The present engenders the past far more
energetically than the other way around.
--Joseph Brodsky
But as no doubt many of you know,
"the past is a foreign country:
they do things differently there."
--L. P. Hartley
I have on occasion remarked on what
seems to be the pointlessness of studying history, in part because people don’t
take from it what they can, in part because it is difficult to draw lessons
from history (it doesn’t repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes), and for most
of us it has few implications for our daily lives. I took that contrarian view despite the fact
that most of my avocational reading most of my life has been history—because I
enjoy it.
Farnam
Street, a weekly blog (and one of the better ones around, in my opinion)
featured a short discussion of, and abstract from a book by, B. H. Liddell
Hart, who was primarily a military historian.
He was also a British officer in WWI and lived to see both WWII and much
of the Cold War (he died in 1970).
Hart’s final work, unfinished, offers among the most graceful and
compelling reasons to understand history—but also to be an unapologetic advocate
for truth. I suppose that position verges
on pious niceties about virtue and wisdom, but I never tire of encountering
such admonitions. I wish I could write
as well as he did. Forgive the excerpts,
but I think they are splendid.
What is the object of history? I would answer, quite simply—"truth."
It is a word and an idea that has gone out of
fashion. But the results of discounting
the possibility of reaching the truth are worse than those of cherishing
it. The object might be more cautiously
expressed thus: to find out what happened while trying to find out why it
happened. In other words, to seek the causal relations between events. History has limitations as guiding signpost,
however, for although it can show us the right direction, it does not give
detailed information about the road conditions.
But its negative
value as a warning sign is more definite.
History can show us what to avoid, even if it does not teach us what to
do—by showing the most common mistakes that mankind is apt to
make and to repeat. A second object lies in the practical value of
history. "Fools," said
Bismarck, "say they learn by experience.
I prefer to profit by other people’s experience."
The study of history
offers that opportunity in the widest possible measure. It is universal
experience—infinitely longer, wider, and more varied than any individual’s
experience. How often do people claim superior wisdom on the score of their age
and experience. The Chinese especially regard age with veneration, and hold
that a man of eighty years or more must be wiser than others. But eighty is
nothing for a student of history. There
is no excuse for anyone who is not illiterate if he is less than three thousand
years old in mind.
What a challenging proposition: "no excuse" for not being 3,000
years old in mind. For those who are
literate but working two minimum-wage jobs to hold house and family together,
Hart’s edict may be a little extreme.
When could they possibly find the time and energy to read enough history
to become sophisticated enough to analyze current events in light of
history? When half of Americans don’t
even vote in one of the most heated and divisive presidential campaigns in
American history?
History is the record
of man’s steps and slips. It shows us
that the steps have been slow and slight; the slips, quick and abounding. It provides us with the opportunity to profit
by the stumbles and tumbles of our forerunners. Awareness of our
limitations should make us chary of condemning those who made mistakes, but we
condemn ourselves if we fail to recognize mistakes.
In this Hart seems to speak to the
apparent fragility of a democratic society.
The steps are slow, the slips are quick.
We will see what 2017 brings, but from the perspective of early in the
year and the perspective of one who likes progressive views, integrity, and
honesty in elected officials, one can argue that the United States
"slipped" badly. Germany
slipped badly in 1932 and it took 13 years, a world war, millions of deaths,
and unspeakable human horrors to correct the course. I can hope fervently that 2016 is not a slip
that parallels 1932, and while the situations are vastly different in many
ways, there are enough similarities that one must worry a little.
There is a too common
tendency to regard history as a specialist subject— that is the primary
mistake. For,
on the contrary, history is the essential corrective to all specialization. Viewed aright, it is the broadest of
studies, embracing every aspect of life.
It lays the foundation of education by showing how mankind repeats its
errors and what those errors are.
We learn from history
that men have constantly echoed the remark ascribed to Pontius
Pilate—"What is truth?" And
often in circumstances that make us wonder why. It is repeatedly used as a
smoke screen to mask a maneuver, personal or political, and to cover an evasion
of the issue. It may be a justifiable question in the deepest sense. Yet the longer I
watch current events, the more I have come to see how many of our troubles
arise from the habit, on all sides, of suppressing or distorting what we know
quite well is the truth, out
of devotion to a cause, an ambition, or an institution—at bottom, this devotion
being inspired by our own interest.
I
see this last as hauntingly appropriate for our times, when one sees this
happening constantly in American politics, both national and local. And truth (yes, the word is chosen purposely)
to say, it is the right that is far more guilty than the left when it comes to "suppressing
or distorting what we know quite well is the truth" if "truth"
is defined as demonstrable facts rather than baseless claims. Hart pleads for living in a fact-driven
world; instead we have devolved to fact-free exchanges (it is an assault on the
meaning of the term to call it "discourse").
