Gaps, Ghosts and Dice: More inchoate musings on the nature of history (in which Julius Caesar meets Stéphane Mallarmé): Part 1

[Brace yourself for more ill-informed, half-thought-through pseudo-philosophical waffling about what history really is.  Ill-informed, etc., yes - but serious and heart-felt, too.  

What I am going to explore here might possibly be considered under the general headings of change, narrative, causation.  Those of you who have read Barbarian Migrations will know from the middle section (theoretically and methodologically, the most important bit - although Stuart Airlie seems to be the only person to have spotted this) that I have been interested in the inescapably ironic nature of history.  That's to say that the outcomes of decisions are very often entirely unintended by historical actors.  I've been carting it about with me for days but I've still not read Benjamin on History, so I'm aware that I'm probably re-inventing a wheel he already invented.  This, incidentally, explains some of the thinking behind my miniature manifesto; for some of the rest, check out the posts with the tag 'The Unbearable Weight']

Here are a couple of minor issues: what is the past?  What is history?  Let’s be basic and uncontroversial.  The past, we can all agree, is simply enough all that ‘stuff’ that happened before now, whenever ‘now’ might happen to be – such as me writing the beginning of this sentence.  Or – now – writing the end of it.  But how do we make sense of that?  Surely by selecting particular elements from all those past events and placing them in a sequence, rightly or wrongly.  (I used to keep a diary and, although I have a pretty good memory, I confess that I often had difficulty remembering the exact order in which things had happened, even if they’d only happened the /previous day.)  That sequencing inevitably involves a process of winnowing; you can’t remember everything (unless you’re Funes the Memorious in Borges’ story).  And then we might process that information to involve an element of causation.  X happened – we think – because of Y and if only I/they hadn’t done A then (we like to think) B might not have happened; etc.  It’d be uncontroversial to say that we can’t even imagine the past in any meaningful way without this sort of process happening first.  We can imagine all that protean mass of ‘stuff what happened’ but we can’t access any of it without selecting from it, placing those selections in sequence, evaluating them and having some idea of their meaning; in other words without placing it within the symbolic order.  Only then can we really imagine the past.  Thus, ironically, it is true to say that memory happens before the past.  By the same token, then, we could also say that ‘History’ happens before ‘the past’.

       Digression

In the 1990s people started talking about history as memory.  Cultures in many ways create, deploy and access history in the same way as individuals create, deploy and access memory.  As a result, every bandwagon-chaser in the land began to write articles (sometimes spectacularly impenetrable and yet still somehow meaningless) about ‘cultural memory’.  Yet, I’ve never been very sure what this really added to our understanding of history, other than a new metaphor: memory.  I once quipped sarcastically that the only meaningful interaction between ‘memory, literacy and orality’ in the Carolingian world was when one monk told another monk that he had forgotten what he was going to write…  All this does not seem to me to have added any fundamentally new or different ways of understanding the way that history is used; it does, by contrast, seem unhelpfully to have blurred the useful distinction between how people make and access memories of the personal, lived past and how people and societies construct and access their collective past, especially before that experienced by those alive in the present.  It seemed to me that we already had perfectly good words for the latter, in ‘tradition’ and ‘history’.  But there we are; this is how disciplinary trends and paradigms work…

So, none of those opening comments are startling, new or profound.  At its most basic, essential but initial level, history is the process of symbolising the past.  Only then can we begin to imagine it.  It is here, I think, that things (possibly) get interesting.  Someone said that history was a seamless web; what they meant was that time as it is lived and experienced is a seamless web.  History is surely the inescapable and absolutely essential process of making seams in that web; folding it up into the manageable sections that we call periodization.  Everyone who has ever lectured to first-year history students about the perils of periodization knows that historical periods are, fundamentally, simply units of convenience that mask certain continuities by fastening upon other pre-determined aspects of change.  But the problem reaches down much further than that into the very way in which we write the narratives (I like to call this stage ‘chronicling’ rather than ‘history’) that we then analyse and explain (this, in my view, is ‘history’ properly defined).

