Ethically-engaged Early Medieval History-writing. Why it matters and how (not) to do it ... or 'They was asking for it!'

Every year I do a session on 'History and Ethics' with the students on our Public History MA course.  As you know, this is a topic that matters a lot to me, and about which I have blogged before (see posts with the label 'the unbearable weight' and/or 'ethics of history'). 

I like to open these discussions with these two passages written by a well-respected and prominent early medievalist.(1)

The first comes in the context of a passage trying to minimalise the extent or severity of Viking attacks on ecclesiastical persons and property.

In 860 the monastery of St-Bertin was attacked but the community had plenty of warning.  According to the author of a translatio written a generation later ... all the monks fled save four 'intent on martyrdom, save that God had to some extent decided otherwise'.  ... [The Vikings] had been 'hoping to capture some monks' - after subjecting three of the four who were 'older', thin and wasted' to 'painful acts of scorn and mockery' (such as pouring liquid into the nostrils of one of them until his belly was distended) [they] tried to take away the fourth, 'more succulent than the rest'.  The idea was surely to take this one for ransoming.  He was the only one to be killed.  He refused to go quietly, throwing himself to the ground and insisting that he wanted to die on the spot, where he might be buried 'in the cemetery of his ancestors, and his name be entered on the commemoration lists of his brother monks'.  Apparently out of sheer vexation at his obduracy, his captors began to beat him with their spear-butts', then pierced him with spear-points' ... and the cruel game got out of hand.  [I have added emphasis.]

The second comment is in the context of alleged Viking 'pillage, plunder and rape':

Among all the Annals of St-Bertin's references to Viking plunder and pillage, there is no mention of rape, and this is significant, given these Annals twice mention the episodes when the followers of Christian Carolingian kings committed rape, in one case the rape of nuns.  It hardly follows that Northmen never raped: it does seem that they were not notorious rapists. [Emphasis added.]

The second passage in particular tends to shock the students; the first less so (though I think it is every bit as bad).

I am not concerned with the 'Viking atrocity' debate, within which this is situated and about which I have written before.  What concerns me is the ethical implications of this piece.  It is one thing to say that the Vikings were no worse than anyone else (an argument with which I would agree), but this goes far beyond that and into an ethical relativisation of violence, torture and rape.  That, as you might imagine, I find objectionable, offensive and irresponsible.

Let's look more closely at the first paragraph.  Here, above all, the blame is shifted onto the victims.  The monks allegedly had 'plenty of warning', so they should have got away.  Silly old monks!  It was after all the four monks' own 'decision' to stay behind.  Wouldn't they learn?  Then we essentially have the torture (including waterboarding) of frail old men passed over without any comment, other than to quote the description in the contemporary source, which in this passage is in any case explicitly being 'read against', of 'painful acts of scorn and mockery'.  Finally we come to the monk whom the Viking wanted to take away. 'Surely', says the author, this was to ransom him.  Why 'surely'?  If this intention was attested in the source, the term 'surely' would not have been employed.  Why was the intention 'surely' to ransom him, rather than - say - to torture him to death for fun, to rape him (he was after all 'more succulent than the rest'), or anything else?  [Note that rape is only envisaged in this passage in heterosexual terms, although 'painful acts of scorn and mockery' is a broad category.]  And then maybe ransom him?  That interpretation is the modern historian's assumption and that seems to me to be unwarranted.  Why, we are authorised to ask, make that assumption?  Anyway, the monk refused to 'go quietly' and this excuses the Vikings (driven 'apparently by sheer vexation at his obduracy'; why 'apparently?'  Again this begs serious questions) for their act of pig-sticking him slowly to death.  Just to add the icing on the cake, this lengthy and painful murder is described merely as 'a cruel game'.  Boys will be boys, eh?  What can you do?

The second passage requires little by way of commentary.  There is, apparently, rape and then there is 'notorious rape'.  We might call this the 'Ken Clarke view' of history.  Whether the relative mention of rape by Christians and pagans might have other explanations within early medieval textual strategies is not considered.  Here, frequency of mention equals relative notoriety.  Frankly, I don't think much else needs to be said.

So - why does this passage vex me so much (other than the fact that is written by someone who, one would like to think, damn well ought to know better)?

For one thing it raises the issue, which I have discussed before, of the historical 'statute of limitations': how far back in the past do events have to be before it becomes acceptable to write about them like this?  Let's leave the obvious 'limit case' to one side for now.  Would it be considered acceptable to consider the Austrian troops rather brutally occupying Serbia during the Great War in this fashion, playing down torture and rape because allegedly no worse than what the Serbians did?  At what point does it become acceptable to go beyond the sometimes necessary but nevertheless pretty vapid 'well they were no worse than anyone else' argument(2) to actively playing down violence like this - actively introducing victim-blaming and assumptions about (*relatively*) benign intentions to the aggressors?  When?  Those Serbian civilians: they had plenty of chance to escape you know.  If they didn't flee, well that was their decision.  If they didn't want to 'go quietly' who, I ask you, among us, can blame the Austrian soldiers for shooting or bayoneting a few of them?  At least they weren't 'notorious rapists'.  Transposed to that context, the nature of the writing really becomes apparent.  Don't ninth-century people (and these were, I assume, real people - at least the author assumes so) deserve better?  Don't they deserve the same respect?

When the historicising of violence goes this far - as far as to attempt to excuse the perpetrators - what is the logical implication?  The logical implication is that, in certain contexts (so, why only historical?  why not geographical, social or cultural?) violence - here, murder, torture and rape - can be relativized.  Whenever we are thinking of the public role of history, or of the socially-committed historian (something that the author of this piece not infrequently strikes postures about) it seems to me that implying this sort of thing is the very last thing a historian ought to be doing.  To call this irresponsible would seem to be saying the very least, but I would go further.  I will say, unapologetically, that I find it disgusting.  Why, therefore, we are entitled to ask, is this kind of writing considered unremarkable and acceptable in a book about the ninth century when it would more than merely raise eyebrows if found in a book on the twentieth?

---

(1) You can, if you are interested, find the passages on pp.28-9 and p.47 of this book.  I have not named names directly because, although there is certainly no love lost between me and the author, the point of this blog-post is the general issue of attitude and acceptable methodology - that this sort of writing is seen as generally unobjectionable by the historical profession - not an ad hominem/feminam attack.

(2) My own Viking piece was about why, when the Vikings did the same as everyone else, they got a worse press for it and had demonstrably worse effects.

Getting the Point of Pointlessness

[I am off to Kalamazoo in a couple of weeks, or rather less (eek!) where I will be giving a paper in the Exemplaria session on 'New Critical Imperatives'.  Here is the abstract I sent them.  Some may note similarities with 'the Manifesto'.  The finished version may end up as the last chapter of Why History Doesn't Matter.  

Given my previous post, it now seems especially pertinent... (On that issue, btw, there is some talk of specifically local reasons for poor medieval take-up, about which it would be unprofessional for me to say more, and I am not 100% convinced in any case.)]

Academic history seems not to know what to do with itself since the linguistic turn.  The realisation that the Rankean ideal of objective history, telling it ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’, was not (and never had been) possible appears to have led to a real – if largely unacknowledged – crisis of identity within the discipline, one result of which (in the UK and perhaps elsewhere) has been the removal of academic practitioners of history being increasingly sidelined from public discussions of the subject, its value, its place in education and so on, increasingly replaced by non-academic ‘media dons’ and ‘writers and historians’.  On one side there have been those who have adopted a position simply deriding the absolute possibility of history, a (usually ill-informed) nihilist position (Jenkins, Munslow, Ankersmit); on the other there have been more or less extreme or at least pragmatist defences of traditional empirical history (Evans) while most historians seem to continue in what Žižek might call an ideological fantasy, the ‘je sais bien mais quand même’: continuing to write empirical history judged by fundamentally Rankean empiricist standards as if it were still possible, even though they know it isn’t.