We learn from history
that in every age and every clime the majority of people have resented what
seems in retrospect to have been purely matter-of-fact comment on their
institutions. We learn too that nothing
has aided the persistence of falsehood, and the evils resulting from it, more
than the unwillingness of good people to admit the truth when it was disturbing
to their comfortable assurance. Always
the tendency continues to be shocked by natural comment and to hold certain
things too "sacred" to think about.
I can conceive of no finer ideal of a man’s life than to face life with
clear eyes instead of stumbling through it like a blind man, an imbecile, or a
drunkard—which, in a thinking sense, is the common preference.
How
rarely does one meet anyone whose first reaction to anything is to ask "Is
it true?" Yet unless that is a
man’s natural reaction it shows that truth is not uppermost in his mind, and,
unless it is, true progress is unlikely.
Given
the widespread concerns about "fake news" and how it may have
affected the 2016 U.S. elections, I can hardly think of a more pertinent
question that every citizen of the Republic should be asking. Every day.
Hart
offers a rather harsh view of democratic governments that I don’t think can be
justified by careful analysis of the data available on national innovation and
the ability of those with great talent to exercise it.
We learn from history
that democracy has commonly put a premium on conventionality. By its nature, it
prefers those who keep step with the slowest march of thought and frowns on
those who may disturb the "conspiracy for mutual inefficiency." Thereby, this system
of government tends to result in the triumph of mediocrity—and entails the
exclusion of first-rate ability, if this is combined with honesty. But the alternative to it, despotism, almost
inevitably means the triumph of stupidity. And of the two evils, the former is
the less. Hence it is better that
ability should consent to its own sacrifice, and subordination to the regime of
mediocrity, rather than assist in establishing a regime where, in the light of
past experience, brute stupidity will be enthroned and ability may preserve its
footing only at the price of dishonesty.
I
have to wonder what Hart was thinking about when he wrote the first two
sentences in that paragraph. It doesn’t
align with my observations about history.
Even if he’s right about democracy, however, he takes the Churchillian view
that democracy may be terrible but it’s better than all the alternatives.
Is it possible that the triumph of
stupidity can precede rather than follow the move to despotism?
Hart is also of the view that the
pursuit of truth through the study of history is not easy. One "has to learn how to detach his
thinking from every desire and interest, from every sympathy and antipathy—like
ridding oneself of superfluous tissue, the 'tissue' of untruth which all human
beings tend to accumulate for their own comfort and protection. And he must keep fit, to become fitter. In other words, he must be true to the light
he has seen." I don’t know many
people who are able to do this. I try,
but I’m sure I’m not entirely successful.
Finally, Hart takes a position
contrary to one I espoused a few years back:
he maintains there are implications of history for personal life, and in
a surprisingly simple fashion: "the
experience contained in history is seen to have a personal, not merely a
political, significance. What
can the individual learn from history—as a guide to living? Not what to do but what to strive for. And what to avoid in striving. The importance and intrinsic value of
behaving decently. The importance of seeing
clearly—not least of seeing himself clearly." Behaving decently: something that has come close to vanishing
from American politics.
Lord
Acton, the English historian and Catholic leader, about whom more in a few
pages, had a view about history that modern historians are reluctant to
embrace.
There are principles, he believed, that transcend specific historical
periods, and the historian should not hesitate to condemn cruelty or injustice
whenever it occurred. "Historical
responsibility has to make up for legal responsibility. . . . Unjust men should not escape the judgment of
history merely because our time may be more "advanced" than
theirs. To hold otherwise would mean
that "we have no common code; our moral notions are always fluid; and you
must consider the times, the class from which men spring, the surrounding
influences . . . until responsibility is merged in numbers.
Hart
urges us to learn what to strive for, behaving decently. Acton argues we can apply standards of
decency (condemn "cruelty and injustice" and judge by a "common
code"). Should one do both? One can make the argument that the Nuremburg
trials of Nazis after World War II were a bow in Acton's direction.
The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel had a
different take on history. "We
learn from history that we do not learn from history."
*
* *
If
A. J. P. Taylor is right, that "the present enables us to understand the
past, not the other way round," understanding the past may be more
difficult as time passes because the writing of history has become more
complicated since Hart’s day. From the Chronicle of Higher Education: "The
Problem of History in the Age of Abundance," written by a Canadian
professor of, among other things, digital history, Ian Milligan.
Milligan
describes the difficulties and the ethical questions that modern historians face
given the enormous amount of information that has accumulated on the web in
just the past 20 years. He begins by
recalling GeoCities, which provided free websites to everyone. In 15 years the site grew from a few thousand
users to over seven million, with 186 million different URLs by the time it was
closed down in 2009.
