. I think I’m must wiser about the way the world works that I would have been otherwise because I did.
I was born on the southern plains of Texas, and thus belonged to a people for whom breaking out the last agricultural frontier in US history was part of living memory . My grandparents told stories of the radical changes they wrought on the Great Plains — shifting it from buffalo commons to cattle ranches to cotton farms. The artifacts of that transformation had been visible to me as a child.
Visits to historical sites — like the Palo Duro Canyon, site of Ranald McKenzie’s massacre of a winter village of Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho people — were part of my childhood experiences and historians accounts of the Red River War were on my father’s bookshelves. Our extended family leased hunting land on the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River, and as a teenager frequented a indigenous campsite to pick through the debitage piles looking from tiny broken arrow points. My dad would wonder if this was a campsite of the “little people” (Nunupi to the Comanche, Nimeregar to the Shoshone).
It fascinated me to imagine the changes in the way people of different cultures interacted with and used the land. I wanted to know more about that — so U.S. history in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and Environmental history gave me insights into that.
That was a period of time in which the industrial revolution reached maturity. The ability to transform landscapes on large scale, to communicate near instantaneously, to travel a high speed, all because humans learned to harness non-respiring power sources all happened at this time. These new ways of doing things were still radically changing culture — my culture — I wanted to know more about that — so history of science and technology was clearly something I wanted to delve into more.
Not only had I grown up on agricultural frontier; I also grew up on an ethnic one. The southern Great Plains was part of the Borderlands where Indigenous tribes, predominantly Spanish speaking mestizos, and predominantly English speaking tribes collided on the northern frontier of Mexico, the western frontier of the US, and the compressed domain of the last unsubjugated indigenous tribes, predominantly nomads, collided at the end of the nineteenth century.
In school Spanish rang in my ears almost as frequently as English — though English was the language privileged and authorized. We ate barbecue and what has come to be called “Tex-Mex” as frequently as we ate cornbread and black-eyed peas, which is to say about half the time. By language and religion, Spanish culture was mysterious and exotic. In practice, we lived in it as much as our Hispanic neighbors lived in Anglo culture.
It was here that I became predisposed to understand social hierarchy to be about both class and race. As I saw it, racism was present, but class was the real issue. When I first encountered blatant expressions of white supremacy in a cousin visiting from East Texas, I was appalled. My dad was a sharecropper, a level down from the land owners and town merchants who we referred to as the “rich folks,” and a level up from the predominantly Hispanic laborers who drove, but didn’t “own,” the tractors. The fact of the matter was that the banks owned the tractors, but we liked to believe we did, or would if we worked hard and got a little lucky.
On a practical level, sharecroppers and hired laborers all worked in the fields — hoeing, irrigating, etc. Larger landowners drove around checking on things from the air conditioned cab of the pickup. We called referred to them as “turn-row” or “windshield” farmers. I understood clearly at that time that wealth really mattered, skin tone less so. This is not in any way copping out from recognizing later on that there were many fewer black and hispanic landowners and sharecroppers in the area than whites, and I’m certain that the system of policies, rules, and regulations put in place by local, regional, and national lenders created a system optimized to create that result. When my father couldn’t come up with enough collateral to get another operating loan, while big landowners in much greater debt were able to, one banker told may dad, “if you owed more money, we’d probably have to loan you more this year, but you don’t and we have to clean off our books.” So much for trying to be fiscally responsible while paying 17% interest on commercial loans.
Studying Latin American History helped me understand all that, both directly and indirectly through analogous themes.
Finally, I was fascinated by both mysticism and spirituality and the romantic nostalgia for pre-modern society — medieval Europe was a field that let me study both of those things.
Those biographical factors fed my early interests and tendencies as a historian. We all have personal histories that condition our understanding of the world and shape the way we operate in it.
Potential solution:
We need to recognize that there is no objective, disembodied oracle that speaks “History teaches…” as some absolute truth. The personal experience of the historian matters. We have been taught to be aware of how our experience can create bias and to use that awareness to work toward a less biased approach to research, to reading our sources, to reporting our findings, etc. Even so, I think its important to review and acknowledge our identities and the ways that they have shaped our approach to doing history before getting too far into pronouncing historical judgements. In public discourse, I think its critical to acknowledge one’s roots and the reason’s for one’s interests in order to assist your audience in understanding who is behind the voice.
Problem 2: Destiny or, Does History Fix the Future?
There are those who suggest that history is the story of inevitable occurrences. We historians sometimes tell the story that way. This happened and that happened and those things caused this later thing to happen. It is a nice and orderly chain of cause and effect. And yet, it’s not.
There are lots of intentions and effort that don’t work out to the desired effect. There are lots of effects that were wholly unintended. Go too far in that direction and one gets the point in which everything is random chance. Believing in either historical inevitability or total randomness can lead to believing that humans are powerless to do much for themselves.