It seems to me that none of these stand-points is sustainable if the academic discipline is really to survive.  But how to avoid the pitfalls of epistemological nihilism when there is no possible transcendental ideal or goal for history, whether one sees that in empiricist terms of recreating or retelling a past just as it was or in more academic-political terms of creating a dominant paradigm/convincing everyone else?  I would like to draw on some work by Simon Critchley (Very Little … Almost Nothing) and Jean-Luc Nancy (La Communauté Désoeuvrée), possibly trying to marry it with some of the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, to try and deconstruct pointlessness.  In other words I want to argue that the role (political/ethical) of historical study is fundamentally transient, consisting in conversation and dialogue, and that that element of discursive transience should be embraced.  What I am suggesting is a ‘talking about’ or an ‘engagement with’ the traces of the past to help us live in, make sense of, engage with the present.  This does not avoid the traditional epistemological standards or rules of ‘fit’ between data and argument, etc., but it – I propose – permits us to avoid either the perils of trying to argue about who is right and who is wrong, or paradigmatic dominance, on the one hand, or simply seeing academic historical practice as no more than a mask for academic careerism on the other.  Whether this is possible without introducing some other transcendent ideal remains to be seen.

Laughing with Sisyphus

[In January I was kindly invited to participate in a small workshop at York entitled 'the academy just isn't funny enough', exploring why humour so often isn't deemed an appropriate (or, if you like, serious) topic for academic research.  I'm not sure my short contribution went down very well, but anyway, here it is, written up.]

There's an episode of Futurama in which, to lure him to a surprise birthday party, Professor Farnworth's colleagues tell him he has been summoned to a disciplinary hearing.  On receiving the letter, Farnsworth is outraged and says something on the lines of how, if you manage to revive Hitler's brain, you'll get an award but 'put it in the body of a great white shark and suddenly  it's "Oh no: you've gone too far!"'  This seems an appropriate quote with which to start a discussion of humour in history.  There is a very fine line between what we can tell jokes about, or laugh at, before suddenly you've gone too far.  It's not a line, as you know, that I tread with particular aplomb.

A long time ago, I organised a series of sessions on early medieval humour for the International Medieval Congress at Leeds.  Essentially I did this because the year's congress theme, 'priests and bishops' seemed too earnest and, well, boring.  As it turned out, though, the sessions worked very well and became a book.  It wasn't a side-splitter of a book, as indeed I remarked in a foot-note to a remark that explaining jokes robs them of their humour anyway:

Herein lies perhaps the biggest joke of the entire project: putting together a book with the enticing word ‘humour’ in the title and yet filling it with (mostly) dry discussion of largely serious medieval texts.  That joke, dear reader, is on you!

A German reviewer - it would be a German reviewer, wouldn't it? - picked up on this and took me to task for 'insulting [my] readers'!  Leaving aside this marvellous example of the German academy performing its symptoms, the book addressed a series of problems: What was funny back then?  Why?  Can we know why?  Were the things we find funny funny to them?  Can we identify things that were funny but which don't look funny any more?  The source material was unpromising: mostly élite political irony and satire.  Popular humour, where it can be glimpsed, seems pretty nasty.  At Attila the Hun's court, the Huns - here living up to their stereotype - had 'jesters' who were a man with a speech impediment made to make speeches, and a dwarf made to dress up in armour.  The Huns (although not Attila) allegedly found these uproariously hilarious.  After one of many plots against him, Childebert II of Austrasia had the guilty mutilated by having their noses cut off and 'released them to be ridiculed'.  I say, these prisoners have got no nose.  How do they smell?  Etc.  It's a fine line.

Those issues are interesting and important, but what I want to talk about is humour in teaching and in studying the past.  There is a lot of funny stuff in the early middle ages.  It is a period soaked in the Pythonesque or in imagery straight from the Black Adder.  That is a great teaching resource and, as I discovered quite early in my career, a useful mnemonic.  Students can remember points because of jokes attached to them (they can, admittedly, also mangle points because of jokes attached to them but let's let that pass).  But early medieval humour can be pretty edgy.  How does one deal with Carolingians like Charles the Fat, Pippin the Hunchback or Louis the Stammerer?  Or the fact that every time the unpopular emperor Phocas left his palace he was surrounded by crowds chanting 'drunk again!  Pissed out of your mind again!' - suggesting a not especially sympathetic attitude to the problems of alcoholism.

Sometimes the surreal gets a laugh.  The mid-7th-century emperor Constans II moved the imperial court to Syracuse where, after an unsuccessful attempt to retake Rome he reigned for a few years before being battered to death with a soap dish.  This almost always gets a laugh from my students (it didn't from my academic audience when I gave this paper: too soon?) - but why?  It's a horrible thing!

Nonetheless I've always thought it's important to laugh at your topic.  it opens a crucial distance and that can be especially important in teaching the early middle ages, whose alien nature can be a problem for many students.  But in recent years I've become very interested in the politics and ethics that inhere within the historical project.  There is a serious ethical demand at the heart of historical enquiry: an engagement with, a listening to or hearing out of the other person (a formulation which I draw to some extent from Levinas).  

So this catches me on the horns of a dilemma.  How can laughing at the past square with an ethical demand of that nature?  Let's compare Constans II with, say, a resistance fighter, hypothetically beaten to death with a soap dish.  Why is one legitimately funny, the other not?  When do things become funny?  Is there a statute of limitations?  I don't believe there is.  Is it more to do with the socio-cultural capital of the victims?  If we transferred the 'joke' to modern or near-contemporary Africa and made it into a central African dictator would it be funnier? [Actually doing this did produce some titters.]  What does that tell us?

I haven't really worked out a way out of this bind.  To the extent that I have one it is based upon Simon Critchley's work on humour.  Critchley argues that the way to cope with and continuing to answer the impossible ethical demand is to laugh at just how ridiculous it all is.  It's a sort of light-hearted take on Camus.  When Sisyphus sees the rock roll back down to the bottom of the slope he laughs.  Miguel Benasayag criticises Camus for standing and watching Sisyphus.  Heaven knows what he'd think of me standing and laughing.

But I'd say I was laughing with not at Sisyphus.  Human endeavour is largely absurd.  Laughter at a component of shared humanity that still recognises difference; laughter as engagement, not complete distancing, and not complete empathy.

What matters, I think, is to ponder the nature of laughing with history.  Not whether to laugh but how to laugh, if we laugh.  For I think that there, rather than having gone too far, it's more the case that we haven't gone far enough.

History and Finitude (in which I embrace my historiographical pointlessness)

While I was in Princeton I got to thinking about paradigms, paradigm-shifts and the problem I have

Look at that.  No boots, reflector vest or hard hat.
Health and safety would never let you get
 away with that nowadays.  At least he's bending his knees.

mentioned before about what History does after the Linguistic Turn, after the realisation that we can't just tell it like it was (even if there are regions, such as the Thames valley between the Strand and the Cherwell, where the Linguistic Turn hasn't happened yet).  

The prompt for this was Pat Geary saying that he hoped that his current - very important - project on historical DNA would lead to a way out of the 'impasse', as he called it between those who still see the fifth-century west in terms of invasions by undeveloped barbarians and those who regard such a narrative as a romantic construct and who see the period more in terms of 'civil war' (i.e. like me).  I pondered to myself, gloomily, that I didn't think there actually was an impasse.  My arguments and those of people who think like me have made little or no headway against the dominant migrationist paradigm.  This, I continued to muse, was not because of the undecidability of the scarce data; it certainly wasn't because of the greater subtlety and explanatory force of the arguments put forward in defence of the dominant paradigm.  It was for reasons far better explained by Pierre Bourdieu than by Thomas Kuhn: straight issues of cultural capital and hegemony.  All this seemed more than amply illustrated by the two papers submitted by members of 'The Old Boys' School', both of which blithely disregarded or waved away the whole generation of scholarship that disagreed with the migrationist model.  One indeed did little more than uncritically ventriloquise the oft-repeated thesis of 'The Old Boys' School's' golden boy of migration studies, with no acknowledgement of the myriad problems in that model (problems that deserve acknowledgement even if you think that that model  is superior to its alternatives).  You can't change paradigms when exponents of the other view don't even consider you worthy of having a debate with.

