Ethics in history - The value of history: its uses and abuses.
Good history is not heritage
Good history is not heritage
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The goal of the good historian is to find out and explain what really happened in the past. But not everyone who uses the past has such noble ambitions. What makes historians special users of the past is that they alone are concerned with making sense of the past, simply for the sake of making sense of the past.
History is the study of the past in itself, for itself. David Lowenthal makes a useful distinction in this respect in that, if the user of the past is using the past for present day purposes – whether positive, benign or harmful – then what they are doing is not history, but rather ‘heritage’. '...heritage is not history at all; while it borrows from and enlivens historical study, heritage is not an inquiry into past but a celebration of it, not an effort to know what actually happened but a profession of faith in a past tailored to present day purposes.’ |
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Never has our interest in heritage and our ‘profession of faith in the past’, been as fanatical as it is at the start of the 21st century. The past provides stability and certainly in a time of unprecedented social and cultural change: the past is everywhere: on dedicated television channels and in hundreds of successful Hollywood films, heritage sites, folklore celebrations, glossy magazines, bestselling novels and nostalgic commercial adverts. (Below - 1980s Levis sells 1960s heritage and 1970s Hovis sells 1930s tradition)
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They may borrow from history and may even be produced by historians, but heritage shares a common non-historical, present orientated purpose: they use the past to entertain, to inspire, to engage, to provide identity and to sell to us, in the here and now.
‘‘The past can be used for almost anything you want to do in the present. We abuse it when we create lies about the past or write histories that show only one perspective’
Margaret Macmillan
Because the past is central to our emotional sense of identity, the state has always sought to control how we interpret the past through, for example, national memorials, public holidays and the teaching of history in schools. As Arthur Marwick once explained, ‘As memory is to the individual, so history is to the community’.
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A shared sense of the past is central to our national identity, because the nation is in Benedict Anderson’s memorable phrase ‘an imagined community’. But it is also an exclusive community; national ‘history’ is our history often defined in terms of opposition to those outside the national group. Only historians stand in the way of those who use the past as part of a patriotic agenda, because historians have the means and interest in exposing partiality and challenging the myths that often constitute the national story.
Good history, therefore, is one in which the historian is ‘open about their closures’; consciously aware of their present orientated prejudices, both cultural and personal but determined to remove this from all aspects of their work. |
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Good history is hard
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Real history is hard going: it is a methodical, sometimes lonely existence of reading, checking and double checking, of immersing yourself in the past and trying to empathise with the dead, of writing-up carefully and reaching qualified judgements scrupulously, whilst providing explicit, accurate references for everything you write. As the French author Flaubert once said, ‘Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful’. I know I could not do it, but I admire those who can.
It is far easier not to bother with monotonous archival research or to write about the past as if the people of the past were just like us. It is far easier not to provide detailed footnotes or to just select the lessons of the past because they suit our present needs. |
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The American historian William Dunning discovered through careful archival research and comparison of handwriting that Andrew Jackson’s (left) first message to Congress had in fact been drafted by George Bancroft. How much time must this comparison have taken? How many samples of handwriting had Dunning reviewed? The end result is relatively trivial but it is also central to the historical process because ‘it is not only new it is also true.’
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The uncovering of new truths is a significant part of what history does. It is a cumulative process and over time we come to know more about the past than we once did. When those in positions of political power or economic influence tell stories about the past to justify their actions, it is only the professionally trained historian who has the real authority to challenge them. It is something else that can make history hard, that historians play the role of professional sceptics, often charged with being unpatriotic or disloyal. For those in power and defending the status quo, history can be a dangerous subject that teaches that the world hasn’t always been like this, that change has happened and by implication can happen again.
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TOK - Prescribed Essay Title Discuss the ways in which value judgments should and should not be used in different Areas of Knowledge. November 2007 - May 2007 |
Good history is not fiction
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Above all else, good history is concerned with facts about real events that actually happened. Events cannot be invented that did not happen, nor can the chronology of these events be reversed. There are real limitations to the narratives that can be told about the past and those limitations are fixed by the facts.
There was a revolution in Cuba before the Cuban Missile Crisis and a year after the crisis President Kennedy was assassinated. As the historian G.M Trevelyan once argued ‘...the poetry of history does not consist of imagination roaming at large, but of imagination pursuing the fact and fastening upon it.’ |
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For any claim historian’s make about the past they must provide evidential support from the historical record. And the historian must be open and accurate about this. The historian must provide clear referencing to allow the authenticity of the original source to be verified and to allow their interpretative reading of these sources to be analysed.
‘We historians are firmly bound by the authority of our sources (and by no other authority, human or divine), nor must we use fiction to fill in the gaps...’
Sir Geoffrey Elton
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One of the negative consequences of the Internet revolution has been decline in importance of the academic authority that was once more or less guaranteed by the published book. Now anyone can publish their views about the past on a website, blog or discussion board, irrespective of whether they have respected the traditional requirements of academic historical scholarship or not. Conspiracy theory websites of variable quality, rank highly in search results alongside reputable institutional history sites. Politically motivated sites can promote selective nationalist history and revisionist sites can deny that the Holocaust ever happened.
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In the face of such narratives it is clearly not enough that there are simply alternative narratives. There must also be accounts that are founded on the factual record. For these accounts we depend on history.
As Richard J Evans forcefully argues:
‘There is a massive, carefully empirical literature on the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Clearly, to regard it as fictional, unreal, or no nearer to historical reality than, say, the work of the “revisionists” who deny that Auschwitz ever happened at all, is simply wrong. Here is an issue where evidence really counts, and can be used to establish the essential facts. Auschwitz was not a discourse. It trivializes mass murder to see it as a text. The gas chambers were not a piece of rhetoric. Auschwitz was inherently a tragedy and cannot be seen either as a comedy or a farce.’
As Richard J Evans forcefully argues:
‘There is a massive, carefully empirical literature on the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Clearly, to regard it as fictional, unreal, or no nearer to historical reality than, say, the work of the “revisionists” who deny that Auschwitz ever happened at all, is simply wrong. Here is an issue where evidence really counts, and can be used to establish the essential facts. Auschwitz was not a discourse. It trivializes mass murder to see it as a text. The gas chambers were not a piece of rhetoric. Auschwitz was inherently a tragedy and cannot be seen either as a comedy or a farce.’
The official list of TOK ethics in history questions.
- Is it unfair to judge people and actions in the past by the standards of today?
- Should terms such as “atrocity” or “hero” be used when writing about history, or should value judgments be avoided?
- Do historians have a moral responsibility to try to ensure that history is not misused and distorted by people for their own ends?
- On what criteria could we decide whether people in the past have a right to privacy in the present?
- Do historians have an ethical obligation not to ignore contradictory evidence?
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