It’s fair to say that things happened and that there were numerous things happening in the surrounding context that contributed to the set of events that a historian is recounting. The point of doing history is to identify something that happened and analyze the things that preceded it and were happening around it to identify potential causes, contributing factors, and also inhibiting factors — things that worked against the intentions of people trying to accomplish something. Armed with such insights, individuals can potentially improve the effectiveness of their efforts to shape the future.
It’s naive to suggest that an event was inevitable. It’s better to note with awe how something notable (either delightfully or tragically) rose to notice out of a constellation of interesting and mundane past events. For instance, out of a perception of betrayal, culture of victimhood, significant economic hardship related to hyperinflation, and nationalist pride that occupied the minds of young central Europeans in the 1920s emerged fascism.
Does that mean that a new wave of fascism will inevitable emerge to dominate in the US of the 2020s because rural, white, working and middle class folk feel betrayed, victimized by a rapidly changing society, losing ground economically, and embrace a loud nationalism that has racist and xenophobic overtones? No, not inevitably. Afterall, at the time fascism rose to dominate central European governments, there was a rising fascist movement in the US driven by and manifesting many of the same kinds of concerns and behaviors, and yet democracy won out against authoritarianism in a contest for public opinion. Some people might be comforted by that outcome — but it’s not inevitable that we’d see that same outcome, either.
It would be better to use that to investigate further. Did going to war with fascists in Europe and Asia short circuit the further development and rise of dominance of US fascism? Were people in the US less despairing because they could understand themselves as victors rather than vanquished and in a much better overall economic situation than their fellow humans in Germany? More questions don’t tend to lend themselves to political point making.
Potential solution:
Historians, professional and amateurs, should show model curious humility when opining about the connection between past and present — particularly when suggesting that past events are analogous to present ones. It’s appropriate to identify and highlight contributory elements as context surrounding an important event. Doing so provides readers and listeners, present and future leaders with some hints about what to look for in the present that may allow them to take advantage of opportunities to act in the present in ways that shape the future. It is disingenuous to contend that “based on history” a particular outcome is inevitable.
Problem #3: The Moral of the Story: Triumphant or Apocalyptic
One might hope that history could provide us with a ‘How To Guide’ for acting in the present to shape the future for some transcendent good — that the march into the future is a march to progress. That is certainly a comforting tale to tell. Philosophers such as John Dewey in the early twentieth century, the mid-twentieth century’s Jean Gebser and Clair Graves, or the the early twenty-first century’s prolific integral philosopher Ken Wilbur, to name just few, have championed a model of cultural progress that predicts an inevitable progress, at least spiritually, for humanity based on their reading of the advances from primitive cultures to post-modern civilizations over the past 10,000 years. In the mid-20th century, foreign policy experts, such as John Lewis Gaddis, were keen on using historical wisdom in service to (or justifying) their theoretical frameworks to construct effective foreign policy that would advance the purposes of the US in the midst of the Cold War. In their approach their was a mixture of the pragmatic and the idealistic.
While we can elect to tell a story that suggests more or less consistent progress over time (called an ascensionist narrative) and muster evidence to support the story, we can just as easily select evidence that supports a declensionist narrative — a story that suggests, nostalgically, that there was once a golden age when things were wonderful and our society has gotten worse and worse ever sense. A good historian recognizes that such simplistic stories, particularly told as the grand story of the entire human past, are bad history. It’s prudent both to count our blessings or to worry about our future. We draw on our past experiences to do so. Professional historians prefer to tell more nuanced tales, both/and stories or stories that are peppered with ambiguities.
Sometimes they are akin to the Taoist tale of the farmer:
An old farmer had worked his fields for many years. One day, his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.
“Maybe,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.
“Maybe,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.
“Maybe,” answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.
“Maybe,” said the farmer.
Similar to the ideas associated with Destiny, good historians recognize that given the seen and unseen ripples of causes and effects and the very good and very bad behaviors that humans manifest in any age, the best we can say is that the future will likely work out in ways that are similar to the past. Which means there will likely be acts of love, generosity, selfless courage and acts of hate, selfish greed, and horrific violence. Not much to feel triumphal about there.
Problem #4: They Didn’t Teach Us That in School — Deferential or Subversive Stories
Of late there has been a hue and cry against “revisionist” history. Frequently it seems that this label is spat at those historical narratives that call for reconsidering the standard, frequently ascensionist view of the past. Revisionists tend to say, “Wait a minute, there is another, perhaps less flattering tale to tell, based on the evidence that was unknown or unexamined by previous historians.”Though, it doesn’t have to be less flattering, it could be a tale that attempts to reinterpret or provide a more nuanced interpretations of what past historians viewed as villains.
