Her and History

There are two opposing strains of thought concerning the worth of history. The first, expressed by philosopher George Santayana, claims: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The second, antithetical to the first was originally declared by Freidrich Hegel and later paraphrased by one of History’s greatest actors, Winston Churchill, follows: "The one thing we have learned from history is that we don't learn from history." It seems however, to examine the true worth of history - if that is indeed possible - these particular strains of thought are relevant only in so much as they constitute the opposing ends of the spectrum of the debate.
The history of History is convoluted. It is, for some, a moral anchor and a necessarily incorrigible truism. Those who violate it, as David Irving is intimately aware, do so at the risk not only of one’s own freedom, but more importantly and naturally more contentiously, at the behest of the devil – as some may have you believe. Irving’s indiscretions, being as they were, un-scholarly and hackneyed, received their rightful recompense but only because he was an anti-semite. However, while the substance of his work may not reach beyond the superficial anti-semitic rhetoric in which it was marinated, the philosophical argument concerning the nature of his work – revisionism – remains on the concious backburner for many a historian and philosopher. There are, for some, specific events that cannot and should not be open to different interpretations. The phrase ‘never forget’ speaks to this sentiment. For others, History’s dissolution into the minutiae of personal pasts is necessary. History is, they argue, the consolidation of millions of personal histories, reasoned, articulated and forwarded by and of the tip of the academic sphere – intimidatingly, forcefully - and to others – liberally or coservatively. And to some, it is neither something to be forgotten nor is to be remembered, rather, it is just to be. What then with such ambiguous definitions of history is history’s worth today?

The worth of history in making decisions, such as invading Iraq, labeling genocides, and more topically, invading Iran, inevitably cut across many spectrums of interpretation each couched in endless levels of dense ideological and philosophical bias.

Often our understanding of and appreciation for History is more nuanced than those views expressed by Churchill and Santayana. It is naturally encumbered by fractured thoughts, manufactured opinions, sensitivities and proximities. Fraught with such inconsistencies and inconveniences, traversing the academic terrain of historical analysis is mission impossible. It is a post-modernist minefield. As Lothrop Mothley said of History to the NY Historical Society in 1868: “ It is all confused babble, hieroglyphics of which the key is lost.” Despite History’s necessarily modest conceptual boundaries, it, more than any other form of academic inquiry, penetrates the public discourse. For this reason alone it stands to be worth something. Why, though?

One reason is that everyone has history, each can reference their own past. Arthur Schlesinger said of history that “it is to the nation as memory is to the individual.” History is thus the projection of individual pasts upon a collective canvass. This is the pixelization of history; only coherent from a distance. This distance though is not of space, but rather a distance of time; time from the ‘screen’ of the past.

There exists an intimate relationship with history within the self. In this way, each individual of society has within themselves a particular history – one that is easily referenced, brought upon debate and thrashed about at dinners throughout the world. It is this intimate relationship we have with our own history that makes history as a justified form of academic inquiry so vile.

Such conveniences are not extendable to other academic lines of thought that are equally - and indeed, the argument is made here - far more relevant to current events, than those methodologies preached by the historian. Sociology, Psychology and Economics do not themselves lend to easy incorporation into everyday debate. They are for that same reason often marginalized for their lack of a ‘personal touch’. They require at the very least elementary understanding of basic concepts and, being as they are, not necessarily everyday experiences (ie; no one has a sociology or a psychology for which they feel or have felt objectively exposed, in contrast to that of history), the average person is less inclined to relate to abstract concepts. History, however, is with us all. We reference it, analyze it, forget it and remember it. History thus trumps all other line of academic inquiry simply by way of presence. Its presence in both our subconscious and conscious thought impedes our ability to think objectively about events, people, actions and movements. Schlesinger, responsible for packaging a potent, proud and righteous history for which JFK is indebted for both gaining his presidency and a Nobel, called these “permutations of consciousness.” Like all spin-doctors, Schlesinger was a master of deciphering new permutations of history – in an effort to contextualize the present in manner fitting of a great nation. In this way, history, having as it was several interpretations, is the anti-christ of academic inquiry. History is everywhere and at the same time nowhere.

Crucially, though, presence does not then beget relevance. On the contrary, relevance may in fact be best understood by the lack of presence. Even if we were to have ‘the annals of mankind’ in our lap to read, as Motley claimed 150 years ago, it would be beyond the human capacity to do so.
It was Marx, a historical theorist in his own right, in Das Kapital, that suggested that the real factors that control humankind’s destiny lie below the superficies of the knowable, deliberately and necessarily beyond our collective or individual ken. The contemporary ‘false consciousness’ – the term Marx used for such a state of ignorance and under which he believed all but the capitalists were held captive - is the product not of some nefarious plot conjured by ideologues, capitalists or of some similarly slimy ilk (as Marx might argue), though it may be deliberately forwarded by them, but of each person’s exposure to their own individual history or to our own individual ‘annals’. The mere act of inquiring into one’s past, let alone a nation’s, is in and of itself a doomed endeavor forever a fruitless, counterproductive pursuit. Collective history dogmas, those that speak of events, movements, people and places as though they happened in isolation to both their actors and framers struggle earnestly to disambiguate history from itself. When then we speak of a collective history such as WWI or the Cold War, we are really attempting to consolidate individual histories into various shared histories – a process that irrevocably distorts history so as to produce a palatably democratic one. Palatable permutations are the victors not truth. We are thus held to ‘never forget’ an event like the Holocaust if only because we can never truly do justice to it through the anti-rational pursuit of history. Thus we try and remember it by way of fracturing it off into little things like: memoirs, numbers, pictures, records etc. We may in some cases restrict the various ‘permutations’ of these variables, or those voices such as Irving’s that pursue them, but ultimately the permutations for which we are responsible are fraught with similar endless fights, each victimized by an earnest though subjective tendency: the pursuit of truth.