On History

March 16, 2011

A.C. Grayling* on History

(edited by Din Merican)

If we pride ourselves on learning from experience, then the experience of humankind is a required source of instruction. For although what happens in the world rarely imitates its antecedents exactly, the present’s resemblances to the past tend to be uncanny. We know that the price of not knowing history is to repeat its worst mistakes; the benefit of knowing history is that we have some understanding, at least, of the mistakes currently being made–and we might occasionally even be able to avoid them. Reading history should be a standard part of everyone’s week.

The word ‘history’ has two senses: what happened in the past, and what we say about what happened in the past. In the first sense, history as past events is envisaged as a country stretched out ‘behind’ us which we could visit if only we had a time-travel machine. History as the surmises, interpretations and narratives constructed today is based on what those past events bequeathed to us –it survives in the form of documents, letters, diaries, ruins unearthed by the archaeologist, artefacts known or judged to be old. These are the detritus and residue of what otherwise gone; historians study and arrange them, like pieces of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, in order to fashion a coherent story. History, in the sense of past time, is accessible only through history of today’s incomplete jigsaw puzzle; we can get at it in no other way.

Among the indispensable resources of the historian are contemporary accounts of past events written by witnesses. Of course these accounts have to be approached with scepticism; the hisotrian must remember the human propensity to embellish, dramatise, enlarge , or minimise a responsibility, write with bias, distort the facts whether deliberately or unconsciously,’spin’ events or tell outright lies. Even so, first hand reports, are valuable and important. Without diaries and reports, memoirs, newspapers and othe contemporary records, historians would have very hard if not impossible time.

This was what Thomas Carlyle had in mind when he defined history in his Heroes and Hero Worship (1859) as ‘a kind of distilled newpapers’, though of course he thereby ignores the task of checking and interpretation that the historian uses to turn those records into an organised whole. Moreover a great deal of the raw material used by historians consists of other more mundane factual records, such as bills of lading, ledger entries, list of names, account books, legal documents and the like; a far cry from, say, diary entries and personal letters, reportage and memoir.

It is these latter accounts, though, that give the freshest and most vivid impression of the past, however much spin and bias they contain. ‘Take from the altars of the past firs, not the ashes’, said Jean Jaures, the French political philosopher, in an article published in 1911. The documentary raw material of history has the immediacy of presence, the directness that characterises communication from someone who was there and felt and saw the things reported. Any policeman will tell you that four witnesses at the scene will give four different stories of what happened; so we must accept that every contemporary account is one person’s account, filtered through subjectivity and the often treacherous channel of memory. Nevertheless it is impossible not be gripped, absorbed and often moved by letters, diaries, dispatches and other records. It is a quite different experience from reading novelised versions of the evens, and even historical accounts of them. The consciousness that the writer was there makes a big difference.

If, as you read, you recall the cynical view of Santayana that ‘history is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there’, you might not be able to resist a smile. He meant today’s historians writing about the past; but the same applies to the creators of their resources. Some letters and diaries might indeed be a pack of lies, and their authors’ version of the truth. And the fact that they were written close to the described events  makes them compelling.

So, reading eyewitness accounts from the past is a kind of intermediary exercise, between doing the coal-face archival and archaeological work of the professional explorer of the past,and the interpretative accounts  they accordingly write. One becomes one’s own professional, so to speak, consulting the past’s documents and testimonials for oneself–and experiencing their immediacy for oneself also.

Take for example the account given by Jehan de Wavrin of the Battle of Agincourt (1415), written a few years after it occured. Imagine reading Ernst Junger describing a German attack on British lines in the closing weeks of the First World War, historian Michael Howard’s account of how his unit took up its position under mortar fire near Salerno in the Second World War‘s Italian campaign, or the Duke of Cumberland’s dispatch reporting the events at Culloden Moor in 1746. The cumulative effect is that one gets a sense of when such descriptions ring true.

A chronological reading of history’s eyewitness accounts might begin with Egypt and Mesopotamia–the former in the wide-eyed and all-embracing curiosity of Herodotus and the latter with a variety of sources including letters from the archives of the kings of Mari, dating to the centuries before 1750 BCE. These make better sense when combined with accounts by archeologists of their finds. From these ancient civilisations one can advance through the antique Greek world, Rome, the Dark Ages in Europe and their contemporaneously splendid eastern civilisations, in the words (among numbers of others) of Thucydides and Plato, Cicero and Suetonius, Marcion and Eusebius, Masoudi and Lady Murasaki–the litany of great names, and the anonymous recorders among them, offer a rich panoply.

Reading one’s way from the Crusades through the Rennaisance and Reformation to the Mayflower pilgrims  and the English Civil War and Restoration introduces us to sources ranging from Fulcher of Chartes to Pepys in a Restoration England. History speeds up as it becomes more recent because there are more source materials to draw upon, so one gets an increasingly newsreel effect sometimes more potent than actual newsreel footage.It is a tidal race of tumult and suffering; to see it cascade past, bearing the flotsam of time, is vertiginous experience: but a necessary one.

In every case the eyewitnesses’ act of writing down what they experienced gives sharp definition to their reports. In the way of contemporary history, these sources often have a greater resonance because they reach out and connect with other events at other times. Such accounts bring home the recurrent reality of social problems and the fragility of human arrangements before nature’s power–remind us that neither is unique to our day. So we might read of small boys being sold to Moroccan soldiers in Naples during the Second World War, or the letters of Margaret Paston to her husband on the unsettled 15th century, as she feraed riots were about to break out; or John Evelyn’s account of the Great Fire of London, or descriptions of a volcanic eruption whether in antiquity or recent decades.

In every case past time becomes almost as present as it was to the diarist or correspondent of the day. We should read history as often in this form as in the more considered and organised form offered by the historians: remembering always Thucydides’ dictum, ‘history is philosophy teaching by examples’.

And how does one evaluate the worth of such accounts? The chief test is consistency with independent sources that provide confirmation. Other criteria include internal consistency and verisimilitude of detail, contextual knowledge of the author indicating likely motives of bias, plausibility in the light of general knowledge of the time, and understanding of human nature (here employing the kind of empathetic insight urged by such proponents of ‘verstehen theory’ as Wilhem Dilthey and Max Weber). One can be misled by the apparent sincerity of an author, or by the skill with which he weaves a narrative and embellishes it wit persuasive detail; but that is a risk one takes in the search for truth about past times, which is also a search for the truth about our own time.

* A.C. Grayling is professor of philosophy, University of London (Birkbeck College). He is the author of Among the Dead Cities and Descartes: The Life and Times of a Genius.

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