Web
archives offer the power to peer into the minds and thoughts of millions of
people. The ethical onus lies on researchers. Historically, ordinary people did
not leave behind many records, forcing historians to learn about them from the
scant moments when they came into contact with large record-keeping
institutions like censuses, churches, poor rolls, or the criminal-justice
system. Between 1674 and 1913, the Old Bailey, the central London legal court,
collected the transcripts of 197,745 trials. Today’s Old Bailey website
describes its holdings as the "largest body of records documenting the
lives of non-elite people ever published." This is not hyperbole. For 239
years, 197,745 trials are a good standard of historical documentation. Compare that
with the seven million users and 186 million "documents" that were
generated on GeoCities in 15 years, and which represent
only a fraction of the web of that era, and you get a sense of the enormous
scale historians now confront.
Milligan acknowledges that even
today not all "ordinary people" are captured in the archives of the
web, because web access is still constrained by race and wealth and geographic
location.
Milligan
maintains, I think correctly, that any historian who ignores the information on
the web—no matter the topic—will write bad history. It would, he said, be "intellectually
dishonest" not to rely on personal testimonials and other histories and
commentary, but who has sufficient time to read everything that might be
pertinent to one's historical inquiries?
In reaching into the deep past (pre-web), historians have to scrounge
for materials (surviving correspondence, legal records, etc.); now their
problem is that they are deluged with so much material it can hardly even be
sifted, much less read and carefully analyzed and evaluated. Web archiving began in 1996 and now contains
445 billion web pages and (in 2014) over 10 petabytes of storage (petabyte =
1000 terabytes).
The
mechanisms to deal with this avalanche of information are problematic. Search algorithms produce what the algorithm
is supposed to produce—but might not produce what the historian needs (and
won't even know it's needed). As
Milligan points out, everyone is driven by their search engines: if we're looking for something, we'll usually
read the first page of hits and not much more.
But if the point is to write a history, will you read the 100th
and 1000th hit? As he points
out, if the writer relies solely on the algorithms, they should be credited as
co-author.
What
is one to claim is our "cultural heritage" when we have more
"heritage" than we can ever absorb?
There
are also ethical issues. Many web pages
are/were created by people who didn't realize that those pages would have
continued life in an Internet archive somewhere. They didn't have the means to exclude them
from web searches nor will they necessarily be asked for consent to use them in
research. (The same is true for Twitter
messages; they are public but it may not be academically legitimate to include
them in research without the consent of the person who tweeted. I wonder how that concern will apply to the
tweets of Mr. Trump.) At the same time,
the guestimate about the average life of a web page is 100 days; if they're not
captured in an archive, they can disappear—which is more history then lost.
Mulligan
argues, I think correctly, that the pages should be collected and retained, if
history is to be accurate. Moreover, if
treated like publications—which they resemble in some ways—there is a legal
right to cite and quote from them. To
also use them ethically, he suggests the same standards applied to oral
historians: their work needs to be
considered by an Institutional Review Board, bodies charged to approve research
projects to ensure they meet appropriate ethical, safety, legal, and any other
applicable standards. Yes, IRBs have
themselves been subject to criticism (see, for example, recent controversies at
the University of Minnesota), but they're better than no review at all and we
haven't discovered any flawless method of review.
Mulligan
concludes:
Ultimately,
web archives offer power: the power to reconstruct online lives, to peer into
the minds and thoughts of millions of people from 20 years ago, and to move
toward a potentially more democratic form of history. We need to think about
the role of algorithms, to reach out to our librarian and archivist colleagues,
and to begin a broader conversation about the implications. Without taking
these steps, we will not be able to write honest histories of the 1990s or
beyond.
The issue of search algorithms showed
up again in the Chronicle of Higher
Education a month later, with a darker hue.
("Google and the Misinformed Public")
The problem is the lack of curation,
allowing the widespread distribution of what we have come to know as "fake
news." Even though Google and
Facebook "may disavow responsibility for the results of their algorithms,
. . . they can have tremendous — and disturbing — social effects. Racist and sexist bias, misinformation, and
profiling are frequently unnoticed byproducts of those algorithms." Libraries and other agencies evaluate the
credibility of sources; organizations like Google and Facebook don't—or if they
do, how they do it is not transparent.
