Eric Vandenbroeck 5 June 2018:
Ever
since David Hackett Fischer's book Historians'
Fallacies have been a hotly debated topic.
Each
of us lives in overlapping geographical and temporal units that affect our
views about history. And especially world history since it is concerned with
everything that has ever happened. Most historians simple approach
it by reducing it in size, and condensing the events that we are interested
in investigating. Knowing how far to do this is very, very tricky, and depends
to a large extent on the level you are studying it.
Also,
when history was first taking shape as a university discipline in the
nineteenth century, elite young men were fed a diet of Greek and Roman history.
The
misuse of antiquity and the Holy Roman Empire
As a result of the
above mentioned, including to a degree also today, Historians in the early 20th
Century viewed modern peoples as superior to the ancients, and, as a corollary,
portrayed Western Europe and eventually the West as superior to the rest of the
world. The belief in progress – validated by the triumph of reason and science
– helped solidify the Western sense of ascendancy over other regions; the West
and its version of secular modernity now represented the future of the entire
world.
In
the early 20th century this racialized history has often been perceived as
somehow Germanocentric. Plus
then next, given the exclusionary nature of National Socialist racism, the
Nazis were to a degree obligated to embellish the history of Frederick’s
Prussia and the Holy Roman Empire and to illustrate the family tree that
connected Hermann der Cherusker (Arminius the Cheruscan) to Hitler.
But
references to classical antiquity were legion in public discourse, while the
regime’s official architecture revived Rome’s monumental classicism and Nazi
sculptors rediscovered the Greek nude. The reinvention of history, the
fabrication of an origin myth, and the many alleged trials and tribulations of
the Indo-Germanic peoples helped create the Nazi subject, whose racial identity
and history was inflated by the annexation of a culturally prestigious past.
The
annexation of antiquity gave the new man an identity he could truly be proud
like. The prestige of his predecessors required and commanded that his
contemporary exponents work to build a future that would be equally glorious.
The past showed that despite the vicissitudes of a mediocre and unpredictable
present, the inherent potential of the race remained and demanded to be
fulfilled.
The
building of the present and the construction of the future would lean upon the
was achievements of the Nordic peoples of antiquity, just as the great Greek
and Roman thinkers would be read, contemplated, understood, and followed.
But
Nordicist theory on the Indo-Germanic roots of the
Greeks and Romans wasn’t restricted only to the cloistered, at times almost
confidential, a world of professional scholars. A much wider readership awaited
and was targeted in a variety of ways.
SS
ideological propaganda, for example, repeated the point incessantly. One
booklet illustrated the Nordic origins of Greco-Roman civilization with a
series of blueprints retracing the evolution of the Germanic house in
comparison with the Greek temple: “It was from the Germanic house, with its
vestibule at the entrance, that the Greek temple developed, copying and
perfecting its form. . . . We see here a proud trace
of classical architecture. The Greek temple is thus additional proof that the
great civilizations did not come from the East, but from the North. (1) Another
of these SS pamphlets(2) presented a portrait of a
young recruit side by side with the profile of “a Roman head of state.” The
virile pose of the young SS soldier apparently displayed a familiar echo of
Roman’s masculine gravitas: “The SS soldier, son of a German countryman,
carries the same Nordic blood as the men we are about to see. We will show him
side by side with a Roman statesman, to remind us that the Roman Empire itself,
like that of the Persians, the civilization of the Greeks . . . [was] built by
the creative force of the same Nordic blood.”(3)
Elsewhere
I pointed out that the centralization of the myth of
the state clearly distinguished fascist totalitarianism from Nazi and communist
totalitarianism.
Nationalism
based on Religion and Language
As
we initially have seen when I started this website, beliefs about political authority changed during the Thirty Years’
War. Around the same time, I also analyzed how religion and Nationalism
intertwined in countries like lceland,
ltaly, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia,
Malta, Moldova, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Serbia and
Montenegro, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and Ukraine.
As
seen in the above examples some of the factors that tend to shape religious
nationalism are religious frontiers and threats.
