[Here is the next installment of the chapter. As last time, it was mostly written a year ago. It is very much a draft and most if not all of the 'facts' mentioned still need to be double checked!]
There are other arguments
presented for limiting the time and place of relevant history. These can be illustrated by a series of
different examples. Some of these are
taken from John Tosh’s interesting and valuable Why History Matters. I
disagree quite seriously with the line that Tosh takes but I am profoundly
sympathetic to his overall project and certainly find myself in the same
general part of the political spectrum. In
other words, I think he is firmly ‘on the side of the angels’. My disagreement concerns the argument he has
chosen to make in defence of the discipline and its value, which I think is
mistaken in that I hope to demonstrate, that there are better, stronger
arguments available to serve his purpose.
One argument for the relevance of
history in the present is that it helps us understand current situations in the
world. The middle east, Iraq or
Afghanistan furnish potential examples but so too do the ‘troubles’ in Northern
Ireland or the conflicts in the Balkans after the fragmentation of Tito’s
Yugoslavia. Here the argument goes that
if one knows about the historical ‘chain of events’ in the area under
discussion, then one will gain a better understanding of the problems in the
present. The situation in the Balkans –
the tension between different ethnic groups – is to be understood as the
product of a particular series of events. Again, though, this argument for
relevance presents numerous problems in its implications about the nature and
purpose of historical enquiry. The
problems should by now be familiar. The
current state of affairs is assumed to be the automatic, logical outcome of
preceding events. That, in turn, implies
some problematic assumptions about the objectivity of historical narrative and
about causation, which we have already discussed. The narratives used to explain or justify
current political action are no less chosen,
no less artificial, than the ones employed to explain ‘who we are and how we
got here’. Those alluded to by
politicians in modern conflicts are often no more constructed – even if they
frequently are less empirically accurate.
Our modern nationalists are not operating under compulsion from the
Past. As I have already argued, the Past has no power; it’s dead and gone. It cannot even be properly conceived of
without the deliberate construction of narrative, and all the problems that
that entails. It cannot make you do anything. These modern politicians and their followers
are, like the people involved in the Northumbrian Feud or the hypothetical
diarist of Chapter 2, choosing events from their understanding of the past to
justify what they are doing or what they want to do in the present.
Here the argument for ‘relevance’
shifts ground to claim that historical study enables us to challenge the
‘abuse’ of history for political ends.
We can stop to think more closely about the underlying implications of
this argument. Obviously it should be
stated at the outset that this argument is motivated by the best of
intentions. The problems occur in the
nature of history that is assumed. The implication is, firstly, that history is first and foremost about the
collection of empirical facts. This happened like this; that did not happen, or did not happen like that. That is, as I have been at pains to argue,
not only a pretty low level of intellectual expectation for an academic
discipline; it is fundamentally not what history is about, as opposed to
chronicling and antiquarianism. The
second point follows from this and is that this argument for ‘relevance’
assumes that there is a single, univocal object history that is capable of
being abused. The only level of abuse
that can reasonably be encompassed within the argument is the telling or
presentation of falsehoods. A
questionable, if factually reliable, reading of history, based upon the
available data, cannot easily be called an abuse without implying that there is
a finite array of acceptable, non-abusive interpretations. The argument may then move to discuss the
motivation for such presentations of history, claiming that using history for
political purposes is abusive. It
assumes, therefore, that history is capable of being written without some
element of the political, broadly defined, entering into the process. Or it supposes that there is a range of
acceptable non-abusive motivations for historical writing: the simple neutral disinterested furtherance of knowledge for example. Even if this were possible it could only
function at fundamentally non-historical levels of antiquarianism and
chronicling. Then we might reasonably ask what this deployment of erudite, accurate, factual history (itself non-political?
non-abusive?) might practically achieve.
What, for example, might be attained by pointing out the factual flaws
in nationalist historical narratives?
Let’s look at the problem more
closely. We can again draw some examples from modern trouble-spots where
nationalism rears its invariably ugly head.
Let’s take, for example, a modern Ulster Unionist or Irish Republican,
or a Serbian nationalist (or a nationalist from any other area). 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 (as
represented by the neo-Nazis of ‘Golden Dawn’ for instance), to know that in
the 1830s 80% of Athens spoke Albanian? That the reason that (allegedly)
Socrates could still read a Greek newspaper if he came back to life is not the
allegedly millennia-long continuity of Hellenic culture and language but 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 is as close as Italian is to Latin)? Would it avail you much to point out to
a Scottish nationalist that the Declaration of Arbroath was copied from an
earlier Irish letter and that (contrary to the impression one would get from
visiting the battlefield memorial) it post-dated the Battle of
Bannockburn? No. All of these things might get you punched in
the face, or worse, but would not help you to understand why.
Obviously, a simple and entirely
valid advantage is conferred by the collection of accurate historical information and that is the ability to see through the truth claims of others
when these are based around an appeal to history. The counter-arguments provided might be ‘true’,
in that they are based upon empirically-demonstrable historical ‘facts’. Yet, they carry little practical weight. Although such factual correction might
influence third parties and, with luck, cut the ground from beneath some
propaganda, it is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. Frequently the result will simply be to entrench the idea further that some vague power is controlling and distorting
‘the truth’ in order to further their oppression. As Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly argued, using
the psychoanalytical concepts of Jacques Lacan, empirical arguments rarely cut
any ice in such discussions because the root of the problem does not lie in the
register of the Symbolic (crudely, the factual; that which can straightforwardly
be represented in language) but rather in that of the Imaginary (the
ideal/idealised).[This last bit needs re-doing.]
