Column: A Historian Explains his Discontents
By Charles Jeanes
Introduction: contentment and the absence thereof
When one spends a significant amount of one’s thinking time on history and its value, as I do, then one might ask whether the study of History is faring well in this age of choice for self-education. My tentative answer to the question, is, “No, the study of History is not flourishing — despite vast new resources for the lay-person to consult, to learn about the past.”
I am discontented by what the lay public is doing with History, because it abuses quality History. I capitalize the word History to emphasize I do not mean the actual Past but the information about the past communicated by historians. Knowledge of the Past is failing to thrive; one reason is, there are two kinds of History. There is the study that is professional and scholarly — rigorous in its discipline, worth your time.
Then there’s the other History, the kind falling outside of the professional category but is visible everywhere online and in other media; this is by far the most-consumed by non-historians who do not know better.
A Pentateuch for someone who wants to understand the Past
Please, for this column, read my First Appendix. There you’ll see ‘The Five Scrolls’. These rules are what I tell people, to whom I’ve tried to teach History: a minimum of guidelines for consuming historical information intelligently, and with serious intent to avoid inferior product.
I am going to unpack each point a little more in this column. The aim is to outline a basic foundation for anyone in the lay public who wants to absorb some History and not waste their time on materials and ‘teachers’ who do not merit the effort. Each of the following five sections refers to each of the five points in order, from the Appendix. Today, unlike with recent columns, my intent is to persuade readers.
Scroll One: asking ‘Why?’
Human history at its simplest contains facts and explanations. Facts are arguable; because the Past is gone, evidence must be gathered, interpreted, ordered.
Explanations are an attempt to answer ‘why’ humans behaved, built, believed, as they did, when we learn the facts of past action. ‘Why?’ is a question that never stops – as children often learn at an early age, and delight in the results! – but the student of History, and historians, must have some notion of when to allow an answer to ‘why’ questions to stand, and not push indefinitely into the past.
An adequate, sufficient, satisfying explanation for past events cannot be one thing.
Each of us has a limit, that point when we’re ready to let ‘historical digging’ end. Professionally-trained historians must learn how much to argue, and adjust to their audience. Interest levels are varied and inconstant, and students should be left to their own conclusions with an adequate amount of information.
Junk historians don’t learn appropriate judgment; they bore with irrelevant detail or fail to make a convincing case. Worst, they make a case by manipulating the facts.
Scroll Two: knowing what can be repeated and what never can
The Past never repeats. “The Past does not repeat – people do,” Voltaire quipped. Remember this; History might be suggestively similar from time to time, or person to person. But a minute’s serious thought should reveal that nothing can ever be so exactly a copy of another situation that it is a certainty that one can repeat a choice/ role/ act, that another person once did.
One cannot have the mirror-image result indistinguishable from the original. Nor get a different guaranteed result. In this sense, History offers no ‘lessons’. Zero.
“History does not repeat, it rhymes.” Understand this; large general patterns – empires rise and fall; power over others has a negative effect on humans – are not repetitions. They are rhymes, not lessons. They do not instruct you in action.
However, any one of us can remember our own personal past and learn from that. You are the historian of your own life. You learn lessons, or not, from history you recall. History is not memory. The first is impersonal, the second is your own.
Scroll Three: be aware that the Present distorts understanding of the Past
Nothing prevents us understanding the Past more than the Present we live in.
We know the world and humans in it by experience of living, but understanding the Now is not a quantity transferable into the Past. Why not? The Past “is a foreign country.” [see Second Appendix.] As you do not know, now, the people of another place or culture, you won’t know the Past as the people who lived then knew it. One simply cannot expect that what one knows about the “feeling” of living in present time is true for the Past.
Most especially, one must accept the differences of people in the Past, and not pass judgment on them by standards of the Present.
Scroll Four: taking account of fallibility in Historians
This is a straightforward corollary of the third Scroll. Historians, of whatever quality, are individuals living, being, experiencing, the Present. The Present will shape any historian’s mind; professionals are trained to be less prone to mistakes of letting the Present influence their study of the past.
Yet it is your own responsibility, as the consumer of History, to learn about a person trying to teach you History. Learn what prejudices, blind spots, ideology, life-experience etc. might be influencing that person’s study. The subjective elements of the historian’s personality and mind ought not to dim the clarity of an objective Past, nor bias what facts they choose. Caveat emptor! Exercise caution.
Scroll Five: understand that History demands Meaning, but that’s subjective
When you read History, you are putting something of yourself into what you read.
Human beings, by the operation of mind and consciousness, are a species driven to find meaning. We know people love stories. Meaning in a story is essential; no one wants stories without a connection to human experience.