For
example the lrish nation began to identify in
opposition to this new threat, but the lrish
sentiment did not begin to take on religious tones until after the English
Reformation, at which point the English became not just a threatening other,
but a religious other as well, and lasted in the N.Ireland to this day.
In
Poland, the threat from religious frontiers has also been clear. The religious
divide between Poland and its non-Catholic neighbors (Russia and Germany) has
been one of the more prominent features in the history of the Polish nation.
Significantly, the role of threat is also demonstrated through the diminishing
power of the Polish state following the Golden Era. The subjugation of the
Poles to Russian and Soviet rule further enhanced the nation-building power of
the Catholic Church.
In
Greece, as in many nations formerly under Ottoman rule, the Orthodox Church
played a critical role in national differentiation. This was due
to the fact that Greeks were most dearly differentiated from their
oppressors by religion - the Ottomans were, of course, Islamic. The threat from
Turkey continues today on a variety of fronts, perhaps most notably in Cyprus.
As a result, the Greeks continue to emphasize the importance of Orthodoxy in
their national concept.
Also
England reinforced this understanding by demonstrating that the threatening
nature of a religious frontier can change - and with it, the religious links to
nationalism. As British power expanded, the lrish
threat diminished, and Protestantism was no longer essential in national
differentiation.
However many
of the cases I investigated as indicated at the time also be seen to be on a borderline. Italy, for instance, is
difficult to categorize. Is it a secular nation that is very religious? In
other words, are the Italian people largely religious, although the linkage
does not carry over into nationalism? Or is ltaly a
case of a weak religious nationalism, wherein there is a linkage between
religion and nation, albeit weaker than Ireland, Poland, or Greece? An argument
could be made either way.
Thus the
basic problem with rational choice explanations of secularism or religiosity
(in this case at least) is that they get the process reversed. The demand for
religion is not fixed. Rather, demand for religion varies according to a
variety of factors, including religious frontiers and threats. As such, the
assumption that supply shapes overall religiosity is faulty. Rather, as is true
of most economic situations, supply is driven by demand. In Poland, there was a
strong demand for Catholicism due to historical and political circumstances. In
Britain, there was a more subdued demand (in general) and a wider demand across
the spectrum. In the end, the evidence simply does not support the argument.
An
interesting case as I pointed out is the American civil religion has its own
"holy scriptures," the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution, which are treasured and venerated like the Tables of the
Law. It has its own prophets, such as the Pilgrim Fathers. It celebrates its
own sacred heroes such as George Washington, the American Moses.
Going
beyond the aspects of religious frontiers and threats thereafter I analyzed a number of other countries with a different Nationalist setting, like those with language as the central
subject of historical inquiry, including more recently such like the concept of Han Chinese.
Nationalism
and the misuse of History
And
while in the case of the Nazi's or Italian Fascism (not to mention many other
forms of Nationalism), I pointed out nationalism and the misuse of History there
are of course governments who deliberately may create or support an alternative
narrative to mobilize people in rapidly changing societies such as we have seen, in the case of China. Thus the recent national history of China has been
characterized as a miserable past when China suffered due to the force from the
outside. This historical belief has been institutionalized by the education
system in China since 1991. In combination with people’s pride of ancient
Chinese civilization, the historical education with an emphasis on the
country’s miserable past resulted in the construction
of Chinese nationalistic identity: their collective desire to recover the
central position of China in the world became the driving force to build their
modernity. This mythically projected future leads to the concealment of
internal conflicts and violence inside the national history in many cases.
Also,
educational institutions themselves can attempt to exert their own perspective
on history, as in Japan with the
debate over Japan’s history textbooks focusing on wartime victimhood and
victimization. Progressive and conservative power coexisted in the
education sector in Japan including the Yoshida
Doctrine. The former tried to emphasize malefaction done to Asians and
Japanese people’s responsibilities during that imperialism period. On the other
hand, the conservative force attempted to include remorse for the past and
Japanese nationalistic view of history. And as described in the above link this
narrative regarding the wartime suffering of the Japanese people can induce a
critical perspective on imperial wars and their disastrous impact on ordinary
people, apart from the original intention of the conservative branch of the
Japanese educational establishment.