A more positive impact might be
to make political parties eschew any reference at all to the past. This, one must admit, need not be a bad thing. It might, especially, be no bad thing if it
ended cheap demagogic appeals to a supposed national historical heritage (see
above). One might see an example of the
cutting away of the grounds for such an appeal in the cross-party response to
the British National Party’s employment of a picture of a Spitfire in its 2008
election leaflets. It was rapidly
pointed out that, such was the party leadership’s ignorance, they had picked a
photograph of a Spitfire flown by a Free Polish pilot. Indeed one could say that, rather than (as
intended) symbolising the Battle of Britain as a fight against encroachment by
foreigners, their picture actually illustrated the historical benefits of
immigrant eastern European asylum-seekers taking ‘British’ jobs! Had the ‘historical’ argument been developed,
it might have undermined all future use of Churchill, the Battle of Britain and
the Second World War by the xenophobic right – if the point had been made more
forcefully that most of the Conservative Party in 1940 was in favour of a
negotiated peace with Hitler, that Churchill’s biggest supporters in the ‘dark
days’ of 1940 were members of the Labour Party and that certainly by the end of
1940 the war had ceased to be a national conflict and taken on some features of
a ‘crusade’ for the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny – in other words for
an engagement and involvement with Europe, not isolation from it. None of this would have been without value.
Within this line of argument, it
is clear, modern history does indeed normally have a prior claim to
‘relevance’; arguments against xenophobic nationalism that are based on the English
‘nation’s’ formation through the migration into Britain of Anglo-Saxons,
Vikings and Normans are, though not without use, easily enough dismissed as referring
to something that happened ‘a long time ago’ or that was somehow
‘different’. The longer ago that something
happened, the less use one can make of it in discussing modern politics. This is usually the case, but not always; the
end of the Roman Empire, allegedly at the hands of invading foreign immigrants or
because of supposed moral degeneracy is frequently deployed by right-wing
commentators as a ‘lesson from the past’.
Nonetheless, as mentioned the key
drawback with these arguments is its reduction of historical activity to simple
chronicling; historical ‘truth’ means factual accuracy. Wherever a claim cannot be refuted on
straightforward factual grounds, as the element of interpretation involved
becomes greater the value of historical argument to modern politics incrementally
lessens. When academic opinion is
divided (no matter how unevenly matched the sides in the debate), politicians
have repeatedly been able to bat away objections produced by professional
expertise with a sort of relativist line that it represents ‘only one opinion’
(as for example even with the reality of climate change). One could claim, and legitimately enough (see
chapter 1), that a formal historical education – or at least the existence of a
class of historical professionals – is unnecessary for the furnishing of this
level of historical argument. Non-academic
writers about the past could fulfil the need for factual data every bit as well
as ‘professionals’.
Another weakness of the
traditional line about the value of historical knowledge is that it is frequently
somewhat essentialist. Specific types of
people placed in a particular context are likely to behave in the same (or
similar) ways to those observable in the past.
Thus the key flaw in John Tosh’s argument that historical awareness
might have led to an avoidance of the (at best ill-advised) invasion of Iraq in
2003. A knowledge of the problems and
parallels that could be extracted, interestingly enough, from the study of the
British occupation of Mesopotamia in the 1920s not only represents, at the
level of historical endeavour, the simple accumulation of facts (chronicling,
again), as just discussed. It also – if,
to take a hypothetical counter-factual situation, wherein historians are called
in to advise the leaders of Britain and the USA in spring 2003, deployed as a
warning – makes the implicit assumption
that the inhabitants of the region would behave in just the same way as they
had done eighty years previously. It is
not difficult to see how easily such arguments could have been refuted,
logically and indeed reasonably, by a president and a prime minister already
bent on launching the invasion. The
argument that things ‘were different’ after the First World War is reasonable
enough; so would be an accusation of a form of essentialist orientalism on the
part of the historical advisers. So? These things happened in the past. If one moved on – as the true historian (as
opposed to the chronicler) must surely move on – from the cataloguing of
verifiable events to their explanation,
one would soon find oneself in the midst of discussions of the precise context
for the events following the First World War and the break-up of the Ottoman
Empire. Discussion of this context would
rapidly differentiate the recorded events of the 1920s from the likely
consequences of actions in the 2000s, unless, that is, one did assume a set of timeless Arab attitudes, grounded in a view of
the Muslim culture or tribal structures of the area as fixed and unchanging. Such a view, it would correctly be pointed
out, would deny the people of Iraq any capacity to act as independent historical
agents or to make their own choices. Once
these assumptions were (rightly) exposed and questioned, the ‘relevance’ of the
historical knowledge to the present would be seriously compromised. These arguments against the war could
furthermore be deflected in slightly different, if all-too-familiar, less
confrontational fashion by thanking the historian-advisors for their input and suggesting
that the historical knowledge they had provided would help avoid the repetition
of similar mistakes…