History is as much an art as a science.
We dig through the available artifacts and try to make sense of them. It helps so many previous people bothered to tell what they believed was the story of certain events. Of course they got things wrong, as we do today and surely will into the future, as we continue trying to rewrite history over and over again.
It’s the writing which makes it so very human. The very act of recording is itself biasing, because it is per force necessary to answer the questions of the contemporary world of the historian, some of which we recognize as matters of language and culture. What we are less likely to recognize is the fundamental bias which teaches us to assume everyone in the past must have been looking at the world through the same lens as we. We may give lip service to the intellectual frame of reference being different, but Western historians are uniquely poor at actually thinking through the implications of this different worldview.
In every age, the majority of those thinking and writing somehow assume their intellectual approach is universal. This is why we reasonably question historians past, and seldom succeed in questioning our own, except within the narrow differences of political and philosophical agenda which loom so large to us. Each generation creates their own idols, particularly idols of thought.
The problem is history today serves one particular agenda which unites and lies under all the others. We refer to asking and answering the question: “How did we get here?” This is asked in the broadest sense of what brought us to this situation. Devising a means of getting from here to where we would like to be requires knowing how we got here, no? Yet, in ancient histories, this is often not the real issue. A particular wealthy and/or powerful figure might well commission a history writing project for that very reason, but a whole host of history writing came from another purpose. Particularly in the East, a great many histories came from something more akin to the priestly scholars, whose whole orientation was more at pointing out human foibles for whatever they considered a redemptive purpose.
This is not the same as a merely mechanical approach, but specifically translates into something like teaching humility. The provision of information might well serve the purpose of knowing what we should do next, but was not the primary intent. It was to make the person have a perspective. When people with power get involved in the process, they always aim to shape the process to their own ends. Consciously or not, they want folks to arrive at certain selected conclusions. Thus, the inputs are whittled down pragmatically to include only what the power wants folks to know. It’s propaganda, not history per se.
The scholar-priestly approach is more aimed at broadening the horizon, making you see the entire vastness of things not obvious to your initial experience of life. They are frankly willing to let people decide for themselves what to make of it all, or at least aiming at that ideal. We give much lip service to that in Western Classical Education, but it seldom works out that way. Doing all that work of researching and writing requires paying some talented soul to do stuff which doesn’t put food on the table right away. It’s not as if religions are any more altruistic than secular governments. Organizing humans for any kind of specialization and efficiency inevitably ends in someone having power, and with it the inevitable lure of abusing it. We’ve had a few good rulers, and a slightly higher proportion of good priests, as it were, but the problem remains getting that talented guy or gal to work on something we all want, but no one can easily afford without some corruption getting involved.
So maybe we thought democratizing of wealth and power would help? Not at all; it’s actually worse under the rise of the middle class (AKA merchant class). If there is any group less altruistic than the greedy middle class, they have yet to appear in human history. The middling sorts are generally decent, but more prone to enforcing utter uniformity than any other level of human society. It matters not what their relative wealth might be at any point, it’s that drive to gain more control over the circumstances of life which corrupts any hope of humility.
Western Civilization as we know it is primarily a creature of the middle classes. As it lies dying face down in the muck of human passage on this plane, already we see later generations sneering and snickering at the unspeakably foul pretense to greatness of their predecessors. We have a history replete with hypocrisy, saying we don’t want elitism even while we build one more corrupt than ever. It’s coming apart so hideously precisely because it’s so utterly fake, finding itself sliding right back down into the same pattern of human social structure so utterly instinctive and necessary for life. Only, without the grand legacy of noblesse oblige, we have been so horribly bad at it. We pass the job of doing art to those with the least measure of talent because we fear anything which cannot be controlled. Everything is a product, wholly artificially shaped at every step of the way, down to the smallest molecule. We are so sure we have worked out cause and effect on the sub-atomic level, if we could just pile up a little more data from research. Our “proud legacy” is dragging the whole of humanity down into a childhood fantasy of what cannot be, seeking to banish fears, not by growing up and facing them, but blocking out anything we cannot shape to our deeply flawed expectations and petulant demands.
I know beyond all doubt I am not the only one to notice every civilization and culture pays lip service to things they cannot do. But am I the only one to notice what the West pays lip service to is not the least bit ennobling and great as the things of past civilizations?
Bad as all the alternatives have been, what we have now could hardly be any worse.