[Fill in a couple of angry paragraphs about the viciously reactionary early medieval history establishment in the UK and its leaderene; about why there'll be no Kuhnian paradigm-shift; about why I write what I like on my blog because as far as my UK career is concerned I have nothing to lose; etc.]

And that's all absolutely fine.

That was my revelation.

Like many, I suspect, who (in my case at least) dabble in the dark ways of existentialist atheism, the principal problem facing us in modern life is that of finitude.  That is to say, how do you cope with the finitude of human existence after the death of God, after disillusionment with the horrors of messianic or millenarian politics (on which, though problematic, this is an OK guide), after - in other words - the grounds for the old certainties have been cut away, without descending into nihilism.  I recently read Simon Critchley's Very Little ... Almost Nothing, which was what introduced me to Jean-Luc Nancy's La Communauté Désoeuvrée, which in turn I used in a very round-about way in my piece on The Crisis of the State.  That is about deconstructing 'work', finding value in life, without transcendence.  All that made me think, as Pat was speaking, about the futility about worrying about a historical career in terms of paradigm shifts, of changing people's minds, of convincing people.  (I have tended to get depressed about not making a difference, being ignored etc.)  The problem discussed by Critchley is analogous to the problem facing History after the linguistic turn.  In the face of the knowledge that one cannot tell it wie es eigentlich gewesen, does one simply become a nihilist and deny all possibility of history as a redescription of the past?  What basis remains for a role for history in society, if not simple factual rectitude?  What role for the academic if story-telling is as well or better done by amateurs?  Or does one simply ignore these points, or fudge them and go on with some sort of adherence to the old transcendent goals of finding out what really happened and why?

And yet it seems to me that one does have to have a reason to do history, to take a salary for doing it.  Simply being a scholar for scholarship's sake does not cut it - not for me or I suspect any one from my sort of background, where having - let alone inheriting - an academic job/career was not exactly something I thought was on the career radar until I actually got one.

The solution that occurred to me was this.  To embrace the actual act of 'doing history', without having to have any transcendent goal or product in mind.  If one opens up to the fact that the act of thinking through the historical enterprise has the benefits I have discussed before - if it allows me to engage with and make some minimal - infinitessimal - political or ethical intervention in it, then that is what is important, regardless of  its effects.  It is an ongoing activity, or conversation, with no necessary output in the usual transcendent terms: an inheritance; a corpus, an oeuvre; a paradigm change; a thesis.  Maybe there is some potential access to more satisfaction in what I do there.  Maybe it's what people (people without ego problems like mine) do in any case, in which case I salute you.  I only just got there.

Professor Grumpy's Historical Manifesto

[This is an edited bit of my introductory 'briefing' lecture to my new second-years yesterday.  I didn't get the feeling it went very well - I think they were expecting a 15 mins 'here's the course book and my office hours are...' rather than a full-on manifesto.  But still, I got some decent feedback later on...  A Facebook friend asked how we justify medieval history not long ago, so here's my answer.  This section came after a section about why late antiquity had attracted my interest, personally, about all the big changes that took place around 600, and about why they might be important.  That concluded, though, by asking why it mattered to know any of that.  Now read on...]

 

Why does any History matter?

Think of the ways in which people – maybe you – justify the study of history. I expect two themes come up: relevance and ‘how we got where we are’. I’d say, though, that no history is relevant … or alternatively that all history is equally relevant.

What do people mean when they say that history is relevant?

It’s, let’s face it, usually a justification for modern history. To understand the modern world, the argument runs, we have to understand its history. So, to understand the problems, say, of Iraq, Afghanistan, or Ireland, or the Balkans, we need to know the history of those regions. Sounds reasonable, but actually we don’t. It’s no more use to study the modern history of those regions than it is to study the end of the Roman world.

Why? Well, let’s look at the problem more closely. Let’s take, for example, a modern Ulster Unionist or Irish Republican, or a Serbian nationalist (or a nationalist from any other area – including Scotland). Does a knowledge of the history of Serbia or Ireland help us understand his actions (let’s assume it’s a he)? No it doesn’t. For one thing, we’ll soon discover that the ‘history’ that he uses to justify his case or actions is cock-eyed and wrong. Does it help just to know the events he makes reference to, that he keeps harping on about – the Battle of Kosovo Pole or the Battle of Boyne, say? Does it help to know that in reality King Billy’s army was paid for by the Pope, or alternatively that Cromwell’s troops killed rather more English soldiers than Irish civilians at the sacks of Drogheda and Wexford? Does it help to know that for most of their history Serbs and Croats and Bosnians rubbed along together in their communities just fine (think about it; if they hadn’t, ‘ethnic cleansing’ wouldn’t have been ‘necessary’)? Does it help, when confronted by Greek nationalism (such as there’s a lot of at the moment), to know that in the 1830s 80% of Athens spoke Albanian? That the only reason that (allegedly) Socrates could still read a Greek newspaper if he came back to life is that Greek was reinvented on more classical lines, and purged of Slavic and Turkish words in the late 19th century (as was Romanian, which is the only reason why it’s as close as Italian is to Latin)? No. It might get you punched in the face but it won’t help you understand why.

Knowing 'what really happened in history' is Chronicling not history.  And it isn't much practical use outside pub quizzes*. 1: It reduces history to simple fact-finding; and simple factual recounting isn’t history. 2: It assumes that the simple course of events explains them, and thus that the course of events naturally, inevitably, led to particular outcomes (where we are today). 3: Our modern nationalists aren’t operating under compulsion from the Past. The past has no power; it’s dead and gone. It can’t make you do anything. These people are choosing events from their understanding of the past to justify what they are doing or what they want to do in the present. 
*Though it does provide a useful basis for undermining the claims of Nationalists and others, and that is important, it's not (and this is really my point) really history.

There’s another justification. If we’d only known more about Iraqi or Afghan history in the 20th century – so runs the argument in e.g. John Tosh’s Why History Matters – we’d have thought twice about invading because we’d have seen what would happen. What – because these people always act the same way in response to certain stimuli, according to some kind of timeless national characteristics? Isn’t that just a mite – well – racist? There are some general similarities for sure between Iraq in the 1920s and in the first decade of the 21st century but to assume that the latter state of affairs was predictable from the former is essentialist at best.

These arguments are usually deployed to bolster a claim that modern history is somehow more useful or relevant but, as I’ve just shown, they’re all a bit weak theoretically, relying on a pretty poor conception of history: history as only a collection of fact. Further they provide no justification for any sort of cut-off point in how far back we go. By their own logic, there’s no reason why, to ‘understand’ Afghanistan today you shouldn’t go all the way back to Mahmud of Ghazni in the tenth century, or to Sikhander himself, Alexander the Great, or further. For if the events of say the 1990s can only be understood by studying the events of 1900-1990, then the explanation is incomplete, because surely the events of 1900 can only be understood in terms of those of 1800-99, and the events of 1800 by those of 1700-99, and so on back to the earth cooling. A modern ‘relevance’ cut-off point is purely arbitrary and contingent and doesn’t at all follow from the logic of the argument.

So: let’s unpack the historical project and see what the really important – and relevant – elements of the analysis are. In looking at our modern nationalist and his/her relationship with the past, what are we, essentially, doing? First of all we’re showing an interest in understanding the world view of another human being – I’ll come back to that. Second, though, we’re adopting a critical stance to his or her thought or world view. Thus we’re recognising similarity in the sense of a shared humanity, but simultaneously acknowledging difference. We’re not taking the nationalist’s account as gospel truth; we’re questioning it, examining it critically. And that goes for all the voices from or about the past, or from the past about the past. History is about never believing what you’re told – taking a stance of radical scepticism. Put another way, slightly flippantly, the question we are always asking is not ‘is this bastard lying to me, but why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ (an adapted quote from a famous journalist.)