Historical narrative is structured like a language.  Events gain their meaning within sequences from their juxtaposition with other events, before and after.  Like words.   These juxtapositions allow us to write history as tragedy or as heroic epic, or in an ironic mode, or however.  Events – types of events or specific events – have different meanings according to the way they are emplotted within a narrative.  OK: this is old news.  What I want to explore is what is implicit in that potential difference.  History does not simply put seams in the seamless cloth of time.  What it does is to fold that cloth and stitch it tightly together – over and over again.  To pursue that metaphor, what the temporal cloth looks like after the process of historical narrative is, from the front, a narrow, densely stitched-together mass of neatly creased folds.  Out behind that, invisible from our perspective, are acres of billowing cloth: time that has escaped symbolisation.  Now, you can unpick a seam and look at the cloth opened up, but to understand it you still need to make it into a sequence of smaller folds; open up one of them and look at a smaller piece of time but have to stitch that into smaller folds still, and so on.  Or you can unpick all of the seams and behold the whole cloth opened up but, equally inevitably, you will only be able to make sense of it by stitching it together again, even if in a new way, with different bits of cloth (time) concealed in the folds.  You can argue that the latter is what happened when historians stopped thinking that their subject was simply the chronicling of high politics, kings and wars, and started thinking about social history, or women’s history, or when historians unpicked the great seam that lay at 476 and the End of the Roman Empire and made a new fold, called Late Antiquity. 

All that folding and stitching, though happens after the event.  The decision of what constitutes an event that marks the edges of a fold, how we write about them in purely descriptive terms, and so on.  It’s a truism that very rarely (outside the obvious limit cases) do people see the events through which they’re living in the same way as later historians will.  Between 1914 and 1918, for example, we could say that people were experiencing the horrors not of a ‘war to end wars’, as they (or some of them) thought, but of a curtain raiser for an even more horrible war.

It’s these folds, these billows of cloth behind the stitches, which I want to think about.  These spaces or gaps are where history happens.  They are the spaces – as I will return to discuss – where nothing is decided and where history has not yet been symbolised in any way.  In that sense I like to think of them as the spaces of The Real in a way that is influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis.  The historical ‘temporal’ Real, here, is that space where things happen without us yet being able to understand or place them in any sort of symbolic order.  Encountering this Real can (as in Lacanian theory) be a terrible thing.  To take the usual limit case, the Shoah, who can have taken part in that (whether as victim or camp guard or executioner) without being aware of experiencing terrible history as it was being made? 

      Clarification

I’m not – let me make crystal clear – making any sort of equation between the perpetrators and the victims of this crime in terms of the trauma of this experience; just that neither can have occupied this temporal space without knowing that something of immense, unprecedented historical importance was happening – whether you were seeing thousands of your fellows butchered and thinking that your race was going to be wiped from the face of the earth, or whether you were a Nazi thinking you were carrying out some terrible, avenging, messianic task.

So, the spaces closed up, represented metaphorically by my ‘billows’ represent the temporal Real of lived experience.  This can only be folded and seamed after the event, thus symbolising and historicising it.  This process only (as we’ve seen) creates further billows (unless one were to write in spaces that took as long – relatively – to navigate as lived time) and so it can never be grasped.  Yet it is always there, always in the same temporal place.  In grasping it you pass through it; it is like a ghost (though this isn’t the ghost of my title), a spectre.

        Digression

 In his most famous poem, 'Un Coup de dés', Stéphane Mallarmé set out his poem with long spaces and different strands within the work indicated by font-size and their place within the two page spread - a type-setter's nightmare!  I often wonder about writing history like this, with long spaces indicating the time past, and different fonts and font-sizes representing the different threads within the story.  It'd be a huge task and a real work of art, and would sell about 3 copies even if someone took it on.  But it'd be interesting.

