The Truth About History!

History: A Very Short Introduction by John H. Arnold

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Arnold gives a good practical guide with concrete examples, demonstrating the joy of historical discovery and reliable reconstruction of the past. He surveys the history of history, rejecting scientific approach of Leopold von Ranke ("only to say how it really was") while trying to navigate away from the pure relativism of private stories.

Arnold rejects the concept of "Truth" as an illusion of certainty, but clings to "truth" as fidelity to the sources (56). But, I ask, who determines that? Arnold ultimately appeals to consensus: "Truth is therefore a process of consensus, as what operates as 'the truth' (what gets accepted as 'the true story') relies on a general, if not absolute, acceptance by one's fellow human beings" (115). Arnold applies this to Hitler and the Holocaust, "The consensus is rightly so strong on this topic that we know the Holocaust to have been an act of astounding evil" (120). So if this consensus is right, can a consensus be wrong? If so, how do you decide? Go back to the sources? But that can only provide another consensus at best.

Now, what if Hitler would have won? Would the consensus and thus the truth be different? I would say no! And thank God he didn't win. Thus we must appeal to something beyond consensus as even Hitler was operating on a consensus of fellow Germans he had persuaded.

We can only judge Hitler to be evil by appealing to Truth. This resonates with the moral beings we are, and calls for humility, because we don't always see the truth clearly or act in accord with it. It can be abused as a mere grasp for power, as with Hitler. But the Truth has a power of its own that would have defeated him even if he had won the war. Thus we submit our appeals to Truth to the Truth. As a Christian, I acknowledge my point of view, test it against the books of Scripture and nature, and see what comes of it. It's a journey but not an aimless one. We must seek the Truth.

Arnold strikes the post-modern pose of skepticism toward meta-narrative, saying, "In tackling the problems that face us, we have become suspicious of people spinning us great tales, and wish to pay more attention to the details of true stories" (91). This is a false dichotomy. Truth includes but must ultimately transcend mere fidelity to details. Otherwise your just "keeping score."

Arnold does come up with three good reasons for doing history: enjoyment, thinking outside of one's present time, and thinking "differently about oneself" (122). We need to have fun in the past, explore "an alternative world," and make historical arguments that give us the ability to change. But without Truth, whose to say it was for the better?

View all my reviews >>

The Perks of Being an Historian

Cantor/Schneider in How to Study History speak eloquently of the joys of the profession:

History is probably the best field for the student whose main aim in college is a sound liberal [i.e. freeing] education. History is concerned with all that man has thought and done, and a history major combined with inidividual courses in literature, philosophy, art, music, and the social sciences introduces the student to all facets of human culture and experience. Deans of law shcools and schools of journalism believe there is no better undergraduate preparation for postgraduate professional study in their fields than the knowledge and methods acquired by the history major.... The historical profession offers unsurpassed intellectual and emotional satisfactions of the college teaching....

Cantor/Schneider then add:

and attractive remuneration as well [what?!!] (135-36).

The Historical Task

Cantor and Schneider in How to Study History comment on the intersection of historiography and ethics. They quote D. W. Robertson:

Our judgments of value are characteristically dependent upon attitudes peculiar to our own place and time. If we universalize these attitudes, as though they were Platonic realities, and assume that they have a validity for all time, we turn history into a mirror.... And when this happens, history, although it may seem to flatter us with the consoling message "Thou art the fairest of all," becomes merely an instrument for the cultivation of our own prejudices.

The problem with Robertson is that he just made a value judgement "dependent upon attitudes peculiar to our own place and time." Just because our value judgements are historically conditioned does not mean that they are historically determined and therefore relative. Christians believe that God has revealed his value judgments through the books of nature and Scripture, and that we can know them, since we are made in his image.

Do we need to guard against turning history into a mirror of our own ideals and hatreds? Yes! How do we do this? Well, we can start by constantly checking our ideals and hatreds against Scripture which has universal "validity for all time." In this way, we can submit our judgment to God, so that "our' ideals and hatreds are actually God's and not a personal prejudice.