That misinformation can be debilitating
for a democracy — and in some instances deadly for its citizens. Such was the
case with the 2015 killings of nine African-American worshipers at Emanuel
A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., who were victims of a vicious hate crime. In
a manifesto, the convicted gunman, Dylann Roof, wrote that his radicalization
on race began following the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an
African-American teen, and the acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman. Roof
typed "black on White crime" in a Google search; he says the results
confirmed (a patently false notion) that black violence on white Americans is a
crisis. His source? The Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization that
the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as "unrepentantly racist." As
Roof himself writes of his race education via Google, "I have never been
the same since that day."
Roof’s Google search results did not
lead him to an authoritative source of violent-crime statistics. FBI statistics
show that most violence against white Americans is committed by other white
Americans, and that most violence against African-Americans is committed by
other African-Americans. His search did not lead him to any experts on race
from the fields of African-American studies or ethnic studies at universities,
nor to libraries, books, or articles about the history of race in the United
States and the invention of racist myths in the service of white supremacy.
Instead it delivered him misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies that
bolstered his already racist outlook and violent antiblack tendencies.
Professor Noble at UCLA, who wrote the
article, observes that searches can erroneously simplify complicated issues and
provide no index of "veracity or reliability." Searches can appear impartial, but no one
knows the algorithms used by Google and other firms because they are seen as
intellectual property, and in many cases the searches don't produce information
that we would normally acquire from teachers, books, and other legitimate
sources. Professor Noble argues for
holding search platforms accountable and perhaps even regulate them. I don't know if that could work and I'd worry
about who the regulators are, but her larger point, that search algorithms can
lead people astray, is surely legitimate.
I would like to think that those who have a decent education and who are
modestly intelligent can tell the wheat from the chaff, but I have no data to
support that claim.
*
* *
I am certain that every human being
alive has quirks and idiosyncracies (vis-à-vis their own culture). I have mine, and one of them occupied my time
for part of an afternoon last December, as it does periodically. It’s napkins, specifically linen dinner
napkins.
Most people, reasonably, pay very
little attention to napkins, other than to get them in their laps. My idiosyncracy is that I can’t stand it when
the corners and edges of my linen dinner napkins don’t align when I have set
the table in preparation for hosting friends or family. It’s specifically linen, too, because napkins
made of other fabrics come out of the dryer, get folded, and they look just
great. (I’d like to say this is my only
idiosyncracy, but others who know me well, like my wife and children, might
have a different view.)
All of my dress/work clothes and the
tablecloths go to the laundry to be done by someone else. I haven’t ironed any of my own clothes for
decades because I am not competent; no matter how hard I worked at it—those
many years ago—I could not make the clothing look good. So I decided to hell with it, I’ll bring them
in to be done professionally. But I
cannot get the laundry people to get the napkins right—the corners are often
off by an inch or more, they are not folded on center, etc. They are neatly pressed—and crooked.
So once or twice per year, as soon
as I’ve run through the supply of linen dinner napkins, I wash them and then
iron them myself. And *I* get them
aligned and the corners touching. I
suppose life would be easier if I just got rid of the linen napkins, but I will
always remember my friend the late Dagny Christiansen one time exclaiming, when
we had her and her husband Holger for dinner, something like, "oh my,
linen napkins. We only use those for our
best friends." I just looked at
her. She smiled. What she didn't need to know was that some of
the napkins were older than I am; my great-aunt Inez bought them in the 1940s
and I inherited them. If nothing else,
they are a tribute to the strength of linen.
I still use them. (When Kathy and
I were in Ireland a few years ago, I bought a dozen or more Irish linen
napkins, so replacements are at hand.)
But then, as I sometimes do the
older I get, I said to myself, "OK, Gary, you have X number of hours left
on the planet if you live out your normal life expectancy; does ironing napkins
fall under rule #2 that you established?"
(2. Must it be done? No.
Will I have fun doing it?
No. Then I won't do it. 3.
Must it be done? No. Will I have fun doing it? Yes.
Then I'll do it.) I may soon reach the
point where the answer will fall under #2.
I’ll let the unmatched corners be damned. But for now, I still like giving dinner
guests neatly pressed linen napkins.
*
* *
I'm not sure how to categorize this,
but there is something I find humorous and a sign of how far we have come from
real life. Several times last winter I
was in a setting where people turned on their TV sets to a fireplace fire,
complete with crackling sounds. Heavens.
* * *
Elliott and his dad, texting
last fall (thus the abbreviated language)
Elliott: Have said before sometimes I wonder why I in
school when I could have just been a conman for a living. Just saw another story of two English women
catching and bottling "fresh country air" and selling it, mostly to
Chinese people, for $115 a gallon. And
people are buying it.
I could have thought of
that. My conscience is keeping from
being rich.
Dad: The people on the religious right would say
you couldn't have a conscience because you aren't religious. So what's stopping you?
Elliott: Last thing I ever want to do is support their
ideas through my actions.
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