If we were to think some more about these spaces we’d see that they are zones of infinite possibility. Let us assume we can somehow open up the temporal space closed up by the ‘and’ of the sentence ‘Napoleon’s army met Wellington’s south of Brussels and was decisively defeated in the battle of Waterloo’.  This space – the morning of 18 June 1815 – is inhabited by about 150,000 men and women.  French and allied armies are deployed but not engaged.  Blue-clad troops swarming over the horizon to the east are Prussians.  At this point anything is possible.  Napoleon can disengage; he can fight and win (or lose).  He (and the other 149,999) can yet survive the day or be killed.  The day can turn out to be the battle (allied victory) of Waterloo, or the battle (French victory) of La Belle Alliance, or an insignificant encounter some days before the great Battle of Somewhere Else, that no one other than Napoleonic military history buffs have ever heard of.  It could be the day that Wellington died heroically, trying to stem the rout of his army, or the day of infamy when Gneisenau inexplicably stopped the march of the Prussian army, leaving Wellington to be defeated.  Or the day the Emperor’s head was knocked clean off by a Prussian canon-ball at the moment of his greatest triumph.  Or whatever.

This does not simply mean that ‘what happened’ was different, but also that the whole way in which we symbolise and understand it differs – and that symbolization is ever shifting as the narrative lengthens in time.  It means, then, that the symbolization of an historical event is never fixed.  What it also means is that our temporal Real – lived time – is a true zone of Derridean ‘differance’.  That is to say that its meaning derives from difference from other signifiers and that any ‘true’ meaning is endlessly deferred.  ‘Differance’, says Leslie Hill in the Cambridge Companion to Derrida, ‘is the beginning space of time and the beginning time of space.’  No, I have no idea what that means either, but it sounds good (and the ‘beginning space of time’ fits what I’m talking about anyway).

Let’s have an example.  Let’s consider the history of Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War.  If we were writing in 1946, say, we would doubtless see ourselves in a space of triumph after a terrible ordeal; although the future would seem very uncertain, there would be grounds for hope that a new and better world was coming into existence after the horrors of Nazism.  If we were writing in 1982, though, the picture of these events would look very different, a melancholy exchange of one tyranny for another with no sign of anything getting any better any time soon. Even respected professors of modern history could see no prospect of the Fall of the Wall; one predicted confidently over his beer that the Iron Curtain would not be lifted in his lifetime (to much later ribbing from his colleagues) – a good example of why you should never ask a historian to predict the future.  If we wrote that history now, the Soviet occupation would look like an interlude, and the analysis, not just the narrative, changes.  The future looks different from the way it looked in the ‘80s but it is no less unpredictable.  I don’t like to quote Donald Rumsfeld but the old b*st*rd did come out with some memorable sayings, one of which is that the future is no less predictable than the past; the past wasn’t predictable when it happened.

       Digression

There’s nostalgia here and in the link between time and place.  For example, I recently went for a new job – a job I really wanted and I could have done well – but I didn’t pull it off.  I’m quite depressed and angry about it, but let’s not go into that.  So I just went through Sheffield station and I remembered changing trains there on my way to the job presentation.  It was a lovely morning, I felt confident that I’d written a good talk, the sun was shining and I still had everything to play for – it was still a zone of pure possibility.  Isn’t that what nostalgia is about?

There’s no statute of limitations here.  The holocaust is cast as the terrible tragedy that it was, but one that passed, produced the Israeli state (whatever one might think of that) and an awareness of the horrors of genocide, of where antisemitism could lead, and widespread feeling that both were things to be fought against.  But what if…?  What if ultra-right-wingers sweep to power in a post-banking-crisis melt-down across Europe and pogroms begin again?  Would our own time be closed up as a simple interlude between the First and Second Holocausts (or between the Jewish and Muslim Holocausts)?

