My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Novick gives a fantastic analysis of the changing views on the questions of objectivity and subjectivity in American historiography. How Novick, a European historian, could write so comprehensively and with such depth and for almost 650 pages is amazing.
He is admittedly a historicist, which, he says, "means simply that ... thinking about anything in the past is primarily shaped by my understanding of its role within a particular historical context, and in the stream of history" (7). I was glad to hear him define it that way, because historicism usually means that history is to be explained solely in terms of naturalistic historical causation, which is a sophisticated way of saying that the historian has an anti-supernatural bias. But that doesn't come into play so much on the question of what American historians think about the "objectivity question."
Novick begins with the original objectivity project of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when historians thought they were following Leopold von Ranke's dictum of telling history "wie es eigentlich gewesen" (as it really was). Turns out that Ranke wasn't a pure objectivist who was only trying to be empirically faithful to his sources. Ranke meant telling history not so much as it "really" was but as it "essentially" (eigentlich) was. This meant that through history we access the essences of things, which is more a Romantic than scientific view.
Regardless, the pure objectivist school thought that the purpose of historiography was the scinetific sel-elimination of the historian from the task of researching and presenting history. The historian went into the library the way the scientist enters the laboratory. He collected the facts, which spoke through the historian who was merely a kind of secretary taking dictation. Studies would proceed until all texts and artifacts would have interpreted themselves and historians would have put themselves out of a job. Hard to believe, but Novick painstaking documents it.
Then come the new historians: Fredrick Jackson Turner, Carl Becker, and Charles Beard, whose work spanned pre and post WWI. They hit a nerve when they pointed out that WWI exposed the fact that the Enlightenment "victory of Reason" didn't happen. They also revealed that, far from being objective, most historians had been involved in WWI propaganda, pretending that the allies were good little boys on the way to Sunday school when the evil German bullies picked a fight.
Becker and Beard made it impossible for historians to to go back to their pre-war confidence in objectivity. Then came the expansion of professional history, where objectivity was a function of academic Ph.D. programs, whose graduates went on to work for the Allies of World War II. Once again, American historians aligned themselves with their national power, which didn't encourage their critical faculties. Speaking the truth to power only meant providing sobering military intelligence and lessons from the past, not necessarily telling the truth to power about power. In other words, historians knew who buttered their bread. After the war, historians tended to succumb to the temptation to justify Allied actions, which sometimes meant concealing the whole story or unrealistic appraisals of FDR and Churchill. The new objectivity was not about personal detachment but about being on the right side--the side of the West which now included America. This is also when the Western-Civ class was born.
Novick points out that Christian historians like Kenneth Scott Latourette acknowledged their Christian view of history and defended it as superior to naturalistic and relativistic notions from historicism. Novick points out that they were better than most who tried to keep their ideological commitments a secret. This was also the age of purportedly objective journalism, which Novick explodes with admissions from the journalists themselves.
Other historians, like Karl Popper and Richard Hofstader, abandoned old objectivist notions of "detachment" and "self-elimination" for much more honest "self-examination" and "historical complexity." They argued that historiography was objective and scientific in so far as its claims were falsifiable, positing a kind of "normed objectivism."
With the advent of the sixties every group became their own historians, as black and feminist historiography privileged the newly liberated perspectives of those who had suffered as part of their social group. Partisan scholarship proudly dealt objectivity another blow.
Chapter fifteen tells the story of the postmodern resurrection of subjectivity and the demise of almost any meaningful notion of objectivity. Historicism and relativism had taught historians to bracket moral questions and merely be faithful to the sources, but Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) took the issue of subjectivity even further.
Kuhn, following Michael Polanyi, argued that science doesn't take place in the abstract but within a "paradigm." A paradigm is an accepted model that is, by its very nature, freighted with worldview commitments promoted by the current scientific orthodoxy. Polanyi argued that science and dogma are not antithetical, but are, in the experience of the scientist, wed together in a committed relationship. The scientific community enforces the paradigm to control dissent and promote indoctrination. Thus science is no cure for subjectivity (a lesson that the current crop of new atheists, like R. Dawkins, hasn't learned). According to Kuhn, however, scientific revolutions can and do take place suddenly when the old paradigm (like Newtonian physics) is overthrown by a new paradigm (like Einsteinian physics) which accounts for the problems encountered under of previous paradigm.
Michel Foucault expanded the idea of the paradigm to the "episteme" which included relationships between the sciences and between the sciences and the culture at large. Together they enforce an oppressive "regime of truth" in society.
