Those of us who take a long view of philosophy, art, politics, etc., sometimes argue that one historical period was better than the contemporary world in some respect. It is depressingly common, though, to hear someone try to refute such an argument by saying, or, as is more often the case, shouting, "The past wasn't perfect!"
What a stupid objection! Of course, the past wasn't perfect. Perhaps there are some people out there who really think the past was perfect, but no reasonable person does, and this objection generally just obfuscates more than it illuminates.
Unfortunately, this objection, as stupid as it is, seems to be convincing to a lot of people, probably because in history it is so easy to find a counter-example to every general statement. This game of objecting to every general statement about the past on the basis of a single counter-example can be carried to absurd lengths:
If some historians one day decided to discredit maternal love, they would be able to produce a long enumeration of cruelties exercised by heartless mothers upon their young children. [1]
Given how difficult it is to generalize about the past, why do we bother making comparisons to the past at all? What are we trying to achieve?
All I can do, of course, is state my own position. When I base my argument on a comparison of the past and the present, I am usually trying to compare ideals and types. The gist of the argument is that while the past wasn't perfect, at least the past had the right ideals. It may not always have lived up to these ideals, but at least it did try to live up to them, and even produced a number of outstanding individuals.
One way of looking at this question is to ask: What was the "representative type" of an historical period? What type of man did it try to produce, and what type of man did it actually produce? Every epoch will have its fair share of sinners, criminals, mountebanks, scoundrels, wastrels, and good-for-nothings. What matters in this kind of historical analysis, though, is what kind of good that culture in a given historical period was aiming at. What was its idea of a good person? That part is empirical. Then, the questions become more philosophical: Was a medieval monk or king better than, say, the modern financier or industrialist? Was an ancient Greek philosopher better than all of these men? Or, was a Roman citizen-farmer superior? What about a Chinese mandarin?
Another way of looking at the question is to compare not just individual types but also "systems," or broader social arrangements in which the individuals lived and acted. How did oligarchy function in ancient Greece or in Carthage? How did the Senate rule in Rome, and how did the emperors change that? How does feudalism compare to capitalism? Why was China so stable for so long?
The broad, interdisciplinary sweep of these questions does not mean that empirical research is unnecessary, or that an historian can approach history with his conclusions already made. On the contrary, it is only from detailed study of the interaction between individual persons and social structures, between ideals and actual lives, that an historian can gain a clearer picture of the age and individuals he is studying. Only careful historical research can give contour to these ideals, and put the individual in his context. But while a true historian is always respectful of the diversity of history, he is not unduly afraid to make judgments, and it is by virtue of these judgments that he can make comparisons between historical epochs.
[1]Frédéric Le Play, Social Reform in France, in Christopher Olaf Blum (ed. and trans.), Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2003), p. 220
5 comments:
I generally like the idea of comparing (and contrasting) particular eras and epochs to one another. It provides, as you suggest, a forum and context to examine qualitative successes, failures, virtues, and vices.
That said, it seems there is a potentially ruinous obstruction; namely, "How does one get a good sense of what the past was like?". The farther back one looks, the more difficult this becomes. Think of how hard it might be to reconstruct, say, the WWII period--and records and personal accounts are plentiful!
That's not to say that it's worthless to examine the character of the Greek polis or the Medieval monastery vis-a-vis the Welfare State. It's just to say that it's hard and vulnerable to a great deal of subjectivity and bias.
Barry,
Of course it's hard to do history well, and for those of us who are generalists there is a real temptation to skip over the messy details of history. But, that doesn't mean that history isn't possible at all. Our ability to know the past is certainly limited, but we really can know the past to some extent.
As for the difficulty of getting an accurate picture of World War II, I think Aaron may be able to provide some insight.
Barry, I think you're onto a key issue here: before the historian can consider big questions, he must have addressed (at least some of) the little questions. AJP Taylor says the historian's first task is to answer the child's question: "And then what happened?"
I've been reading a fair bit of a fellow named RG Collingwood lately. He's really keen on the notion of history as the study of human actions, and ultimately human nature. But before we ask those kinds of big questions, we have to reconstruct the past.
Is that hard for World War II? Certainly! First, the war is huge, raging across six years and the entire globe. There is an overwhelming amount of data, and yet - on particular questions - often not enough.
In contrast, there are only about a dozen sources for the Norman invasion of England. A journalist named David Howarth decided to read all of them and then write a short history, called _1066_. The idea was that here he had a topic where, with relative ease, he could quickly learn as much as most historians known. The result is highly readable and insightful.
This reminds me of a blurb I recently read about one of the members of my committee. He's a sociologist, but I think it's still relevant:
"Burk takes a broad view of sociology. His premise is that sociology is a discipline particularly concerned with the problem: what makes for and how do we maintain a good society? Sociologists argue strongly about what might count as a solution to this problem and about whether the problem is possible to solve. Some deny that there can be such a thing as a good society, and so they think the search for solutions is a wasted effort. He stands with those who think the problem is worth trying to solve, without committing to the idea that only one solution can be found. Much depends on the period, the institutions, and the people one studies. In brief, his research explores the frontier between sociology and ethics."
I think Burk is spot on, believing that goodness is possible and that questions about how we attain it are worth asking. But he also has the good sense to know that the results are likely to be messy, complicated and incomplete.
Thank you, Aaron. Your quotation about Burk is very good.
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