And that’s exactly it, because what we’re doing after that analysis of the evidence is trying to understand why people are acting like that. Why are they making that cock-eyed use of the past? These are questions that require not data but theoretical models, an analytical tool-kit if you like – and you can get that tool-kit from the study of any history. Thus all history is equally valid, equally relevant – or equally invalid and irrelevant if you prefer!

The true point of history, as I see it is as a basis for engaging with, and action in, the world, not a simple exercise of sitting in a library finding out stuff about the Emperor Maurice or Stalin or Philip V. That exercise of critical engagement with what you’re told is a key to that. But there are other key elements at stake.

Another key point concerns the idea that history had to be like that, that it had to have particular outcomes, that the world we know was the natural outcome of all that. But nothing is ‘just like that’. It doesn’t have to be that way. To understand change you have to see all the other possibilities that were open and that could have come about. It’s about ‘keeping faith with the impossible’. Many of the things we think of as natural ways of classifying the world aren’t natural at all: like race and sexuality. If studying late antiquity does have an advantage it is in making that very clear. Late antique people didn’t see colour as the basis for their way of organising the peoples of the world; they didn’t have concepts of homosexuality or heterosexuality. Their ideas of sexuality were quite different.

Which brings us back to understanding the other: seeing these people as humans, like us, and yet somehow different; listening carefully to their stories but critically examining them. Paying attention to alternatives and different ways of doing things isn’t about wishy-washy relativism; it’s not saying that all things are equally valid – it is about trying to understand them.

All that gives us enormously important skills in dealing with, and acting within, our world in the present. When the papers tell us that this or that category of people are doing this, or are like that, or are to blame for something else, historical analysis gives us the skills of source criticism; it also accustoms us to think twice before accepting a judgement; it allows us to try and see other possibilities, the other side of the story. If we make a judgement it will almost certainly be a more sophisticated and less extreme one, but wherever we end up it will be a more responsible and informed choice of opinion and action, and if we spread that, we do good.

There’s a humanity that permeates the entire process of historical enquiry; the critical questions we ask, the desire to understand, which we must bring from history to our everyday lives. They make it impossible in my view to cast human lives off to the demands of the market, or the nation, or the class struggle. That’s why I always say there’s a huge ethical demand involved in history. Huge. Unbearable in fact. But a good historian doesn’t switch off her critical faculties when moving from the seventh century to the twenty-first. There is a demand for commitment there. So I hope you see why I think my politics are the politics of history; they’ve after all grown out of twenty-odd years of being an historian, and I think being a pretty good one at that.

Now – all this, I am sure is making some of you a bit uncomfortable. Good. History is meant to make you uncomfortable. Clio, the muse of history, is like Jesus: she brings not peace but a sword. She will make you rethink everything you think you know; everything you think you hold dear; she will make you question everything. Everything you were brought up with; everything you thought natural. She’s not here to wrap you in cotton wool and say ‘there, there’ everything is just how it’s supposed to be. She’s not there to bring succour to your view of your country, or smooth over the bad stuff that it did, or to soothe your conscience about the massacres perpetuated in the name of your religion, or the slaughter committed by people who at least claimed to share your political beliefs. She’s there to make you uneasy. She’s there to stop you from falling victim to her evil twin, Myth. In a sense I want to free you from feeling like the past controls us; that we have to base our identities in the present upon myths. That means we don’t have to feel guilty or apologise, either – just to be aware; to understand.

Put another way, the historian is the ‘Internal Affairs guy’. This is a well-known figure in popular TV ‘cop shows’ and rarely a ‘good guy’. He or she is there to suppose that the hero has lied or done something wrong and that the villains might have been wronged or be telling the truth. The character rarely turns out to be as unsettling as that but it works as an analogy. For me, the historian is not there to provide comforting truths but to question them. The historian must always be prepared to wonder whether the ‘heroes’ of history are not, in fact, the villains,

If you believe anything at all, if you want your belief to be solid, in other words, it has to be on the basis of taking it apart and putting it back together on the basis of radical scepticism.

Politicians of all sorts – left and right - always want to control the teaching of history. History is a real political football, and in the light of what I’ve just been saying you can see why. It’s about not believing what you’re told without close scrutiny; it’s about trying to understand the other; it’s about trying to see and evaluate another point of view. That makes history potentially VERY dangerous. What a history degree should be is three years of thinking dangerously. And the sixth and seventh centuries are as good a thing to think dangerously with as any other era.

So, voilà. That’s my historical manifesto. You can read my views on this sort of thing at various stages of development on my blog. The main thing is that that’s what I want this course to do – to bring out this sort of critical ethical tool-kit through the study of an interesting, and important period of change.

Judging History … Or why historicists are the real relativists (The Unbearable Weight, Part 3-ish)

Si rien n’est vrai, rien n’est possible

(If nothing is true, nothing is possible)
-          A. Camus, L’Homme Révolté, p.98

Yay!

Boo!

Nietzsche (according to Camus) said something similar.  So did Lacan, again starting from the widely-cited but evidently erroneous ‘quotation’ of Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov that if god does not exist, everything is permitted.[1]  Lacan said that if you didn’t accept the existence of someone or something that you accepted could permit, then (logically enough) nothing could be permitted.  It’s not just about the semantics of the verb to permit; what, like Camus and (apparently) Nietzsche, Lacan meant (as I understand it, anyway) was that the absence of some sort of accepted yardstick against which things can be judged means that there are no grounds for acting for or against anything.  So much for the continentals.  One of the founding fathers of hard-line analytic philosophy, A.J. Ayer, said that ethics were not a true subject for philosophy because they were metaphysical (which he thought wasn’t proper subject-matter for philosophy).  You couldn’t make a logical argument for something being good or bad; all ethical arguments reduced ultimately to the equivalent of ‘yay, charity; boo, theft’.  Put in historical terms, you could transpose that to ‘yay, FDR; boo Hitler’.  Actually, that's a bad example, because I want to separate the judgement or assessment of individuals from judgement or assessment of their actions: let's instead say 'yay: founding the Red Cross; Boo: the Nanjing massacre'.  In its way, this is the same argument as Lacan’s/Camus’/Nietzsche’s.  However, whereas, because there was, for Ayer (a hard-line atheist after all), no acceptable, rational, neutral yardstick, it was pointless to attempt to discuss it, I would follow the continentals into the solution of discussing these things other than in purely rational terms (as in the first part of these thoughts).  And so what I am going to attempt to argue in this latest in my inchoate series of meandering ‘thoughts’ (if they can be dignified by that term) is that it is not those who are influenced by continental philosophy who end up in a position where they are disabled by relativism but actually the historicists, and by the logic (such as it is) of their own arguments.

With that in mind I am grateful to ‘ADM’ for her comment on the last instalment of these wafflings, essentially because it suggests to me a number of points I have often heard and with which I could not disagree with it more!  I can say that without any trace of personal disagreement or animosity because these points that ADM sets out so well pretty much represent, I would say, the orthodoxy of the historical profession - and because they points I will respond to aren't quite the one's she is making!  Me?  Not following the orthodoxy?  I know you will find that an absurd idea![2]

Essentially, and to anticipate my argument somewhat, I think that the debates on judging history have the whole problem the wrong way round.  There was quite a useful representation of what I mean in a forthright review-article [3] by Roger Collins of several recent works including a book containing an essay by Lisa Bitel which argued for a politically-committed teaching of medieval history.  Collins is quite right, that finger-wagging at the past for its sexism, racism and so on is an empty gesture, aiming, I would say, at little more than the facile, grandiose public occupation of some sort of moral mole-hill.  And yet, I would also say that Bitel is right that a politically-committed historian cannot unproblematically pass things over in silence.  To do so is tacitly to acquiesce in it.  It is surely pointless now to tut-tut about Charlemagne executing thousands of Saxons in the 780s, in itself, but to pass over the massacre of Verden as simply ‘what people did in those days’ (what can you do, eh?) is ethically highly questionable.