Of
course in industrialized society, there
are multiple narratives of national history, and depending on the kind of
historical schedules, different values are associated with national
identification. Especially, knowledge about identity construction could be
valuable in the globalized world: both to a country that is already
multicultural like Australia, to a country that has just become a multicultural
society, and to countries that are bewildered by globalization. The thesis and
further research in line with it could give practical implications regarding
how to avoid exclusive national identity in international contact settings, how
to resist to political manipulations of historical narratives, and how to
promote international relationships in the globalized world. More profoundly,
the thesis implies a prediction about future, that globalization would create a
more complicated map of culture in the world or even in a country, resulting
from conflicts and reconciliation between traditional values and modernity, and
between material development and mental life.
The future
of History
What
we need more than ever now are histories that are deep and wide and histories
that are minutely particular and histories of dimensions and units in between
because we live in a world of many dimensions, from the local to the national and
the global. History as an academic discipline assumed that humans were the
proper subject of history or at least humans who could write and therefore
produce documents. Increasingly, however, historians have recognized that
humans do not live and have not lived alone on the planet and do not make
history just about each other. People are always interacting with the
environment in which they live, with the animals and machines that inhabit the
same spaces, and with the microbes and pathogens that make human life possible
and sometimes miserable. Awareness of a deeper and broader sense of time has
helped draw historians to studying the interactions between humans and their
environment, settlement their animals and machines, and their diseases. Humans
do not entirely control these interactions, like hurricanes, epidemics,
recalcitrant animals, and crashing computers all show. The environment,
animals, microbes, and perhaps even machines have their agency in the world;
they act independently of humans and shape the human world. Histories of these
interactions enable us to recognize that humans are not masters of the universe
and that our disregard for the planet and other species has created problems
that we must now face.
Research
on such questions is now popping up everywhere. Elephants, common in China
4,000 years ago, were steadily pushed southward into smaller and smaller areas
as farmers claimed land, destroyed the forest habitat, exterminated elephants
who threatened their crops, and finally hunted them for ivory. Medievalists
have shown that access to water in Europe shaped settlement patterns and
conflicts over property rights. Studies of Native Americans in the United
States have demonstrated the devastating agricultural and social effects of the
acquisition of horses by some tribes at the end of the seventeenth century. In
what has been termed “the Columbian Exchange,” the European conquest of the New
World opened the way to massive transfers of plants, animals, diseases, and
human populations between the New World and Europe. To cite only one more
example among many, global cooling in the seventeenth century encouraged
Europeans to seek colonial outlets while also hampering early attempts at
settlement in North America: extreme weather produced high mortality rates
among would-be colonists in Jamestown, for example, and also
made the long ocean voyages even more dangerous. Attention to whole earth time
is enlarging the canvas of historical analysis, and the pictures that are
emerging are often very different from those familiar in the past.
While
it might be said that humans, oceans, horses, airplanes, and the syphilis
bacterium occupy the same time frame, because humans have invented the time
frames that encompass them, they do not experience the progression of time in
the same way or even experience the passage of time as progression at all. But
more important still, the heterogeneous communities of humans in the present
and the past have experienced and conceptualized time in many
different ways. Another of the exciting new perspectives of historical
research is the study of different organizations and experiences of time. We
live in a globalizing world in which synchronicity and simultaneity are
increasingly important, but time zones did not even exist before the end of the
1800s, and they only came into use because of the needs of railroad schedules.
The experiences of nighttime before gas lighting, of seasons before
industrialization, and of work before wireless communication is almost as
foreign to us now as the notions of time of the pre-Hispanic Maya, for example,
who recorded the passage of time in hieroglyphic texts.
The
history of different systems of organizing time shows how contingent and
variable those systems have been and so reminds us that ours, too, is a product
of history and not universally valid. Not to mention that national and global
histories are constructed on the building blocks provided by a localized
history.