A history that stops in c.500 finishes with the end of the Roman Empire (Good Thing/Bad Thing/Supreme Irony/whatever) but a cultural history of the period c.300-c.700 can pass through the period as though, in most meaningful terms, the Empire didn’t end at all (as in some works within the Late Antique paradigm).  And a political history that continued to 814 would end with the revival of the Western Empire under Charlemagne – so it hadn’t really ended after all.  And what if, in our unpredictable future in post-banking-crisis Europe, something very odd happens to the EU, with it becoming a pan-European dictatorship renamed as a revival of the Roman Empire?  Do the 207 years since Francis I’s deposition as Holy Roman Empire become an interval or blip, like the 324 years between Romulus Augustulus and Charlemagne?  You see, even the history of the Roman Empire hasn’t necessarily ended yet…  What was the significance of 476?  It’s too soon to say. 

The Temporal Real is also the zone of pure chance and encounter.  As in my Waterloo scenario, it’s not just the relative skill in generalship of Wellington and Napoleon (and Blücher/Gneisenau), nor the bravery and skill of their troops, nor any combination of those that determines the signification of the event. As I mooted earlier, it is just as possible that Napoleon could have his head knocked off at the moment of victory or that Wellington stop one of the canon-balls, bullets or canister fragments that killed or wounded almost every member of his staff (while leaving him unscathed) that day.

I am by no means interested in this as the ‘What If…’ history beloved of right-wing historians like Niall Ferguson (Virtual History) and his ilk.  Or Cowley's What If? Military Historians Ponder What Might Have Been. In this type of history, the absurd premise is that if one thing happened differently, the whole of European or world history would unfold in a quite different way.  This is logical nonsense.  In the poem, referred to earlier, Stéphane Mallarmé wrote ‘a throw of the dice does not abolish chance’.  Quite so, but for Ferguson and co. a different throw does.  What if Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo?  Well, what if he did?  What if he fell off his horse and broke his neck the next day – with his son and heir still in Austrian captivity?  Or, alternatively, what might have happened if Napoleon had lost the Battle of Waterloo?  What if the allies fell out and took to fighting each other at the Congress of Vienna, in the course of which one party backed a Napoleonic restoration against Louis XVIII (Louis ‘the Inevitable’: perhaps my favourite royal epithet in French history)?  Not very likely, you might say, but – hey – by 1848 both branches of the Bourbons had been deposed anyway and by 1851 Napoleon’s nephew was ruling France.  Different outcomes are always possible – they’re still possible.  Vive l’Empereur!  There are no endings in history, but many fictional explorations of the possibilities I am discussing in the oeuvre of Jorge Luis Borges.  Take Julius Caesar, declaring the die to have been cast when he crossed the Rubicon.  He must have thought he’d rolled high, too.  Until he got stabbed to death by Brutus and the rest, having ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time after all.  The throw of the dice did not abolish chance, Julius.  Watch out for my forthcoming Airport history paperback blockbuster, So What? Historians Ponder How Things Could Have Worked Out Exactly the Same…

Political Implications

Now, since my theme in this Blog is very often the relationship between the study of the past and political engagement in the present, you won’t be surprised to learn that I think that there are some political implications in all this.  On the one hand, there is always hope, because the narrative is never closed – maybe it’ll take time, maybe beyond our lifetimes, but if we don’t lose hope and stop fighting, maybe things will change for the better.  After all, only we can do that.  The equal implication, though, implicit in my discussion of The Shoah, is vigilance – because the narrative is never closed.  New Labour was not vigilant.  It assumed that the battle had been won, and it stopped fighting – and look what happened: the battle had not been won at all.  Even the narratives that seem to have come to a happy conclusion require us to keep fighting.  Hope and Vigilance: a committed historian’s watchwords.

Quite apart from the competitive interplay of actors’ intentions (which side ‘wins’) or the intervention of chance, the outcome of actions can be quite unintended by anyone.  I’ve written about the end of the Roman Empire as an ‘accidental suicide’, the ironic result of actions aimed not at destroying the Empire at all, but at dominating it in the tradition of more traditional fourth-century politics.  The intervention of chance and the fact that the outcomes of actions are not (usually teleologically, as in the oeuvre of Gussie Finknottle) reducible to the achievement or frustration of particular actors’ aims is a major problem with many models of social interaction (in my understanding of it, it’s a big problem with Heidegger’s, for example).  My way of seeing might be a good way of avoiding the totalising tendencies of such approaches.

