The problem of history: Part one
…if the past ‘really happened’, why is it so hard to bring it into the present without controversy?
The past is with us. We are shaped by it, connected to it and we often go in search of it.
But the past is nothing if not divisive. Who started the First World War? Was American intervention in Vietnam necessary? Which modern democratic institutions (if any) have their roots in ancient Greece? Good luck finding a consensus.
But why, if the past ‘really happened’, is it so hard (impossible?) to bring it into the present without disagreement and controversy?
This question is, perhaps, the chief problem of history and it has at least three main elements: 1. The nature of the past, 2. The preservation of the past and, 3. The production of history which attempts to represent the past.
The nature of the past
At a fundamental level, the past (everything that has passed) is just like the present; it is simply a collection of fractured moments.
Neither the past nor the present have an inherent meaning or story that we are ‘forced’ to believe. They ‘sit there’ awaiting commentary.
Take today’s commute to work. Even the people you travelled with will not remember the same parts of the journey. They will not construct the same story out of the events took place.
To state this baldly: no event forces us to believe one thing over another. We have to put the story together ourselves and decide on our own interpretation.
Also, the further we move away from the past, the harder it becomes to see with any clarity.
In his book A Little History of the World (1985) Ernst Hans Gombrich described this problem of distance in time by using the metaphor of a burning scrap of paper and a bottomless well. Suppose the well is dark and you set fire to the scrap of paper and drop it into the well. At first the paper lights up a large part of the well but as it falls deeper inside the concrete cylinder it only seems to light smaller and smaller portions.
So it goes, Gombrich says, with our familiarity with the past. The further back in time we try to cast our minds, the ‘darker’ many of the moments become.
Preserving the Past
The divisiveness of history also comes from the way the past is preserved.
Only a small fragment of information from the past survives into our contemporary world.
Sometimes material that could be enlightening is deliberately destroyed in an attempt to cover up certain aspects of the past. Towards the end of the Second World War, for example, the Japanese government began to destroy large amounts of records it had kept on important issues such as the prisoners they captured. To find out about these issues we now have to find other sources of information.
In other cases the fragments of the past are accidentally lost. Think of a family who moves house and, in the process, loses a box of photographs. Unless they have been digitised there may be no way of finding images of past relatives, the houses they lived in and so on.
The important point to note is that we never have fragments from every moment that happened in the past; it is always preserved in incomplete form.
Even when fragments of the past do survive as large and detailed collections there are other complications that can arise.
In many cases, surviving fragments of the past are over-managed. In some countries documents and records are tightly controlled by powerful groups or governments who wish to censor what the public knows about the past. Historians working on the history of the former Soviet Union or China know this problem all too well.
We should also remember that there can be the equally difficult problem of ‘under-management’ of these resources. Some countries simply do not have institutions capable of properly managing the preservation of important documents or artefacts. If there are no libraries or national archives to safely collect and store these sources they can be easily lost.
The production of history
Even when historians have been able to acquire enough fragments of the past to begin developing an interpretation, there are very real constraints on their work. First and foremost these are personal. They include their own abilities, preferences and values that shape their reactions to the material they work with.
But this issue goes much deeper than that.
Historians also have to chose a way in which to represent what they have come to think about the past. This has to be done in some kind of visual or textual language.
Languages are imperfect communicator of ideas. A book may be written in language that is too complex for many people to understand. Conversely, it could be written in simple language which may mean that important subtleties of the past are lost.
There is one further problem in any quest to turn the past into history: what we produce can be manipulated by the circumstances in which we work. The rules of our government and the tastes of our society have the real potential to shape how our ‘version’ of the past is received and understood.
Imperfections
There are always imperfections in the recovery and representation of the past. These imperfections leave ‘gaps’ wide enough to create serious disagreement and they mean that we can legitimately see the past in many ways.
(Part two discusses some of the possible ‘solutions’ to this problem)