We can also be upfront about our worldview and admit that our interpretation of the universals can be off. Thus we invite others to evaluate our interpretations from their perspective, so that we can learn from each other in all humility. By balancing what is absolute with our finite and fallible understanding, we can also stand for something without being prideful and obnoxious. We can be firm and soft, instead of being squishy and self defeating. Cantor/Schneider go on:

Lord Acton ... took a somewhat different stand: he warned that it is the historians first duty "not to debase the moral currency." By this he meant that the historian must always point out what is good and what is evil in the actions of men in the past. But in order to do this justly, we must first establish what they actually did; and we must also have an understanding of what the men of a particular era in the past considered to be right and wrong (43).

We are moral beings who instinctively evaluate for right and wrong, but we can table our Christian perspective for a moment, while we do the historical task. Once we've understood someone or something on its own terms, then we can bring in the biblical perspective. If we perform the historical task first, we are able to perform the biblical task more faithfully, since it will be based on an accurate understanding. Before we critique we better understand what we're critiquing.

Hitchens vs. Hitchens

I started watching the Christopher Hitchens vs. Peter Hitchens debate on YouTube today. Yes they are brothers and know how to get into a good scrape. It's hard to get the better of Chris, but at one point Peter rebutted his tirade against hell by pointing out that the civilizations that chose not to believe in hell soon created hell on earth. People started clapping and Chris tried to shame them into stopping. (Atheists can be an intellectual bullies, but don't let them get away with it.)

Why is this the case? Could it be that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. fell into this because they purposely forgot that they were creatures and substituted themselves for God? If we don't accept accountability before God, that we could end up in hell, we lose perspective. When we lose perspective, we think we can get away with anything. We assume the divine prerogative, which is something awful for a non-divine person to assume. What is lawful for God because he's God is horrific when usurped by a mere man.

Advise for Students of History

I've been reading How to Study History by Norman Cantor and Richard Schneider and ran across some good advice for the historian in all of us:

If you are a beginner, the reading of one secondary book in history each week should be enough--but just barely enough--to enable you to build up the necessary skills of reading quickly, which include finding the thesis of a book in a few minutes, learning to recognize the devices of various fundamental interpretations, and finally storing in your memory some approximate awareness of the contents and subjects covered in the book so that you can use it later as a reference.... To be sure, once the pressures of graduate work ease and the new pressures of writing, teaching, and having a deeper and closer interest in primary sources take over, the professional scholar's reading of secondary sources will decrease with time. But even so, most good scholars still try to read at least one secondary source each week and to keep up with the periodical literature, and in general try to stay abreast of the literature of their own fields of interest....

The first aim in reading any secondary should be to determine as soon as possible what the main point of the book is--to find the central conclusions the book is trying to prove, and to recogonizethe historiographical point of view represented ... i.e. the assumptions and value judgements upon which the author bases his conclusions....

To find the main point of a book, you should read the introduction, the first chapter, and the last chapter before you read any other part of the book....

With the main point as a central focus, everything else to be discovered by the student as he reads the book will have a frame of reference.

The authors end the first part of the book with these observations:

The one theme that has recurred ... has been the need for the active perception, for creative and imaginative interpretation in the use of all types of historical materials. Neither primary sources nor secondary sources will offer any significantly meaningful insights to a passive reader who seeks merely to recognize their contents. But the student who has acquired the basic principles of anlyzing sources, and who through diligent study learns by practice and by observing the work of other historians to apply such priciples fluently, will find hismelf fully prepared and well informed for the next major step in his development--the wrinting of his own original historical papers.

Don't we all learn by imitation? And then we learn to develop our own voice, point of view, interests, and come up with something ours.

The Unredemption

Grendel by John Champlin Gardner Jr.