In the next part of these musings, I’ll return to the folds of the cloth, and more on social interaction.  This is where we'll meet the ghosts.

School History: really, what is the point?

All right, I will cheerily admit that I am not entirely averse to saying things just to provoke people, and even - sometimes, just sometimes - just to annoy them.  So you might want to take what I am going to say in that sort of spirit.  In fact, however, although I am entirely willing to be disagreed with and indeed to change my mind, I am actually quite serious in what I am about to say.

And that is that I find the debates over what sort of history should be taught in school, both the political proposals of the odious Gove and the responses to them to be so intellectually worthless that it leads you (well, me) to wonder whether we might not be better off not teaching history in school at all - or at least not making it compulsory.  I'm serious.

Gove wants schools to focus on a triumphalist narrative of British history.  Is this what Schools history is for?  To foster some kind of petty nationalism? (There was a good response to Gove by Richard Evans not long ago.  I will post the link when I find it.)  I think most of us will agree that it is not, not least because it really runs a risk of alienating significant parts of the modern population of Great Britain unless the way that 'British history' is conceived of undergoes a serious, radical overhaul.  I don't mean by including the Empire, or making sure that all of the British Isles are covered.  I mean by rethinking what Britain (in the present) is and what history has to contribute to it.

Answers to that sort of question have tended to be couched in terms of 'narrative' and 'relevance' - neither of which terms seems to me to encourage any sophisticated understanding of history.  It is perhaps not surprising then that most of the public contributions to the debate (apart from Evans') have come from people that I do not regard as historians, but as writers, journalists, broadcasters and gentlemen-chroniclers or antiquaries.

Many of those of us who teach history at university will agree that schools history instills in students very little sense of what history is really about, and very few of the skills for university history.  I am not entirely sure what a simple factual awareness of British (or any) history is really supposed to do to enhance anyone's life or culture.  I doubt it would do any more than memorising the county towns of England in geography lessons would, or taking up English literature classes with learning which British writers wrote which books (perhaps accompanied by 'memorable quotes').  In other words a rather shallow form of pub quiz general knowledge.  After all, most people think that's all history is in any case...

I have argued before on this blog that history is about interpretive skills and understanding other cultures.  The whole debate needs a major imput from proper historians and moving completely outside the limitations within which it is currently constrained. If schools history is to continue as a political football and the debate on it remains focused simply on what sort of British story it should tell or what bits are most 'relevant' then - seriously - I would be all for making it an optional subject and replacing it with compulsory philosophy.

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’.

Tainted money (again)

The story that prompted this previous post has rumbled on with an exchange between Michael Pinto Duschinsky and Richard Evans in the letters page of the Higher (7 April and 14 April).  It seems to me that Pinto-Duschinsky is responding in the way that I feared he would, which highlights the weakness of the argument Evans chose to justify the committee's decision.   Consequently the argument seems (to me) to have veered off down a predictable but unprofitable avenue.  I am nevertheless amused by the irony of the fact that Pinto-Duschinsky's preferred outlet for venting his spleen on Oxford is Standpoint magazine, a right-wing rag established inter alia by the odious Michael Gove and which currently seems to be becoming a favoured place to publish amongst the late antique/medievalists of the Oxford University faculty of history (very disappointing but not, alas, very surprising).

The real issue (to my mind) about this is that if there is to be, as Pinto-Duschinsky says he wants, a 'truth and reconciliation' committee about these gifts, there should be one to examine the ethical 'cleanliness' of all money donated to universities.  And that, I suspect, would leave us all very hard up...

How Clean is your Funding? And does it matter?

This is something I wanted to post on a couple of weeks ago, then left, and then thought that with the whole AHRC business rumbling on it still seemed relevant.  Maybe more so.  It concerns the ethics involved in accepting research funding.  I am going to argue that in the current climate especially academics should accept, pragmatically, any research funding, as long as there are no strings attached, regardless of the ethical or political business history of the donor.

