Paul Musgrove writes passionately as a writer of history about the limitations of writing history. His lead example of historiography-gone-wrong is a conference where the gender of the Industrial Revolution was discussed:

What I want you to understand is the mindset in which “The Industrial Revolution was a masculine event” is a statement which makes sense. It is a mindset which has lost touch with reality.

I’m in no position to decide about this particular debate. But I do want to defend the utility of abstractions of this and other sorts.

Paul worries that the very act of abstraction — for example, talking about The Industrial Revolution as if it were an actual event rather than a way of referring to a wide range of acts, ideas and feelings — does violence to the very real people who were directly affected by it. For example:

The more I write, and the more I read others’ writing, the more I detach myself from the pain and joy of daily life that lies behind “agricultural depression” or “bank failure,” or the pettiness and granduer wrapped up in “Congress” or “American hegemony.” As I use written language, that is, history becomes a set of arbitrary symbols, rather than a quest to understand the events and choices that confronted people with thoughts and feelings as real as mine.

But he holds out some hope:

Words, when used to communicate well, can push us in the direction of truth. The same attention to detail which serves the best poets and novelists would serve a historian no less well. And our best historians—William Manchester, Robert Caro, and—yes—even Steven Ambrose—comprehend the relationship between the telling detail and understanding. That’s why their books are readable and informative, and books exploring the gender of the Industrial Revolution aren’t.

I’m a sucker for readable histories. And I also like books, like Manchester’s “A World Lit Only by Fire,” that abjure trends and theories in favor of descriptions of what daily life was like. I like historical fiction for the same reason. But that doesn’t mean that historical accounts that are not about the quotidian are therefore false. One might as well say that the theory of natural selection is untrue because it passes over in a phrase (“nature red in tooth and claw”) the very real pain of the short-necked giraffe curled up as it starves on an over-populated plain of Africa, yada yada.

Here’s what I think: Truth doesn’t apply only to the details, and the details aren’t all that’s real. Communities are real. Generations are real. Wars are real. Peace is real. Poverty is real. Even fashion trends are real. They are real in different ways, and truth — IMO — consists in (1) revealing each in ways appropriate to it, and (2) remembering that there isn’t only one type of revelation. If you do 1 but not 2, you become a narrowly focused partisan who sneers at history’s stories as sentimentalism or sneers at history’s hypotheses as mere academic flatulence…but either way you end up sneering. If you do 2 but not 1, you end up without beliefs or understanding.

So bring on the abstract theories! But remember that they’re doing the work of abstraction, which is not the only work we need done.

As Paul concludes:

The problems of historiography, alas, are not hard to solve; the solutions are simply difficult to implement.

By the way, don’t miss the discussion of Paul’s ideas following the blog entry itself.

What I’ve said about truth comes mainly from what I learned from Heidegger. He talks about truth as an uncovering. This in opposition to the standard view of truth as the correspondence of a statement with a state of affairs. Seems real right to me.

Categories: Uncategorized dw