Tamurlane: Misunderstood

You can’t say that Hitler is just different from Charlemagne, because he is more recent and some of his victims and/or their children or relatives are still alive.  There is no historical statute of limitations.  Otherwise, at what point do we start discussing the Holocaust as just another historical atrocity, like Tamurlane’s slaughtering of the inhabitants of central Asian cities (millions of dead, some people estimate)?  Well, it was just an extreme case of the antisemitism that pervaded much of Europe at the time, wasn’t it?  Who are we to judge?  But people died; human beings like us.  There’ll always be something qualitatively different, unique about the Shoah (with luck, by which I mean I wouldn’t want repetitions) but there seems to me to be no compelling reason to enshrine this as the only atrocity of history deserving of ethical treatment and comment.  There is an annual remembrance day and pressure groups that preserve its memory, for sure, but people have died in horrible circumstances throughout history.  Pity the victims of the Armenian genocide (which Israel has accepted Turkey’s denial of, shockingly), or – even more so - those of the ‘colonnes infernales’ in the Vendée in the 1790s, or the victims of the massacre of Thessalonica in the 390s who have no one to speak for them.  They were human beings, like us, too.  If you accept that the Shoah was ‘all bad’ (as anyone sane surely must) the only logically consistent conclusion you can draw from that, without descending into grotesque Zionist arguments, is that all massacres are Bad Things, just different and (usually) on a smaller scale.  Let me make it quite clear that I’m not trying to reduce the significance of the Holocaust to being just another bad thing[4]: quite the opposite; I’m moving the scale in the opposite direction.  Here in some ways I return to my points about the universal in the particular.

The way out of the impasse is, I suggest, by acknowledging that both sides in the debate as usually rendered are looking through the wrong end of the telescope.  The issue of an ethical engagement with history is not about us judging the past, but about the past judging us or, better, about us judging the present through the prism of the past.  I came to this point of view via a comment made by Slavoj Žižek in In Defence of Lost Causes (I think) about the issue with Marx today not being about what Marx has to say to us but what we would have to say to him (or something like that – anyway it was the same general point).  So, to return to the massacre of Verden, what I suggest is that the event is viewed as a focus for thinking about – an opportunity to meditate on – such actions in general.  These were the ‘dark ages’, right?  What light does it shed on our supposedly more ‘advanced’ civilisation?  Put another way, to consider the massacre (say) as an historical phenomenon can (and should) include its ethical treatment without it necessarily becoming in any way about ‘judging the past’. 

One of my innumerable teaching mantras is ‘to explain is not to excuse’.  Of course one must see things within some sort of context, but ethically things should not stop there.  One reason why they should not concerns causation.  If historical context becomes an explanation in itself, as it inevitably does in the historicist way of looking at things, then no one has any agency or moral responsibility at all.  You can’t make any exceptions to this rule that will withstand any close analytical scrutiny. 

Oradour/Glane:
"A regrettable incident"?

2nd SS 'Das Reich':
"Men of their times"?

But the moment you allow individual agency into the equation the ethical issue surfaces.  If that person had a choice (as surely s/he did) then you need to explain why s/he made the choice that s/he did.  And this of course has to take into account the commonly-accepted options of the time and the reasons why people saw some choices as valid and others as not.  But people did not always make the choices that ‘their time’ demanded of them.  If they had not done, nothing in the world would ever have changed (and furthermore, such an approach leaves one wondering where the accepted options available at any one time actually came from if not by people actually making new choices further back in the past).  This is where the historicist position reveals one of its many internal contradictions.  Most historians will have no problem with the historian who writes that Charlemagne executed 4,500 Saxons at Verden because he thought it would put an end to the Saxon revolt, and leaves it at that.  But that is not an ethically neutral statement.  It is no more ethically neutral than one that says that men of the SS 'Das Reich' division wiped out the village of Oradour-sur-Glane because they thought it would put an end to Resistance attacks on them, and leaves it at that.  What, exactly, was Charlemagne doing in Saxony?  In fact the statement is no more ethically neutral than the statement that Hitler killed six million Jews because he thought it would bring unity and benefits to the German race, and leaves it at that, or one that says that Stalin wiped out however million Kulaks because he thought it would further the dictatorship of the proletariat, and leaves it at that.  Leaving things unremarked upon tacitly approves them.  It buries the victims just as surely as the perpetrators did (if not better in most cases).

There are very many, very common ways of approving and disapproving in historical writing, without actually saying ‘This was A Good Thing’ or ‘That was A Bad Thing’ (which I used simply as 1066 And all That short-hand).  The orthodox position generally sees no problem with the approval or admiration of things past.  Presumably, when a historian expresses admiration for Charlemagne’s energy and ability to organise (I have praised this myself), that is OK.  Think about it; instances of this will be littered throughout the works of all kinds of historians whom I regard as very fine practitioners of the art.  Aesthetics work in the same unidirectional fashion.  You can coo over early medieval metalwork or manuscript art, or the beauty of the space of the Hagia Sophia without exciting comment, but you can’t say (as I have done) that this is ‘obviously rubbish’ or that the decoration on an early Parisian plaster sarcophagus was ‘clearly not the work of a well man’, except for comic effect.  Indeed I well remember David Ganz getting physically irate with me for describing Venantius Fortunatus as the ‘W.T. MacGonagall of his day’ (fair enough; it was at best a pretty flippant gag).  Thus, in fact, in practice, the historicist position says we are allowed to commend, but not to criticise.  There is no consistency, methodological or theoretical, here.  It allows ethical and aesthetic judgement in one direction but not the other.  Actions, productions and results transcend their time if we like them, but not if we don’t.  What this is, is the position that allows us overtly to praise Mussolini for getting the trains to run on time (if indeed he did) but prevents us from openly condemning him for dropping gas bombs on Libyans and Ethiopians.  Charlemagne?  Wonderful organiser and strategist, you know; lovely sponsorship of learning.  But a cold-hearted murderer of thousands in an afternoon, just to shore up his conquest of their land?  Ooh no: now you’ve gone too far; you’re allowing your own feelings to influence your judgement. 

This is why the orthodox historicist position is in fact one of disabling relativism.  It allows no position to act in the present on the basis of an understanding of the past.  Because actions in the past cannot be condemned (only praised or commended), because they have to be understood in context, then nothing in the present can be combatted or condemned either.  They also have to be understood in their context, which evidently explains and excuses all.  Everything is valid on its own terms.  As we have seen, this approach enables no means of criticising history written to support extreme and distasteful political positions (on right or left), as long as that history does not falsify evidence or deny the reality of events or commit other obvious sins of method.

To explain, however, is not to excuse, but both elements of that equation need to be present for good history.  In fact, what I think we would agree on is that it is not the commendation or condemnation of past events that makes a bad historian but one-eyed condemnation or commendation.  A historian that goes out of his or her way to explain away the ‘stains on a reputation’ and ‘big up’ the good things is probably not a good historian.  Nor is the historian who condemns in simplistic fashion, without the ‘explaining’ element of the equation.  But it is the lack of even-handedness that makes them that way, not the recognition of and commenting upon good and bad things.  If all history that approves or condemns is bad history, as ADM suggests, then all history is bad history, by its very nature (as I will return to explain below).