The
tension between our own history and someone else’s is likewise very productive
of new insights. Every nation’s or group’s history tries to establish its
singularity, but identity histories tend to follow similar narrative patterns:
the search for roots, the story of overcoming obstacles, and the laying out of
challenges still to be faced.
Attention
to groups that have been excluded in the past from the narrative disrupts the
familiar story and leads to the drafting of new narratives. The conflict has
been especially intense in settler societies. Should the national history focus
on the settlers, or those who were displaced, or both?
The
“Aboriginal history wars” of the 2000s in Australia provide a prime example,
and they show that resolution if it comes at all, comes from discussing and
debating the tensions, not from trying to make them disappear.(4)
The
tension between our history and theirs can extend to a global scale. Earlier
writers of the history of the West, have too often presumed the West’s superiority
over the non-West, but consideration of the long history of Western relations
with other regions reveals other possibilities. For the Romans, Europe was the
land of the barbarians, the very antithesis of civilization. The thoughts of
Greek thinkers such as Aristotle that was eventually posited as the fount of
Western civilization came to Europeans via translations from Arabic into Latin
between ca. 1150 and 1250. Many historians now agree that
the dominant economic power in the world between 1100 and 1800 was China, not
Europe. Much of the impetus for Europe’s interest in international trade
and hence for the development of trans-Atlantic slavery, and even arguably for
industrialization, came from the European desire for goods from the east: at
first spices, then later, and most significantly, silk, tea, and porcelain from
China and calicoes
from India. Superiority, whether in trade, technology, military power, or
culture, has shifted from region to region around the globe and will continue
to shift in the future.
One
aspect is also that maintaining the tension between academic and popular
histories seems the most desirable option; historians have to
find their way between the profession’s and the university’s demands for new
information and interpretations, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the
imperative to translate that knowledge into accessible forms.
Balancing
past and future
Balancing
past and future, the last of the sets of tensions outlined here, presents
unexpected difficulties. We want to know how we came to be where we are now to
be better prepared for meeting the challenges of the future, but we also want
to know where we have been in order to maintain a
sense of continuity over time with our families, nations, or the earth itself.
Unfortunately, the former – shaping the future – has begun to overshadow the
latter – preserving the sense of continuity.
But
the future is meaningless without the sense of continuity. As the discipline of
history has evolved, and as popular and public history has drawn more interest,
the center of gravity of history has shifted toward the present. It is
inconceivable to us now that every Harvard University student would have to
take a course on Roman history. There is very little agreement among professors
or the public about what every educated person ought to know. Even within the
discipline of history, which is by definition about
the past, research now focuses more often on the last century or two than on
the further distant past. Until the 1970s, most scholars who aspired to be
considered great historians in Europe or the United States wrote about the
foundational periods of state formation, that is, either the Middle Ages or the
sixteenth and seventeenth century in Europe or the colonies and the early
republic in the United States. In France, the period ranging from the
Renaissance of the fifteenth century to the French Revolution is still called
“the modern epoch,” whereas history after 1789 is “contemporary,” by
implication more suitable to journalism than historical scholarship.
Nineteenth-century history got a foothold in France in the 1970s and the
twentieth century followed in the 1990s. Now the great historians in France,
like those in Britain and the United States, are more likely to be those who
write about the twentieth century.
AAs
enrollment figures at just about any institution of higher education will show,
students prefer to take history courses on the most recent periods of time.
They can still be lured to ancient or medieval history by a charismatic
instructor, or a university requirement, but they flock to courses on
twentieth-century. Thus history is in danger, as an
academic field, of neglecting much of what has happened in the past. (5)
“Presentism”
takes various forms and not just an interest in more recent history. It also
includes judging people in the past by present-day norms. Hegel was presentist in the sense that he considered the German conception
of freedom as the benchmark for all people, but we are equally presentist when we criticize Hegel for not sharing our
understanding of the world today. Presentism is an enduring tension in
history’s relation to the past; history would have no interest at all if it did
not speak to our present-day interests, so we need a dose of presentism, but if
we only view the past from our own standpoint, we simply impose our standards
on it. The dose of presentism cannot be too high, or it will lead us to commit
anachronism, that is, the failure to respect chronology. Then the past just
becomes an inert mirror of ourselves rather than a place that we can discover
and from which we can learn. But the dose of presentism also cannot be too low;
sometimes we have to judge the past according to our
own values. Would we want to analyze Hitler as just another politician or his
treatment of the disabled, Jews, Roma, or Slavs as just another policy option?