Derrida once said that only the unforgivable could truly be forgiven.(1)  It is a classic move in later Derridian thought.  What he meant was that if you set terms on forgiveness, such as repentance,(2) then the act of forgiveness is tarnished; it ceases to be a genuine act of forgiveness.  He went on to concede that such an attitude might not always be practical in everyday life, but that our thinking about forgiveness should be inflected by this point.  And, in my view, he was, as he so often was, correct.(3)

This seems relevant to me because in a recent (10 March) edition of the Higher there was this piece by none other than Richard Evans, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge (in other words they don't come any higher) entitled 'Tainted Money?'.  This article stemmed from the recent decision by Oxford University that it was satisfied by the findings of a commission looking into the alleged links between the Toepfer Foundation and the Nazi past.  Essentially the problem (I hope I have this right) was that it had been argued that Oxford should sever all links with the foundation on the grounds that it eponymous founder was a Nazi supporter who had profited from the Holocaust.

The commission found that this was not the case and was even happy with the foundation keeping Toepfer's name.  Oxford, as I mentioned, declared that this was acceptable to them and that thus the Hanseatic scholarships should remain in place.  Evans' piece defends this, and I agree with him.  Richard Evans and I have not always had the happiest personal relationship(4) but I do have very high regard for him as an archival historian (I would do even if he weren't the Regius Professor; the fact that he is the Regius Professor makes whether or not I have any regard for his work pretty much irrelevant!), and - probably more importantly - higher regard still for his work in putting historical skills to practical social and political use in refuting holocaust deniers and the like, something which won't surprise regular readers of H.o.t.E. (of which gratifyingly there seem to be a few).  But here I think that, although I agree with the conclusion he reaches, he has used the wrong argument.  Well, I say the 'wrong argument'; what I might mean is 'an unconvincing argument that might yet have been the only politically practical one'.  We'll see.

You can read the argument via the link above.  What troubles me about it is not whether it's factually accurate or not (how would I know?); I assume it is.  It is more that if you aren't predisposed to accept the conclusion it is very likely to look like a bit of sophistic hair-splitting.  Toepfer wasn't a Nazi, he was merely a German nationalist with views about the racial links between the 'Anglo-Saxon races', who later employed ex-Nazis.  He didn't profit from the Holocaust; his company just provided materials which the Reich used, and made some money out of this.  And who didn't in wartime Germany?  None of this looks very convincing to me or likely to carry much moral or ethical conviction.  I suspect that people like Michael Pinto-Duschinski, out to find traces of Nazi whitewashing or antisemitism wherever they can, will not be swayed by it.  I also think it might be a mistake to lump things like prizes in with funding and scholarships as I think there might be subtle ethical differences between the two.

So, am I saying then that Oxford shouldn't have accepted this money?  As I said earlier, no I certainly am not.  My argument, which might be unpalatable and politically ineffective (I admit) would be that as long as there are no strings attached to a gift, determining what you use it for or what line you take or what findings you reach, then any gift of money is acceptable.  In other words that a lack of strings attached is more important than the ethical business history of the donor.

I say this because it seems to me that there is very little untainted money out there in the capitalist world.  If you start looking into the business details or investments of just about anyone you'll probably be able to construct a trail that leads to something more than a little unpleasant: war-crimes, arms-dealing, support for repressive regimes, ecological disasters, cover-ups, etc etc.  I shouldn't imagine that any German company doesn't have some link to something that happened under the Nazis; I shouldn't imagine that any of the major Japanese organisations has unstained hands regarding Japan's exploitation of surrounding nations (especially China and Korea) or other nastiness, like the Burma Railway (and unlike Germany, where guilt about the war is practically pathological, Japan has rarely come close to official acknowledgement of what was done in its name, say at Nanking).  A whole string of British businesses will have some link somewhere to an involvement in supporting the apartheid government of South Africa, or in arms deals to dubious regimes, and so on.  How untainted is Russian money, do you think?  And so on.

