Reading Snippet - In Defence of History (5)

What should historical studies focus on?

This is an important question, for historians are keen to distance themselves from chroniclers, whose core role is to note down what has happened in each year or month, allowing future studies to be possible. If historians are not chroniclers, then what exactly should historians study?

To the author, the answer is "causes" - what other events or root causes resulted in a historical event taking place. While chroniclers focus on ensuring an event is recorded, historians goes beyond the event and ensure the events are understood. However, this distinguishing feature leads to a number of questions and considerations.

The first question is whether "finding out causes" is really the core role of historians. What's the point of finding out what led to a historical event which is buried in the past? It sounds like a futile, time-wasting activity that would not benefit the present time when making decisions that impacts the future. A modern or postmodernist recommendation would be to focus on "explanations" and "implications", more like the contextual learnings or the results of the events on how the future unfolded. A more social science-focused recommendation is to turn the "cause finding" upside down, from finding out the cause surrounding a historical event to finding out common rules that are validated by a string of historical events, so as to identify theories for immediate use by the present time.

These alternatives are all appealing and worth pursuing, but the value of finding the causes should not be sidelined - to the author, understanding the past would explain the present and enable us to see how the future may unfold. The causes behind key events is a constituent part of out understanding of the past, and therefore justifies efforts being poured in.

Another consideration is that of the variety of narratives (or explanation of causes). A lot of historians are weary of the dominant "master narratives" which were prevalent back in the nationalistic and communist days to drum up patriotism, and are still popular in certain post-colonial countries to maintain national myths for support of present regimes. The favouring of official causes and attempts to eliminate alternative narratives or angles of analysis was harming the reputation of historical studies, and gave ammunition to postmodernists who argued against studying of causes.

The author agreed to the negative impact of "master narratives", but was keen to point out that the masses of modern historians put their efforts into finding out alternative narratives, especially given the current atmosphere of "finding exceptions from the mainstream" as studies deepen. This means that the "master narrative" are constantly being challenges for modifications or re-evaluations by the academic community. Furthermore, alternative or local narratives have long been in existence as fringe movements to counter master narratives, e.g. women and black history amid a male-dominated and white narrative in Europe and North America. As time progressed, these local narratives have stayed strong and form a main branch of historical studies. Contrary to postmodernists' fear, "master narratives" have not crushed the alternatives which are just as important in helping us understand the past.

If we go back to comparing a historian with a chronicler, a postmodernist would usually argue that both are not that different from each other, in that both utilise time periods heavily in their narratives. In the case of chroniclers, all events are recorded against a flowing timeline, while historians would identify events and causes which unfolded before the event, then described the progress of the event, and the post-event impact as time moved away from the event itself.

The author's argument is that while both utilise time periods heavily, the ways in which time was utilised are different. Chroniclers are controlled by the flow of time which occurs at a steady pace, whereas historians control the flow - they could collapse long periods of stable development into a few paragraphs, but then expend vast spaces to explain a very short but critical time period with series of events occurring. Within the same time periods, the level of details could also differ, such as researching into fine details for the key decisions makers, expressing the progress of science and technology in an abstract manner, and portraying the peasants' lives as almost static and unchanged. Same ingredients, different outcomes - chroniclers and historians are not the same.

What makes a cause the true cause? A postmodernist's favourite argument is that the author's context cannot be retrieved from the text, and so all analysis would be futile. This also means there are infinite context in a text rendering analysis meaningless - you can't analyse them all. Also, if there are a few items that could be the causes, which ones would you list as cause and some others as irrelevant? It is a deeply philosophical question, but the implication is that all causal analysis are practically fabrication and forced justification of the historians' personal perception with a veneer of evidence.

This is a complicated argument, but the counter-argument is simpler, as it comes from practical operation of historical studies rather than the philosophical thought experiments. In real life experience, authors' contexts could be inferred from the text and from comparing between texts. It is true that there are multiple contexts from each source and lots of sources need to be studied, but once a research direction has been decided the number of contexts to be considered per source would drastically diminish. This begs the question of the historian's pre-conception having excessive influence, but in the discovery process the sources may suggest that the preconceived direction is poorly supported, prompting a revision of the direction to make the contexts fit. Whether a cause is a cause depends on how much learning or impact it could bring - causes that bring little value to future scenarios of a similar nature or could be validated by similar scenarios in the past are less likely to be a valuable cause than otherwise.

It is easy to argue and come up with counter thought experiments, but it's the practical implementation that busts the myths.