Column: Historians and their consumers
By Charles Jeanes
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” — Winston Churchill, historian, maker of historic events
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” — James Baldwin
Our minds and our living: thoughts that shape our characters
The two epigraphs above frame the entire focus of my Arc today.
Baldwin makes a much more profound point, one delving into the relationship of human knowledge and consciousness to the very way one lives a life. Churchill is an illustration of Baldwin’s point, having lived a life exercising power and then writing history.
Today it is commonplace to say humans need stories. Stories give us meanings. Meaning fuels a life.
I recently viewed the film Inside Out 2, where it is proposed that memories and thoughts make our beliefs, and our beliefs and ideas about our self decides “who we are.” A film for children more than adults, it still makes a point that relates to my topic: we can keep or discard a lot in our minds, and those choices indeed are in us as “history is trapped in us”. We live as we think we fit into a meaningful story. The historian’s story is made by cutting from the cloth of the entire past.
The Past is there behind us, everything that ever happened. History is a selection of threads (“historical facts”) weaving a story for human consumption.
Know your columnist: a disclosure of my persistent interests
Perhaps you, like me, have already chosen your grave-site in a cemetery and have erected a stone on it with words of your choosing. No? Well, I have. I blush to confess this, for it’s eccentric and reveals my dedication to questions of legacy and memory that not a lot of people bother themselves with.
Historians are my community in a particular sense, and the study of history has generated significant architecture within my consciousness. When I look at the world and its daily events we call ‘news’, my mind responds in idiosyncratic, historically-blueprinted ways. Consuming the daily news is the reason why I write; I can only in-take so much without some opinions overflowing my mental trash-can.
A reader might well observe, “garbage in, garbage out.” One can only hope all news is not garbage.
The Places we learn History: what you think you know about the Past is someone’s Story
I would not be writing about this were I not reading a particular book by Priya Satia. And her book is not one I would expect non-historians to dig into.
But I offer this overview of it, hoping you might read this much: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2021/05/10/times-monster-how-history-makes-history-by-priya-satia/
I’m guessing that the large majority of my readers have learned what history they remember in formal schooling, but that a great deal more of their learning in history has come from daily journalism, when they read ‘backgrounder’ columns for current news, and from specialist magazines on History, and from online sources. All such sources are themselves derived from historians in academic careers, ultimately.
My readers know this: Professional Historians are not objective. They do not report the Past as one’s own experience reports one’s own life. Historians are not your eyes and ears in the past.
I advise that anyone reading history ask yourself, ‘Does this feel like my (or our) story too, or is it just this historian’s?’
Historians are human and their histories differ as humans differ, even as they relate the same set of “facts.” Historians write history to be read, and other people (who read history) “make history” in active life – the more so if the reader is a person of great power like Churchill, leader of an empire.
Satia sums up what historians do when they also rule over people in her sub-title, “how history makes history.” History – the product of historians — makes history, — the actions of powerful world-shakers whose decisions determine life and death for subject people.
Historians’ mission statement: what Story does humanity fit into?
I am an historian. Here is a reaction to Satia’s book that I resonate with, fully.
“After 17 years of learning to think like a historian, I’m facing up to the violence implicit in my profession’s way of making sense of the world.” — Yves Rees, historian
I get what Rees means here. I see that historians make sense of the world in a certain way. That way is formative for the minds of people who possess and use power so that they are ‘making historic events’.
Satia’s book on history-writing, and historians who ruled in parts of the British Empire over centuries, has an effect on someone like me (who has been “thinking like an historian”) that’s quite refreshing. As Rees noted, one should face up to an implicit violence in how historians put sense into the past. The historian who in private life as citizen in democracy might proclaim ethics of peace and empathy, can still find “justification” for acts of governance and law-enforcement that are quite brutal — and in the recorded facts of British Imperialism and colonialism, there are a sad lot of examples.
One example will serve to explain how history shapes a mind, and mind in a Ruler makes actions happen – actions which history consists of. Oliver Cromwell (or Vladimir Putin) knew history with a distinct model: War is a means to some end; it makes sense of the world because historians write history as a story of men using force/ violence as political act. Cromwell employed war rather frequently as a tool; because he won almost every battle, he believed Providence ruled his history.
Historians and the human subjects of historical study
Politicians, in their self-definition, are agents of action and deciders of policy for their people. They thus make history, it seems to them. Conversely, political leaders often are readers of historical accounts, and self-consciously see themselves commanding a stage where great events are set in motion.
Historians write about what leaders do. It follows that what the ruler holds in her/his mind as a Story of human meaning, will most certainly influence her or his political activity.
A wonderful example springs to my mind: US President Obama loved to use History to explain why he was doing good and others were not. As noted by a journalist during Obama’s presidency: “If Obama’s interests run toward history, so does his rhetoric. …the president has repeatedly deployed a series of phrases—especially “the right side of history” and “the wrong side of history”—that suggest a tortured, idealistic, and ultimately untenable vision of what history is and how it works.”
–David Graham, Atlantic magazine, December 21, 2015
Reader, do you not want to be on the right side? I imagine it must feel good to know one is there!
Historians enable rulers to soothe their consciences. History as a Story of Progress (as Eisenstein labels it*) gives a ruler absolution from moral or ethical crimes by assuring the ruler “in the long run, this act is necessary for the forward march of humanity.” In the short run, it’s a heinous act. But history justifies. It renders moral, or exempt from morality, things like colonialism, war, etc. by the ultimate “good” produced when the human species advances upward. Historians believed this for centuries, Satia shows us.
*[For his essay on Progress, see https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/reinventing-progress]
War, the greatest Story ever told?
I have been writing historical columns on war for decades, as this link to the archive at The Rossland Telegraph will demonstrate. https://rosslandtelegraph.com/?s=War+Charles+Jeanes
Similarly, my archive of programs for my weekly show The History Hour at co-op radio (begun broadcasting 1999) reveals I keep researching the topic. [As always when I raise the topic, I urge reading two books on war, one by James Hillman, the other by Christopher Hedges.
https://www.psychotherapyinsights.ca/self-awareness-blog/a-terrible-love-of-war-a-book-review/
https://www.bookey.app/book/war-is-a-force-that-gives-us-meaning ]
We live in times when War is more threatening than at any time since 1962 (the Cuban missile crisis). But historians have an even bigger story to which they must give meaning: a maybe-fatal climate change. If our species has made the planetary habitat the cause of a ‘Sixth Great Extinction’, do historians suppose they can make this into a story with explanatory significance? I would answer no. The story exceeds what historians can validate. The story has crossed into spiritual territory where historians are no more knowledgeable than physicists.
The meaning of human existence will not be discovered by an historian, of that I feel sure.
Conclusion
History is not the only avenue by which modern humans understand this species we are members of, but I do insist that what people think they know about the past, and the histories they carry, consciously or not, affect their life and how they live it.
I have long assumed my readers are a peculiar kind of introspective individual who delves into Questions: about the working of their own minds, the origin of their consciousness of “reality,” and whether they’re aware of living inside their Story about human life and meaning — in which they’ve immersed themselves.
Readers who don’t accord with my presumption will not have found this column to their taste, most likely. But if you are one who does enjoy such inquiries, you might’ve found something new to think about in comments offered here about history and historians. I hope you did.
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