Here is where I return to the first part of these musings about history and ethics.  There is, I argue, a contradiction inherent in this historicist position, especially when used to espouse what I consider to be ethically and politically dubious positions.  When approaching the evidence, all schools of thought, I think, accept that (as I argued before) one does so in a spirit that allows the preserved voice of the past to speak and be heard (in the first part, I argued that that ethical demand was actually inherent in what I called the ‘aesthetic moment’ – the decision to study history in the first place).  As we’ve seen, we then listen and we grant that voice some priority as that of another human being.  That does not imply that one must purely take it on its own terms – that approach would logically lead us to a place where all we could do was to re-describe the past as manifested in the surviving evidence, without comment.  That is chronicling and antiquarianism, not history.  I don’t think that that is a controversial statement.  But once we permit some people (those whose voices are preserved) to be examined with that respectful but critical scrutiny then the implication is that we allow all people – all fellow human beings – that same respect.  That means that the voiceless victims cannot be passed over in silence as collateral damage for the ambitions of the great and the good.  We are back with the universal in the particular, inherent in the ethical demand that is itself present the decision to study history, but none of this is really controversial.  In a way, women’s history and then gender history have been about recovering the experiences of those who do not dominate the record, and the same is true of Black history and other sub-types of the discipline (actually I am opposed to ‘interest group history’ but that’s a different matter).  All I am really trying to do is to bring out and develop an ethical dimension (indeed a demand) that is actually already implicit within accepted historical ‘good practice’, in a way that would be empowering and enabling for politically-committed historians.  In that sense, then, I disagree that this is something that is going far beyond history.  Far beyond antiquarianism and chronicling, perhaps…

Ludwig von Wittgenstein: Anyone
else think he looked like the late
Patrick Wormald?

Wittgenstein, in one of his apparently increasingly numerous manifestations,[5] said (in yet another version of the argument I started with) that:

“Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world, dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all the people that ever lived and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgement or anything that would imply such a judgement.  It would of course contain all relative judgements of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. … Our words, when we use them in science, are vessels capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense.  Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only contain water and if I pour out a gallon over it."[6]

I would adapt that to say that if all the events of the past – thoughts, words, deeds, justifications, etc. – were recorded in a Great Book of All The Past, it would not contain a word of History.  And it couldn’t contain History any more than a teacup could contain a gallon of water.  As I just said, the ‘teacup’ is just antiquarianism and chronicling.  What happens when we start history is that we start analysing, commenting and explaining; all things that in a way are transcendental.  Such analysis, comment and explanation is, as I have tried to argue, not ethically neutral or disinterested.  If one looks for a value to history, the usual defences (‘relevance’; ‘learning how we got where we are’) are pretty weak if scrutinised closely (I’ll have to leave why for another time) and certainly of little comfort to medievalists.  For me the key (not the only) purposes of a historical education are twofold: the ability to scrutinise what you are told critically, sceptically, and understanding other people and their cultures.  These are both things that make history a dangerous subject.  In both of these dimensions there lies the ethical demand of history to treat the other human being (the ‘autrui’ of Levinasian ethics) with priority and respect.  Where history is written in a way to justify unethical politics and positions in the present – whether of left or right – by writing off the suffering of human beings, without further comment, as some sort of unavoidable collateral damage on the altar of some principle then, I maintain, it contradicts the principles and demands inherent in the process of historical analysis itself.  It thereby becomes ‘bad history’.

Thanks for all your comments thus far, for helping me see what needs further justification and explanation.  Keep ‘em coming!

Notes

---

[1] I’ve never read The Brothers Karamazov so I wouldn’t know.  I’m still girding my loins to try one more big push to finish Crime and Punishment.  To quote Father Ted, I think Dostoyevsky lost his way in that novel, somewhere between the crime and the punishment.  Anyway, it’ll be over by Christmas…

[2] It’s a pretty damning indictment of the profession that I still haven’t yet found anyone to take over from me as the Enfant Terrible of the early medieval historical discipline.  I’m 46, for heaven’s sake.  I should be in carpet slippers and charter witness-lists by now; that or endlessly repeating the researches of my youth.  Oh, hang on, though…

[3] This is a bit of an unfortunate piece.  Roger does make some very good points, as you’d expect, and savages at least one very deserving victim but (to mix my metaphors) this sort of blanket bombing of the profession inevitably catches some innocent people in the blast.  I emerge quite well from the carnage, but I think I have developed a sort of ‘survivor’s guilt’ as a result.

[4] Not long ago I was pretty shocked to see a book that described as a ‘genocide’ the massacre of Goliad, where 400 Texian rebels (who had, let’s not forget, risen in rebellion to defend their right to own slaves against a Mexican edict of liberation) were executed by Santa Anna’s troops.  As a massacre, clearly I have to condemn it, but to call this genocide really is pretty absurd and insulting to the victims of genuine, systematic killing.  It might have been this book.  If not I apologise, although further down the page the author inaugurates a discussion on how American settlers into Mexico – illegal immigrants – were different from Mexican illegal immigrants in the modern USA, producing the all-too-predictable responses.  Goliad is also described as genocide in an evidently pretty poor book reviewed here.  I was going to say that maybe one ought not to expect historical perspective in Texas, a state where - I am told - about half of a school-child’s historical education is taken up with the history of that state alone, but there I go.  Historical perspective: what does that mean?  That 400 Texian lives didn’t count because there were far worse massacres in history?  Does their legal status as rebels according to contemporary the laws of war justify describing their killing without comment?  Does the morally objectionable basis of their cause justify their execution?  The risk is to give that impression.  There is not, admittedly, a numerical threshold at which systematic massacre becomes genocide (I have an image of two soldiers amidst the ruins of a slaughtered village, and one saying to the other ‘Damn! We only needed one more to make it genocide’).  But the massacre at Goliad, brutal though it was, wasn’t genocide.
[5] How did Wittgenstein die?  He became the Late Wittgenstein.  Sorry but that’s the only Wittgenstein-based gag that I know.

[6] In conversation, apparently, Wittgenstein used to express the same point, more crudely, as ‘you can’t shit higher than your own arse’.

The Unbearable Weight… More Clarifications and Explanations

Thanks for the comments posted so far, and made in conversation, which have been most useful.  They have, not least, made me realise that I launched you, dear reader, somewhat into the middle of the quagmire that is my thinking on this and then finished the post a bit prematurely.  So, a few words of clarification in advance, I hope, of something more considered.

1: I’m not making a specific claim for history, against all other disciplines.  I imagine that what I am saying would apply equally to all the humanities at least, and I wouldn’t like to say that it didn’t apply to sciences too.  If I followed the argument through, though, I would argue that history has a value for society that is different (not better or – necessarily – worse) from that of the other humanities.  The line of thought I am milling about amidst here is in some ways a separate matter but it does lead into it.  So, first, let me clarify that I’m most certainly not claiming that history is somehow a more humane and ethical discipline than any other.  What – at least in its inchoate form – my thinking leads on to is simply that there is a way in which the subject matter and the ways in which one approaches it have a direct link to that ethical demand which is – perhaps – more visible and direct (not more real) in the humanities than in some other areas of intellectual endeavour.  So really the argument is pursued through a consideration of historical methodology.  I am a staunch defender of methodology, unfashionable though that, as ever, makes me!

2: By way of background.  I came to this via reading Richard Evans’ In Defence of History and its (to my mind) somewhat muddled defence of truth.  Let me say first that I don’t think Evans’ argument was wrong as much as I think it was the wrong argument.  Indeed I think that the so-called Truth Wars of the ‘90s generally involved people wilfully speaking past each other.  In Evans’ work the argument descended into a defence of history being about simple factual accuracy.  Fine; if you are fundamentally concerned with the fight against Holocaust deniers then that is important.  There were two problems, one lesser and one greater.  The lesser is that the targets of his work, the post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida and co., whom the footnotes to In Defence of History suggest that Evans has only read at second hand (therein would lie something of an aporia within the work, but let’s leave that to one side) do not actually allow any statement about the past to stand as being as valid as anyone else’s.  Now, there are some writers about History (Keith Jenkins and his gang) who have traduced the post-structuralists as saying that, but they are wrong. The fact that Jenkins and his followers are not very good historians, or indeed historians of any sort, is, as Evans rightly says, not really a problem.  The problem (as I see it) is that they aren’t very good philosophers.  I’m not a very good philosopher either, but then unlike them I don’t pretend to be a philosopher.  Anyway, the end result of the way they have misrepresented continental philosophy as saying that anyone’s reading is as good as anyone else’s is that it has come to form the mainstream historian’s (mistaken) idea of what ‘post-modernism’ is.  That’s the lesser of the two problems.