Getting the right dose of presentism is a constant challenge, and we probably
only have a chance of getting it right if our choices are constantly up for
discussion and debate.
Even
with the emergence of a deeper and broader notion of historical time, the two
earlier approaches are with us still, and each one provides a unique access to
historical knowledge. A globalizing culture still needs exemplars, which can be
found in many places and not just ancient Greece and Rome. The Epic of
Gilgamesh, the sayings of the Buddha, the teachings of Confucius, and the oral
traditions of countless African or South American tribes are just a few
examples. Wisdom is not fundamentally altered by changes in technology, growth
in population, or specialization of occupations. Wisdom can be found in
learning about how people in the past confronted their challenges.
Progress
may be in question, but the very act of telling a story – and all history
consists of stories in one form or another – requires a beginning and an end
and therefore some sense of progression. Not everything in the past need lead
inexorably to the endpoints that we choose for our stories, but the end does
influence the way the story is told. The tension between explaining how the end
came about and maintaining a sense of the choices being made along the way is
one of the most difficult to negotiate when writing history. The story is not
exciting if there is no sense of choice, but the story makes no sense if there
is no logic to the choices. We still need grand narratives, therefore, though
they need not be the story of progress. Thinking about what those narratives
should be is one of the undertakings that makes history as a field so
exhilarating.
New
vistas are constantly emerging. As media have become more omnipresent in our
lives, historians have begun to pay more heed to the role of visual
representations of all kinds. History as a field has been defined by its
relationship to textual documents, and this focus will not disappear, but other
ways of delivering information are now being considered, too. In societies
without universal literacy, which means all societies before the end of the
1800s, visual forms played a major role: monuments,
processions and parades, reliquaries, and woodcuts spoke more directly to
ordinary people than did tracts, treatises, or official documents. Similarly,
the advent of the digital world is prompting new approaches.
Historians now have access to massive databases of all kinds that can be
searched in seconds, and the number of them will only increase. Scholars have to learn not only how to use them but also how to
evaluate their reliability.
The
emergence of new fields such as visual and digital history reminds us that
history cannot predict the future but can benefit from the changes it brings.
Only our imaginations can predict the future, and we will not know which
predictions are right until the future becomes the present. But we can know the
past, however incompletely, and we do not need a time machine to get there. All
we need is curiosity and a willingness to learn how those before us made sense
of their worlds. Why we need to do so was explained by the Roman politician
Cicero more than 2,000 years ago. “To be ignorant of what occurred before you
were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of a human life,
unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”(6)
1) Deutsche Geschichte,
Lichtbildvortrag, Erster Teil: Germanische Frühkeit,
“Das Licht aus dem Norden,” ed. Reichsführer-SS, Chef
des Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamtes (Sonderheft, 1942, Bundesarchiv
Berlin-Lichterfelde/ RD/NSD 41/87, 16–17.
2) Das Blut, seine Bedeutung, Reinerhaltung und
Verbesserung, ed. vol. 1, Blut und Boden: Lichtsbildvortrag, ed
Reichsführer-SS, Chef des Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamtes
(Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde/RD/NSD 41/87.
3)
Ibid., 25. The men the book was about to show were Reichsgraf
Maximilian von Spee and Horst Wessel, both of whom
“incarnated the German essence” and were “combatants for the Nordic blood and carriers
of its spirit, linked by blood to the modern German man.”
4)
Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History (Crows
Nest, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2005)
5)
Ben Schmidt, “What Years Do Historians Write About?” (Sapping Attention, May 9,
2013). Available at:
http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2013/05/what-years-do-historians-write-about.html
6)
Peter G. Bietenholz, Historia, and Fabula: Myths and
Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity to the Modern Age (Leiden: Brill,
1994), p. 57.