Of course there will always be something qualitatively specific about the Holocaust that keeps for it a particular place among the obscenities of the past.  That needs to be stated, and remembered.  But it wasn't and isn't, the only such obscenity, even in scale.  Here is something to ponder.  For a long time (I am not sure what the current state of play is) western drugs companies mounted a long and hard-fought challenge to prevent various African countries from manufacturing the medicines that have made AIDS effectively an illness that can be brought under control in the West.  They did this in the name of their profits.  It may be that as many as twenty million Africans will die as a result of this obscene bit of capitalist money-grubbing.  I cannot think of any very convincing reason to say that this is a significantly lesser evil that ought to be treated very differently from the Holocaust in terms of the ethics of accepting money.  Different?  Yes.  Lesser?  I don't know.  And very much more recent, which seems to me to matter in terms of thinking about the origins of money.  But we like our villains to have faces, don't we?(5)  And nicely-tailored uniforms too, if we're honest.  A set of faceless grey-suited corporate directors doesn't fit the bill.  And, I ask in a whisper, do we prefer our victims to be white?

And what was one of the leading lights in this movement?  It was Glaxo-Wellcome.  As we all know, the Wellcome is one of the major funders of historical research these days. Apart from the fact that such research has to be on something related to science, health and medicine it doesn't attach strings to these gifts.  No one suggests we shouldn't accept this money; I am certainly not suggesting it.(6)  Anyway, I don't see a problem in accepting this money.  It doesn't come with the demand that it be used to promote the public understanding of Glaxo-Wellcome, GlaxoSmithKline or whatever, or to support and promote the rightness of their approach to patenting and pricing life-saving medicines.  What it does is to fund a great deal of good research and keep a lot of good historians in the business, who might otherwise not be.  And they don't have to spend their whole career working on the history of science and medicine.  So it is a good thing and that matters a lot.  But, whether you like it or not, it's hardly 'clean money'.  What is?

Are there any exceptions we can make?  What about the money from the Gaddafi regime that led to the resignation of the head of the LSE?  I am not well informed but I know that other Gaddafi foundation money was used elsewhere as a slush fund for research into any subject - no restrictions.  But this is money, in the present, provided by a dictator oppressing and killing his people.  We knew about this.  Perhaps that sort of money should be rejected.  But how bad is bad?  Did people reject US government money when the US was invading Iraq or when it was funding terrorism in central America?  I don't think so.

Ultimately, there is no line you can easily draw on an ethical chart of what can be excused and what cannot, without exposing oneself to charges of hypocrisy, double-standards or whatever.  Whether or not conditions are attached to a gift, about subject matter, the angle of approach, etc., is something far easier to draw a meaningful line across.  Toepfer may have been a deeply unpleasant man with abhorrent views but in the end - because it came with no strings attached - his money allowed Richard Evans to set out on a career that led to him being a formidable foe for neo-Nazis and holocaust deniers.  I once took the Berlusconi lira (it was before the Euro), but I figured that if he wanted to pay a socialist historian to travel to a conference, give a paper about a quite left-wing approach to history, and write it up, then that was up to him; fair enough.  Wellcome money funds the careers of people who work hard for causes that the GlaxoSmithKline board of directors might (for all I know) oppose.  On the other hand, strings attached to gifts can seem innocuous at the time, but these things have an unpleasant habit, over time, of coming back to bite you.  When I walk from campus into town I have to walk past a theatre emblazoned with the name of a notorious, disgraced insider dealer...  Thus it's not - in my view - the origin of the money that matters so much as what you use it for, and what you're allowed to use it for.  That's easier to define.