The greater problem is that history isn’t just about truth and falsehood, what really happened and what really didn’t.  What professional historian would nowadays really claim that the discipline solely concerned the compilation of accurate descriptions of past events?  That is simply chronicling – shelf upon shelf of ‘history’ books in the high-street bookshops show that you don’t need professional historians to produce that, and indeed that non-professional historians often do it better.  But while it may be the inescapable first step of history (‘accuracy is a duty, not a virtue’, as I believe David Knowles said) history is surely about explaining and understanding – and on that front the high-street bookshops’ history sections have very little of any quality that isn’t by a proper, trained professional historian.  And that is where the issue of ‘truth’ becomes much more intractable, and where it is decidable with much more difficulty.  In that sphere, the challenges of the post-structuralists to truth-claims are more real.  It might be that these philosophers would take a position that traditional positions don’t allow you to decide whose is the correct interpretation of what – say – the Holocaust actually meant – wie es eigentlich gewesen (in Evans’ own understanding of that phrase).  They never said there were no means of deciding whether one reading wasn’t better than another. Certainly, as far as I am aware, Derrida never said as much.

And therein lies the problem that set me off on these lines of thinking.  What if you have a historian who writes not that the holocaust didn’t happen, but that it was ‘A Good Thing’?  How does the profession deal with that - assuming that the historian in question was careful not to write in a way that fell foul of ‘incitement to hate’ legislation?  Let’s assume that the historian said something like the persecution of the Jews was a rational and logical (if regrettable) response to a particular situation by a strong government that (and let’s just for the sake of argument say that this is correct) produced valuable social cohesion after the turmoil of Weimar.  What then?  Short of stifling his career through the simple employment of influence and professional standing (in which case the Jenkins argument that historical ‘truth’ was just a matter of crude power would be right), what could you do?  The task I set myself – and which I am trying out – is to suggest that, within the historical project, there is an ethical demand that any such conclusion – consigning the Jews to the gas-chambers in the name of a ‘greater good’, strong government, stability, whatever* – would flatly contradict.  And because of that contradiction we could say that this had fundamental flaws within its own argument and was therefore ‘Bad History’.

What I want to do is to keep the humanity in the Humanities. (In contrast to A.C. Grayling and the rest of N-Chumz, ‘the people who took the humanity out of The Humanities’).  Today seems a good day to write this, as the Paris Pride march goes down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, where I'm writing this...

3. Finally, there was a bit of a jump – I appreciate – between the discussion of Camus and Critchley and that of the ‘aesthetic moment’ in history.  I should clarify – because this was lazy thinking by me, or lazy expression at any rate – that the feeling of interest in history – the calling to history – is not necessarily a call to political action in just the same way as the moments of ethical demand discussed by Camus and Critchley.  Not just the same anyway.  But I would want to argue that it is in important regards analogous and can lead perfectly correctly to a desire to act and to ethical commitment in the present.  It certainly ought to lead one to support such commitment and action.

I hope this makes things a tad clearer.

---

* Or, and let me make this clear, happily slaughtering Kulaks or whoever in the name of Communism.  I have taken the Third Reich and the Holocaust because it does always seem to be the limit case that everyone discusses, but the same applies to any historical discussion of massacre and inhumanity.  That would be another component of my argument.  It’s not only opposed to right-wing political violence.  This is why I can only really take Critchley’s side rather than Žižek and Badiou’s, which is consciously inhuman.  This latter worries me about the trend towards the ‘post-human’.

A Clarification for the Hard of Thinking

Since I have received some personal abuse based on the post below, might I make the following points clear (I shouldn't have to, I know, but evidently people can't be bothered to read the post properly, or at all):

1: The title is a (crap, admittedly) play on the title of Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

And therefore,

2: It is not claiming that academic historians 'have a hard life'; it is about, well, what it talks about - the difficulty of living up to the ethical standards you (implicitly) set yourself by being an historian.

Thank you for your attention, but - really - if you can't grasp that from the post below then there are plenty of blogs about bringing up kittens, or liking looking at trees, or the joys of wearing a hat, or - oh, I don't know - living in fucking Kentucky and being addicted to cheese: basically any number of things that might be further up your street.

The Unbearable Weight of Being a Historian

[This is a rough attempt to sketch out an argument about the ethics of history.  It takes its starting point from the work of Albert Camus and then Simon Critchley to argue that there is an ethical demand in the moment where we decide to study the past - where, in other words, we allow the people of the past to speak to us - which is universal in its implications.  Here I am just talking about history in a very limited sense.  I hope to develop the ethical, political and historical implications of these thoughts further at a later date.]

Let me try out a preliminary sketch of a first draft of a vague idea of something that might eventually take concrete form.  As you know, I’m not a philosopher but I do find philosophy very interesting, particularly in its ‘Continental’ form.  Indeed, most of the time I find it considerably more interesting than history, at least as usually practised (by me at any rate)...  I consider ‘continental’ philosophy to be a natural ally of historical enquiry, especially in a politically engaged way. This makes me sad that so many historians, medieval historians particularly, are so frightened of (especially post-structuralist) continental philosophy that they will adopt just about any alternative, any number of self-contradictions, in order to avoid giving either of the dreaded Jacques (Derrida and Lacan) any air time.  It makes me sad that they seem to think that they are more in harmony with the ‘analytic’ tradition in philosophy, which really has very little to say to history at a fundamental level.  Unless, that is, you think that history is first and foremost about deciding what is or is not ‘meaningful’ or logically ‘true’, or engaging in what are, at base, little more than highly intellectual, abstruse parlour games, such as whether it is logically possible to have two omnipotent beings.  Actually, on reflection, maybe it is the natural ally of most historical practice…

Or not…

Albert Camus: pioneer of the
open-plan office

As is my pretentious wont, I am re-reading Camus’ L’Homme Révolté.  Currently I’d have it as my ‘Desert Island Discs’ book, instead of The Bible (as an aside, Muslims get the Qur’an on Desert Island Discs, so why do atheists still get lumbered with The Bible?); it will certainly be the core text (in the abridged English version) when I start teaching my course on ‘Terror’ on my return from the joys of research leave.  Anyhow, the point I am waffling my way towards concerns the recognition of a universal in the specific case.  Camus’ argument is that revolt, even when provoked by a very specific, personalised affront (the slave whipped once too often), even when the immediate statement made by the revolt – I’ve put up with this for so long but no further – concerns a very specific personal event or history, rapidly comes to concern a general principle: you don’t have the right to do this to me, because (and therefore) people don’t have the right to do this to other people.  But, says Camus, you don’t have to be the victim of such an infraction of the acceptable to revolt against it; you can observe it and see that it is wrong, and therefore in revolting against it you declare it to be an example of a general wrong.

This is a version of a particular strand of thought about ethics that (as far as I know) goes back at least to Kant.  It is also a good example of how ethics lie, to a certain extent at least, outside reason (as has been argued by Raymond Geuss).  Put another way, what provokes a reaction to something as ‘wrong’ is not the application of reason, whether in terms of calculations of the greater public good, or the pondering of a code of do’s and don’ts, or the striving towards virtue.  All of these things might be deployed after the event to explain or justify but the moment of revolt comes before any of that; it precedes reason.  Insofar as I understand it, it is on this sort of basis that Levinas argued that the ‘other’ precedes the self; the calling to the support of another person precedes the consciousness of oneself as an agent or the calculation of any personal benefit or loss.  At least that would be how I would make sense of it.  In that ‘non-reasonable’ demand there is space for the calling of god, or an appeal to a basic human nature, if you are so inclined, but neither is necessary to the argument.

Simon Critchley (left: currently my favourite British philosopher) brings many of these strands (and others, including Lacanian thought) together in his book Infinitely Demanding (which I thoroughly recommend) around the relationship between the demand (to ‘do the right thing’) and the acceptance of that demand, the undertaking to bear that burden.