In fairness, revisionism can be seen as a generalized use of a method for advancing truth laid out by the philosopher Frederich Hegel. We call the approach the Hegelian dialectic. Subsequent scholars including Karl Marx and Thoman Kuhn have built on and modified the approach. It basically goes like this:
A scholar or set of scholars lays out an initial interpretation of reality. They develop a claim, muster evidence to support it, and detail out the logic that warrants the conclusions that they draw. This is the Thesis. If most people in a community or society accept this Thesis as the truth it becomes something called a Worldview.
A worldview, the dominant explanation of the way the world works, is typically so pervasive and unquestioned by those who live within it, that it becomes a matter of faith. It is pervasive enough to provide a matrix into which law, business practices, religious beliefs, ethics, educational objectives, body images, dietary preferences are interwoven. Questioning the veracity potentially threatens the normative ways that people relate to one anther. When worldviews come under review, demands to defer to, or reinforce, the rightness of the Thesis become shrill.
Other scholars re-examine the thesis, poke and prod the evidence and logic, look for other evidence, and determine that, based on what they see, there are are other equally viable ways to understand reality based on the evidence that they see and the logic that they construct. Their claims are, in Hegel’s terms, called the Antithesis. It takes the form of an argument that questions the validity of the Thesis. It argues that the Thesis is simply not true. Naturally, this is likely to evoke a defensiveness on the part of those who hold that the Worldview, constructed on the basis of the veracity of the Thesis, is the best model of the truth.
A third group of scholars emerge to suggest that while the Thesis is not completely right, in light of the weaknesses pointed out by the scholars promoting the Antithesis, it might not be completely wrong either. And also, the scholars supporting the Antithesis have identified to truths to which one must admit. This third group argues for an integration of the truths and rejection of the falses in both preceding camps. Their integrated reading of the past is called the Synthesis.
Revisionists are certainly members of the group arguing for the antithesis. They are also members of the group that is developing the Synthesis. By the way, typically, the synthesis take the shape of a new worldview after a time and can thus become a new Thesis. The cycle begins again.
Revisionists are thus seen as subversives. As a professional historian I find myself typically in the revisionist camp. In my book about the philosophical roots of preservationism, a sub-category of environmentalism, I argued that unlike many mid-twentieth century interpreters of John Muir, who suggested his ideas were rooted in Oriental philosophies, such as Taosim or Buddhism, Muir’s ideas were in fact rooted in nineteenth century ideas that were flowing in the Romantic and evangelical Christian circles in his day. Years later, knowing what I think I know now, I would take a more synthetic perspective.
Interestingly, at the time I thought that my interpretation of Muir could make a bridge between evangelical Christians, who politically were not fans of environmentalism, and environmentalists. This would happen naturally, I thought, when they recognized that nature preservation was rooted in a common value system.
Ah, the naivety of youth!
Potential Solution:
Consumers of history need education about how the way scholars work and that the human realization of truth is a work in progress.
Problem 5: Is History an Art or and Science, Narrative or Theoretical?
Finally, I would argue that the best history is narrative history. That will likely evoke all kinds of ire from other very fine historians. Perhaps this is a case of there being no accounting for taste.
However, I note a limit to taking an overly theoretical approach to history. There has been a tendency in the Modern Era to try to make history more scientific, along the lines of the social sciences (sociology, psychology, economics, etc)— letting theory drive the story. I mentioned the Grand Strategists above. I’ll admit taking such an approach leads to some interesting perspectives. But, I think it opens to the door to cherry picking the data and oversimplifying the past. Unlike the social sciences, historians can not test hypotheses about what motivated human behavior in the past experimentally.
We certainly develop hypotheses, but we test them by sorting through the detritus available to us in old books and archives. We can tell a story about what the evidence suggests, but we can’t go out and get new evidence. We can’t ask the dead to give us their perspective on our modern questions. Was their behavior motivated by racism and classism or something entirely different? Would they even understand our terms?
If the evidence doesn’t really say one way or the other, we can look at context and speculate, but we just can’t know with certainty. It is more within the realm of the historian to seek to understand the questions that people back in the day identified and explore how people back in the day dealt with their own problems. Thus, the best story to tell is the story that emerges in the dance between the mind of the historian and the evidence, and to be clear and honest about what the evidence says and what the historian suggests may have been or, in his/her estimation, likely was the case.
Potential Solution:
The work of making history relevant and useful requires telling honest and truthful stories about the people and events in the past, tracking the development of current situations and issues from the past the present, and avoiding projecting, too much anyway, our own perspectives on our ancestors, seeking, rather, to understand theirs and then ask reflectively to what extent we are like and unlike them both in terms of their glorious achievements and dismal failures. The resulting self-knowledge gives us an opportunity to act with greater freedom and agency in our own time and place.