Richard Rorty argued (in unison with the new paradigm) against stable foundations of any kind. With that foundation squarely in place, his antifoundationalism left us only with a common solidarity in an ongoing conversation. Rorty said: "What matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right…. Our glory is in our participation in fallible and transitory human projects, not in our obedience to permanent nonhuman constraints" (541). I wonder if he was attempting to get "things right?" Novick points out that Rorty "urged ... the substitution of 'solidarity' for 'objectivity'" (571). So I guess we have solidarity in our subjectivity by which we may say a fond farewell to our former illusions of objectivity. I guess the rest of us must obey this "permanent nonhuman" constraint.
Jacques Derrida chimed in arguing that the relationship between the sign and the thing signified was arbitrary. This means that words and the concepts they signify are not dictated by the words themselves, but by their authors and the readers who play with words and concepts. Thus, words aren't transparent windows on history but opaque symbols revealing "nothing outside the text." Words also subvert their authors by revealing the power play the author is trying to put over on his readers. Isn't the power play signified by the words in the author and thus outside the text? Maybe I don't understand Derrida, but regardless, this pointed the way to new hermeneutic of "Deconstruction" or reducing texts to power.
For literary critic, Stanley Fish, it is the community that teaches interpretation and the interpreter doesn’t discover but makes “ ‘texts, facts, authors, and intentions’.” Standards of right and wrong exist not in the text but within the community. Fish said this is why we can’t agree on an interp of a Shakespearean sonnet though it’s only fourteen lines. "Rational debate is always possible," he hoped, "not, however, because it is anchored in a reality outside it, but b/c it occurs in a history, a history in the course of which realities and anchors have been established, although … they will have to be est. again" (544). If our debates aren't anchored in reality itself but only in a history of literary study then literary history must transcend reality? But if literary history is part of reality, then he hasn't really helped us, has he? Also, if there's no reality outside the community then what do separate communities appeal to when the debate one another? Other communities, themselves, or what? And how, if right and wrong exists only in communities, does anyone ever change communities?
Novick doesn't critique these guys (like I've been doing) but only concludes that "the center does not hold," adding that: "In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Thank goodness the post-modern community isn't the true Israel. Thank God that the sacred text of the true Israel doesn't end with the book of Judges. The Christian meta-narrative doesn't end in self-defeating despair. It doesn't end in the cynical resignation to power plays and apathy toward meaning.
The relativism of Becker and Beard and the postmodernism of Derrida and Fish have done us a great service by making us more aware of how our preconceptions affect our interpretations and how words get out of our control and reveal our self-centered power plays. Peter Leithart, in Solomon Among the Postmoderns, has argued that Postmodernism reveals that everything under the sun is mere vanity and chasing after the wind, which is the point of Ecclesiastes. But unlike Ecclesiastes, Postmodernism ends in the despair of futility, because it rejects God as the basis of knowledge. It rejects his normative interpretation of the world that is revealed in nature, Scripture, and ultimately in the final judgment.
I would give Novick five stars if he would have taken a sane position on the issue and not written in academia-ese. He once refers to something inconsistent as "problematically consistent." My students choked on this kind of stuff. One student said he tried to understand Novick and another that he tried to slit his wrists with Novick.
Mark Noll's "Christianity and the Possibility of Historical Knowledge," responds well to Novick. Noll argues that only the Christian view of knowledge can restore our confidence in reliable knowledge of any kind. This is because God created the world and us in his image, so that we can know his world. We can trust our senses and our reason because God created them to receive and unlock nature and Scripture. The world can be penetrated by our minds because they are made like God's mind, which knows his world perfectly. The correspondence of our minds to the creation is finite and fallible, especially because of sin, but can also be reliable. The link between the something in my head and the something outside it is established at creation and sustained by God's power upholding his creation.
Thus, I would argue that objectivity is seeing and knowing the world and God as God sees and knows the world and himself. This is humanly possible because we are made in his image, and he has revealed himself in the world but preeminently in the Word made flesh and made text. R.C. Sproul said: "We can grasp the infinite, but we cannot hold the infinite within our grasp." Thus scientific and historical knowledge, as well as personal knowledge of ourselves and each other, can correspond to objective reality or Truth.
But Noll also points out that knowledge is a product of our individual points of view, and thus no two people will ever come to exactly the same perspective. Noll also notes that the Christian view of the fall into sin resonates with relativism. I would argue that what postmoderns call "power" Christians call the sin of ambition and pride. These prejudice our perceptions of the world, but the only response left is not "more power to my power play." The Christian response is: "I repent of my grabbing for power, and I die to self in order to seek God's revelation." In this way, we may, like Noll, steer a course between Scylla of scientific objectivity and the Charybdis of relativism, without falling into the trap of either.
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