With this said, you might think that my conclusion ought to be that therefore we ought not accept gifts of any sort, even with no strings attached, unless they are absolutely whiter than white (and that, practically, is going to be pretty difficult).  I don't think this is either practical or necessary.  For one thing, we academics are under so much pressure to bring in money (especially as the government slashes our funding) that it would be self-defeating to adopt such an attitude.  Furthermore, in middle management-dominated British universities, appointments and promotions now seem to be made heavily on the basis of funding brought in - no matter that you might be the best known historian on your subject in the world, no matter if the project is of no scholarly worth or interest outside a small area of the UK; it's the cash that counts.  Money talks.  Ethically, if we use the money to write history that does good in the various ways that it can do good, then I think that that is justification enough.  [I also think that an argument can be made that there is an ethical demand within the historical project which allows us to equate 'good' history with that which is ethically good, but that's for another time.] I repeat my point: it's not the origin of the money that matters so much as what you use it for, and what you're allowed to use it for.  We need to stop unconvincing attempts to decide which money is clean and which isn't because none of it is.  We need to be ruthlessly pragmatic, grit our teeth and accept it all, just as long as (and this is becoming my refrain) there are no strings attached.

There's another point of relevance, now.  Whether the AHRC was pressured into adopting the Big Society as a research priority (something which, I repeat, could be cleared up pretty quickly) or whether it decided to adopt it in an ignoble attempt to deflect funding cuts, even government money looks as though it might start being linked to political or ideological conditions.  So the demand to look for funding that allows us to do our research free from interference becomes even greater.  Demanding that we reject certain money because of its links to certain evils but accept others with links to different evils is not a position that can be adopted with any consistency.  If it allows us to carry out historical research in the directions we want to reach the conclusions we want, we have no choice but to accept the money.  Any money, provided it comes without conditions.

I accept that this argument might be politically difficult to make effective in the teeth of media or pressure-group howling - usually triggered by some contingent event (for instance, no one was very bothered by the LSE's Gaddafi money until a few weeks ago...) - but, to borrow the formula from Derrida, perhaps our thinking about research funding ought at least to be inflected by it?

Notes

(1) J. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2005; 'On forgiveness' originally 2001)

(2) I read an interview with Norman Tebbit recently (can't remember where; it was in a paper lying around in Pret a Manger) in which he said that since repentance was a prerequisite for forgiveness and since the IRA had never repented for the Brighton bomb, and indeed still sought to justify it, he could not forgive them.  I quite understand his position, but I think he is wrong about repentance being necessary for forgiveness.

(3) It is worth remembering, at this stage, as some people seem not to, that Derrida was himself Jewish.

(4) It's Oedipal, in a way, especially in the Lacanian reading.  Richard is in some ways the 'father' of my career, having appointed me to my first permanent post in 1991 - doing so, it should be said, in the face of the gurus of medieval history telling him which Oxbridge golden child was next in line for a job.  I think he got some flak for this; I certainly did.  For the next 3 or 4 years I had to put up with people telling me I shouldn't have my job.  No, really.  So in many regards I owe my career to him.  There aren't many people who will just appoint whoever they think is the best person for the job regardless of their school or university background, patronage, familial ties, the rest.  The profession could do with a few more like that.  I like to think that my subsequent career and those of the various people who 'should' have got my job justifies his choice.  Nevertheless we did knock heads a few times, which I like to flatter myself was partly down to us being a bit too alike, though the chances of me becoming as successful or politically effective as he is are slim indeed.

(5) A similar point is made in the opening pages of Alain Badiou's The Century.

(6) Even if I worry sometimes that its dominance in the funding of research might mean that in a generation or so every university historian is working on the history of science and medicine, that the social history of athlete's foot will have become more of a burning issue than major world historical developments...

More on the 'GAC'

This piece by Matthew Reisz is an old one but it is very interesting, both on the Great Academic Conspiracy and on the threat posed by academics straying out of their home field and into other areas, but still basing their 'truth claim' on their academic titles and affiliations.  Those of us who come up against DNA and Climate Change 'explanations' on a regular basis will be all too familiar with this.  My book on Worlds of Arthur is at least an attempt to do something akin to what Aaronovitch and others say we should be doing.  ... And you gotta love the quote from Richard Evans at the very end.