The Dismal History of the Present, Part I

What ever happened to history? Should we have been worried?

There was a brief window in which historical knowledge available in the modern West was dazzling, and that window is now closing. History is in a stark descent into a genre not far from conspiracy theory. Ancient and medieval histories had the benefit at least of being rich with metaphysical allegory, or being illuminating or exciting tales with robust literary qualities. The genre with which we are now left resembles on its good days something that we might call “social science with characters” and it aspires to a style of writing that we might characterize as analytical but readable. 

History as a genre has always had problems. It would take a long time to go back all the way to Herodotus—known since eras passed as the father of lies—but I will say as a very rapid summary, which despite its brevity is nonetheless absolutely true, that history as a genre has been doomed since the beginning by its proximity to and kinship with the expedient political myth. Aristotle’s admonishment that the philosophers are closer to the poets than to the historians was essentially correct. Historians, unlike the poets and the philosophers, have no access to any urgent or fundamental truth that they are able to express in language with the aid of some rare virtuosity; historians serve the grubby needs of a this-worldly polity as it persists inside of this-worldly history. Historians do this by telling tall tales that are expedient in various ways, and do so through cherry-picking from available evidence. 

One topic for a later installment of the Dismal History is how the historical sense of Western Civilization developed out of the ancient Hebrews, who unlike the culturally refined and intellectually sophisticated Pagans of ancient Greece and India saw some fundamental meaning in the comings and goings of the contingent world, rather than just the order of nature that stood beyond it. This is too great a topic for today, but it should just be noted here that this introduced into Western thought a preoccupation with history that is not just mere science or myth, but which is alongside those a prism of interpretation for politics, changes in culture, the progress of the arts, and most importantly ethical deliberation about what men ought to do.

Let us pick up the story with Ranke, perhaps the singularly most important figure in the foundation of modern history as a genre and a discipline. I wish it were other, that we might be able to say this about Gibbon or some such thing, but things are as they are. The Rankian standard for understanding history—“wie es eigentlich gewesen ist”—is a statement about the essence of the past—a statement that has been programmatic for generations, and within this statement lies a fateful ambiguity. We are supposed to understand things as they really were. Is this supposed to be a non-interpretive factual reproduction or are historians searching for the essence of the age itself? Surely, von Ranke was not recommending Hegel’s science of spirit. Additionally, he was no value-neutral fact-finder; he loved theater of the mind, and he valued stories of heroism very highly. His histories focus on the experience of participation in history, history being something real, verifiable, possessed of an innate spiritual significance and a plot structure that absorbs all parts into a total whole. Decreasingly in the modern West do we think of history as a thing that is real and has a nature all its own. Instead, we have decomposed it into the parts that we are ready to study; there is value-neutral fact mining from the dataset of the past, and there is narratology: the study of narrative structure.

In any event, the fact-finding mission of the modern historian was subtly ambiguous from the start—an ambiguity that could be overcome for a while by an avalanche of national archives opening as Europe entered political modernity. Hard-working empirical inquiry always pays dividends even if there is no sufficient theoretical basis. And so it did! For a while the dazzling brilliance of some Frenchmen and some Italians carried the discipline through long-duration macro-history and literary micro-history, which superficially served as a new front for the French-Italian rivalry, and seemed to provide opposite approaches, but which served in reality as complements. This era, whether it be characterized by Braudel or Aries or some other figure like Carlo Ginzburg, still had underlying deficiencies that would become intolerable at precisely the point when special insight and diligent, hard work left the conversation. Braudel was aware, for example, that the fantasies of the totalitarians were fantasies about history, and that they involved the belief that the totalitarians could and must re-engineer the future—also a topic for a future installment of the Dismal History—and so he was being self-consciously anti-totalitarian with his admonishment that history is ruled by a grand logic (comprised mostly of ecology and demography) beyond the will of any man. It helped that he was also a scholar’s scholar.

What was the problem? The problem was that history was increasingly practiced as the sociology of the past, a process that started around the turn of the 20^th century and that has continued apace all the way to the present. In this recasting, there are myths from the enlightenment that when truly believed convince the historian that he is obligated to root out backwards historical myths through the scientific study of the past, and to do so in a manner that drains from history almost all of its philosophical and literary qualities. From the French Enlightenment onward, history has been slowly recast as a critical study of a secret truth operative in history, and this is precisely the view that has come to dominate in the last century. In this view, there must be a new history that unveils the gnashing of economically-deterministic gears that secretly lie beyond the sight of normal people and old-fashioned historians, who as a rule share naïve views inflected by nationalism, religion and hero-worship. However, this practice of history has been tied up always with the history of post-Enlightenment conspiracy theory: That since the French Enlightenment modern progress and revolution have not gone according to plan, and so a vast economic and sociological conspiracy must transcend through modern society. A science of history will disclose the machinations of this conspiracy and right the course of modern history. It is because of this that we have ended up with a history that is always factually verified on some factual points here or there, but is pale and anemic as a literary enterprise—using anecdotes here and there to spruce up a tale that is essentially mechanical, maybe even following some normal people as a narrative device aimed at making the book readable—and is finally always a history that at base tells us a structural and economic conspiracy theory. This enterprise always discloses the evil nature of the times in which we live. Somehow, always, we are on the verge of a crisis—and yet its nature is not obvious to us?

And why do we always live in crisis times? Why do we need the historian of the present that allows us to see the conspiracy of domination that secretly structures our lifeworld? The classic answer would be expectation: That the world in which we live doesn’t meet arbitrary expectations that we invented of nothing. However, the true origins of this belief—that the present is at once fundamentally dark time and also indecipherable—this is to my mind an enigma. This is the topic for future weeks.