Michael Gove kicks off a year of bewildering WWI bickering

How the lens of history means we can’t draw reductive conclusions.

Michael Gove, a man who gets his statistics from PR-driven polls by Premier Inn, is inexplicably our Education Secretary. In what is undoubtedly the first of many political battles we’ll see over the next four years, he’s caused a row over his views on what caused the First World War — in the Daily Mail he has criticised “left wing” interpretations of history. According to Gove, claims that the war was a catastrophic mistake are based on “myth” and that luckily now some other historians have come along and “re-assessed”, and it turns out that, would you believe, our soldiers were all patriots defending us from the dastardly Germans.

Perhaps now — at the start of this year, is a good time to remember that when it comes to history, the facts aren’t always quite so simple.

Unlike in the sciences, there is no one way of viewing the social sciences and the humanities. Even if you have, say, a beaker of nationalism, and apply heat, it doesn’t always mean that the conical flask will explode with war. And there’s no nice straight arrow between adding two radicalism particles to one absolutist monarch and creating the French Revolution.

Maddeningly for Gove and Tristram Hunt, who has hit back — there can be multiple truths, that can be both incompatible and true simultaneously.

For example — what caused World War I? Was it the Archduke Franz Ferdinand taking a bullet, or German’s rivalry with Britain — as we’re taught in school, or could it link back to the endless earlier antagonism between German states and France — or did Napoleon’s march through Europe in the 19th century piss enough people off for it to fester? All of these interpretations are valid — and it’s not possible to say that one is true, and the others are nonsense.

The lens of history is both a useful tool for looking at the wider picture, and can hugely distort the way we view events. Events that may have seen tragic at the time can become a Good Thing when viewed through the historical microscope.

Take the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended WWII, for example. At the time, killing tens of thousands of people in one go is a tragedy on an unimaginable scale — though many historians would argue that it was ultimately a good thing that it happened, because it saved the lives of many millions of others, who would have perished had the war continued.

It’s even possible to do the thought experiment to consider how World War II (the better known sequel to The Great War) was more ‘creative’ than it ‘destructive’. Yes, millions died and were injured, and people committed unimaginable horrors — but the war accelerated advances in many fields of technology. We got radar, and the penecillin made in 1945 was 20x as potent as it was in 1939, to name two.

Politically too, the outcome led to many of the pillars of the modern world: we established the United Nations, we developed the idea of universal human rights, the EU has led to the longest period of peace on the European continent since… ever. Even the development of nuclear weapons can be viewed as a good outcome as the spectre of nuclear armaggeddon maintained stability and prevented what could have been a hugely devastating conventional war between the Soviet Union and the United States from breaking out. So all in all — it’s pretty good that millions died in World War II, right?

My point is, determining ‘truth’ in history is essentially futile — and the closest you can get to objective truth is dryly reporting the facts of what someone said at what point, or where certain guns were fired and what times… and interpretation as to why are going to be coloured by the time that has elapsed since, the wider historical context and indeed, the current contemporary context too.

So let’s remember in a few weeks or months time, when inevitably a Labour MP will do the opposite, and say something controversial about how we were just as bad as the Germans (or whatever)… it’s a bit more complicated than that.

Who knows, maybe historians of the future will even be arguing that Michael Gove was a good education secretary?