The point that the acceptance that an individual case of a wrong should be put right implies the acceptance of the fact that that ‘wrong’ should be ‘righted’ universally is what makes life ethically difficult. It is the ‘infinite demand’ of which Critchley speaks and how one deals with that burden is the problem.  Critchley says that the options have thus far tended to resolve themselves out into a number of, to him (and me), unacceptable positions: the adherence to a religious fundamentalism and the eternal wait for a divine solution, or its secular equivalent in the sort of nihilism summed up in the phrase ‘everything’s shit and it always has been so there’s no point doing anything’ (which phrase pretty much encompasses John Gray’s life’s work), and which might otherwise find outlet in the sort of nihilism manifested in Islamic extremism and suicide bombing.  So, the way to cope with the infinite demand of an ethics of political commitment is not to constantly flay yourself with a critical super-ego – which would rapidly become intolerable – but actually to find a friend in your super-ego by standing outside things and making use of humour (‘why the super-ego is your amigo’).  You’ll never manage to bear the infinite burden but you can encourage yourself to keep trying by laughing at the hopelessness of it. 

I hope that does not mangle the argument too severely but, whether or not it does, you can see why I like Critchley!  You can also, perhaps, see where the points of contact are with Camus.  There isn’t much laughter in such of Camus’ oeuvre as I have read, I admit, but his discussion of the philosophy of the absurd brings the two thinkers closer together, I think.  Camus’ view was that the only answer to the absurdity of existence was to keep living, as much as possible, and, since the acceptance of the individual fact that you (personally) were better off alive than dead meant that you accepted that (generally) everyone was better off alive than dead, murder in a political cause could never be acceptable.  The only way round that was if, by accepting that murder was wrong, the assassin expunged his guilt for his particular action, even though it was demanded by the wrongs and injustices of political circumstance, by going happily to the gallows (hence the English title, The Fastidious Assassins).  This brings Camus close to Critchley’s stance on political violence in Infinitely Demanding, which, between it and Camus’ work, sums up my own view.(1)  Another medievalist blogger has recently proclaimed (with reference to my own work, indeed) that ‘we are all anti-Kantians’: this is lazy thinking.  We aren’t, or at least we don’t have to be.

If you’ve stayed with me thus far, you might well be thinking ‘well that’s all very well but what has it to do with the practice of history?’  As I see it this line of thinking is very germane to the study of history in a number of ways that allow us to isolate the implicit ethical demands of the historical enterprise.  That in turn permits, I would argue, a means of identifying what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ history on ethical terms.

My argument turns on this.  What calls us to study history?  I think that most if not all historians would be hard pressed to explain their interest fundamentally in ‘reasonable’ terms – of the value of an historical education, to oneself or society.  It is why one can never convince anyone who isn’t fundamentally interested in history that they should be interested in it on those grounds alone (I tried this, in a way, at a party, recently, and was roundly and personally insulted as a result – probably I should laugh at this but at the moment I’m not doing well on that front!).  You can only bring someone in to history if you manage to provide something that ‘sparks’ them, too.  So, that – as I term it – ‘aesthetic’ moment, when an ‘interest’ is sparked, precedes reason.  What that ‘something’ is, I contend, like the ethical appeal in – say – helping an old lady up the stairs with her shopping, related fundamentally to an awareness of a shared humanity: an interest in other people (and that word ‘people’ is crucial).  Now it might, for all I know, be true that some historians study, say, hats because they are interested in hats and not in people but in a way that wouldn’t affect my argument, if only because it’d just be, as I see it, representative of fundamentally analogous psychological processes (even if ones perhaps less generally regarded as signifying rude mental health). But they'd be in a minority anyway.  If you accept that call or appeal to go and study history, I would argue that you accept the principle that all human beings, and their lives and experiences, are intrinsically interesting and thus worthy of study. 

Now, this is a difficult burden to bear because (as indeed I admitted myself at the start) not all history is of interest to all of us.  I, for example, could happily spend my life without hearing another word about the parliamentary history of Disraeli or Gladstone.  The point about accepting the call to be a historian, though, is that we have to accept that those bits of history that we don’t work on are essentially as valuable and important as the bits we do study; I have to admit that there is potentially just as much value in the study of Disraeli and Gladstone as there is in the transformation of western Europe between c.560 and c.650 and that, if I can’t see that, that’s my fault and, if I cannot find it interesting, that is my problem.  Turned the other way round, if you try and argue that these periods and places or themes of history are worthwhile and important but those aren’t then you are, by implication, saying that some people’s lives, thoughts and experiences are more important than others.  That, I think, contradicts the implications of the calling you chose to accept, and the burden you thereby accepted, by becoming a historian in the first place.  These attitudes may be ‘only human’ but then to err is human and these are errors.  The point about the unbearable burden of being a historian is precisely that: it’s unbearable.  No one said it was going to be easy!

If you try and argue that these periods and places or themes of history are worthwhile and important but those aren’t then you are also, by implication, placing yourself and your agendas in the determining role in deciding who is more important than whom.  You could, I suppose, say that since you chose to study the people you study (and not others) and that their experience (and not others’) called you to study them, the implication of that was that that pre-rational calling had no more general implication about other human beings.  That, perhaps, is the weak point in my line of argument – that the universal demand is implicit in the particular.  It certainly requires a slightly different response.  I think that such a response would have to be along the lines of good historical practice.  For one thing, in examining historical evidence, pretty much all schools of thought are in agreement that one allows the documents to speak for themselves, in the first instance at least; that, in good historical practice, one tries to account for all the evidence available and that one’s argument will be shaped according to the evidence rather than vice versa.  What this implies is that actually you do subordinate your interests, in the first instance, to what the inhabitants of the past want to tell you.  But then, of course, you scrutinise what they are telling you; there is nothing in the historical calling, after all, that demands that you to agree with the position taken or the attitudes manifested in your sources (the contrary would require all historians of the Nazis to be actual Nazis, all historians of Stalin to be actual Stalinists and all historians of the Visigoths to be – well – Visigoths, I suppose…).  What is more, one would expect the same standards of good history, regardless of the period, place or theme under study. In these expectations about good historical practice, I contend, the argument against a universal historical demand being implicit in the specific, ‘aesthetic’ moment is crucially undermined.  One accepts that one’s objects of study are due the same respect, but (also) only the same respect, as any other historian’s object of study.  Furthermore, one puts oneself second; you allow the documents (the past if you like) to speak first:  ‘After you!’  This admits of a certain inability to be in a position to judge a priori who is more important than whom.

Moreover, and (you will be glad to hear) finally, I think that the demands of good practice apply – because they too are universal rather than specific – to the historian herself.  One expects to be listened to with respect, but also scrutinised carefully.  You cannot expect to be accorded more rights by the people who read your words than you are prepared to accord to the people whose words you read.  All this means, too, that you must be prepared to be shown that you are wrong, where you are, and to moderate your opinions where necessary.  I have said this before.  The demands placed on the historian – and they are ethical demands – are difficult if not impossible to bear.  We all make mistakes - some honest mistakes, some not - and we have to submit ourselves to the same law.  But the burden of the historian and the penalties for our mistakes when it gets too heavy, are or ought to be made more bearable through standing outside ourselves and our studies with humour.

If you have got this far, thank you for bearing with me.  There are many other dimensions to this argument and especially about what the impossible demands on the historian are in terms of politics and ethics in modern life.  But I will leave this here for now.  There are doubtless millions of holes, inconsistencies and flaws in the argument above, but I am interested to hear responses because this is a subject, and a line of argument that matters a great deal to me.

Note:

1: There has been subsequent debate between Slavoj Zizek and Simon Critchley about the position taken by Critchley in Infinitely Demanding, with regard to political violence, but I've not really familiarised myself with it.  Suffice it to say for now, that I am much more on Critchley's (non-violent resistance) side than on that of Zizek and Badiou, which seems to me to be quite inhuman and actually a little ridiculous.