My rating: 1 of 5 stars A monster tries his hand at philosophy. He doesn't remember how he learned to speak the language of the Danes, but he also seems to have read Nietzsche and knows some Latin. There's a reference to the "will to power" and he says "nihil ex nihilo." So this is really John Gardner deconstructing Beowulf. Tell it from the monster's perspective and turn the world on its head. "Sympathy for the Devil." The monster is capable of intelligence and admiring the beauty of the queen, but there's nobody to redeem him. He is shunned by humans who fear his ugliness and strength, the dragon gives him a crash course in nihilism, and the only person who cares for him is his drooling mother. So what's a monster to do but amuse himself with slaughter and mock the humans who try to construct meaning out of "copulating dust." Grendel speaks of a wickedness inside him and being born of a cursed race but rejects the gods and ridicules the Shaper's songs for masking reality with a smile. Where does Grendel come up with wickedness and the idea of a curse if there's no such thing as Good and Blessing? The problem with this tale is that Gardner arouses sympathy for Grendel by telling the story from his point of view, but Grendel's actions are objectively evil. The Bible does not encourage us to feel sympathy for evil, but to try to redeem it while also calling out for justice. The original Beowulf story was Christianized by a monk and passed on to us. But those who refuse Christianity rewind the tape and undo the redemption, like with the recent movie. The priests in the story are fools though Grendel spares a sincere one. It is the anti Till We Have Faces. In the end, Grendel calls his death at the hands of Beowulf an accident and wishes an accident on all those "evil" creatures who come out to watch him die. But there's nothing accidental about Gardner's tale. He's out to de-convert the world. View all my reviews >>

History vs. News

C. S. Lewis once said that you didn't need to read the papers. If something really bad happened your neighbor would tell you. One of Twain's characters remarked that newspapers go and fetch everyones' bad news and lay it at your doorstep. Lewis argued that God did not make us big enough to bear the weight of the world. We are not psychologically capable of taking in so much bad news. God designed us to live in small communities, not in global villages. He made us to nourish our souls on permanent things, not the ephemeral news that passes away with the next update. This is why a steady diet of history, especially redemptive history, is better for us than constantly checking the news or watching television, much of which is trivial.

Thoreau: Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.

William Ralph Inge: Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.

C.S. Lewis: If it is not eternal, then it is eternally out of date.

G. K. Chesterton: The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.

Russell Kirk: In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night.

E. F. Schumacher: Small is beautiful.

Isaiah 40:8: The grass withers, the flower fades,

but the word of our God will stand forever.

Weird Al "Craigslist"

What if Napoleon was Napoleon?

Out of the Mouth of Babes

Last night after my six year old Kate and I returned from a bike ride in the park, and she was getting ready for her bedtime story (The Magician's Nephew), she remarked "I love life. Better than being an animal." I smiled, and she added, "I can't believe I'm a person!" Then pointing to her forehead and crossing her eyes at her forefinger rested there she said, "I'm her!" Then getting tickled at herself and giggling madly said, "I can't believe I'm a freak!"

It reminded me that we didn't create ourselves. Life is something we discover. It's a gift meant to be a joy, not a problem to be brooded over or depressed about. I once read this quote:

We try to teach children about life. They try to teach us what life's about.

Ah! They often know, better than we do, the art of living. The Lord speaks to us, sometimes philosophically, "out of the mouth of babes" (Ps. 8:2).

If God Made It, It's Interesting

This is an argument for well-roundedness. If God made it, the appropriate response is not the flip "I don't like it" or "I'm not big on it." But the response doesn't have to be "I like it" either. The most interesting questions are "What is God doing here?" "How can I appreciate it?" "How can this make me more human?"

If it's been warped and perverted by the devil the question might be, even as we turn away, "How can I redeem this?" "What can I learn from this?"

If God made us for this earth and this earth for us and us for him, we don't do ourselves any favors if we look at something He made and then died to redeem, and say "I think I'll be bored."