History is not primarily a ‘story’, but the information we want about the Past is communicated in narrative, and humans put meaning into that. Meaning comes from our connection to other humans. The people — or community — you belong to, is your source of meaning. So History is meaningful to you because you belong to a collective. [see Second Appendix, please.]
Perhaps the group you think is ‘yours’ is the entire human species, and nothing less, but in real life we usually have a community smaller than the whole species. A book by Yuval Harari, read in many languages, is entitled Sapiens: a brief history of humankind; its global popularity might be an indicator that a species-wide sense of community exists.
Conclusions
I am, of course, unwise to expect that study of History would elevate us.
We have all read George Santayana’s comment, yet he never made any effort to persuade us of its Truth: “Those who do not remember the Past are condemned to repeat it.” Untrue, George, we do remember. And we do not learn, and we make the same mistakes. But no one seems to be able to drive his proverb out of use…
There have been times, not long ago, when History was a very prestigious subject. In nineteenth-century Europe, knowledge of the Past was deemed supremely important to the newly-emerged nation-states, several of whom ruled global empires where the mass of the population were not the same nation as the ruling people. History does not have the prestige and respect it enjoyed in the year 1900; I do not regret that nor wish to return to that era.
That age is gone; it did not give evidence for believing knowledge of History among the Europeans led to peace between Europeans, nor justice for colonies and subjects of empire. The Bible too purports to be History in parts, but a History of a chosen, covenanted people – first Israelites, then Christians – who used History to advance their group over ‘the Other.’ History with an agenda is dangerous History.
My main complaint is that people today are consuming History from a plethora of sources, and yet the effect is ineffective for educating a wiser, more enlightened human species.
Everyone with a favourite subject – in science, in arts, in skills – believes that the one they study deserves more attention. Today I have argued for mine.
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First Appendix
The Jeanes Pentateuch [ Five Scrolls ] for History Students
I
The Law of Infinite Regress
You can ask “why?” about anything that has happened in the past and keep on asking why right back to the Big Bang of the start of the cosmos… and still ask “why” about that too. One has to know when to be satisfied that an explanation is sufficient, and to accept “no one knows” as an answer. There will always be mystery in history.
II
Non-repeatability of historical events: History doesn’t repeat but humans do.
No two past events are ever identical. History cannot repeat specifics, only generalities [e.g., empires rise, empires fall.] Leaders never learn “the lessons History seems to teach” because “History” as a Teacher is poetic imagery. There are human behavioural patterns discernible in history but events cannot be mirror images of a previous event.
III
The obstacle of the present in the mind of the historian
The Present is the stumbling-block of knowing the Past as it was. One never examines the past with a completely opened mind, because one is concerned with the present and one asks questions that seem important in the present. Whatever past time one visits in historical study, the Self goes with you. The circumstances of one’s life prejudice one to interrogate the past in a specific manner.
[From this fact follows scroll # IV]
IV
Historians have life and personality:
their recorded histories must bear the marks of this fact
No historian can leave themselves out of their work. Humans are not machines. The influence of an historian’s own life on the historian’s work is not a defect, it is a human truth.
The reader of an historian’s work must be responsible to learn something about the historian’s life as a corrective to an historian’s subjectivity.
V
‘History’ assumes a community of belief:
if there is no consensus on a story, History flounders
History is a sub-genre of narratives that give human life meaning. Human consciousness is self-evidently in need of Meaning; humans have demonstrated our need for it time and again.
A single individual fits themselves into a narrative of meaning, as part of living their life in whole development [= intellect + body +spirit +heart]. The history of one’s community is one thread for a person making their fabric of meaning.
The community creates History in a collective project; historians are ‘ priests of collective storytelling.’
You will most want to read your community’s, or family’s, History.
Second Appendix
Why the Past cannot be understood the way you understand the Present.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfKWd7iXMSo
History to help us… Yuval Harari speaks.
https://www.tiktok.com/@briefbutspectacular/video/7359218230977629483
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/07/the-dangerous-populist-science-of-yuval-noah-harari
The links above help readers see how historians critique other historians.
On History as a Story of a People
Eisenstein
https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/a-new-story-of-the-people/
https://in.pinterest.com/pin/54746951708332865/
Who historians write for:
https://contingentmagazine.org/2022/05/28/who-do-historians-write-for/
Some recommendations for popular history by accurate, entertaining authors
Older popular historians, when I was young, were A.J.P. Taylor, Jan Morris, and Barbara Tuchman, and in Canada, Pierre Berton and Peter C. Newman.
Today, Tom Holland and Simon Winchester, Dan Jones and Christopher Moore.
But I warn readers, do the work to find out the bias and background of any author. I know Churchill and Toynbee and Durant were enormously popular when I was a child, but today no historian would recommend them. They were rife with prejudice!
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