STORIES ABOUT THE PAST P 2

Hello, welcome to part two of Stories About the Past. In part one, I tried to argue against the idea that history is just a simple list of facts that you memorize and then you know history, and you can use it, use those facts as incontrovertible evidence to win political arguments. There is no history that's just objective facts. There's only history that is the interpretation of a historian who chose the story, evaluated the sources, and then presented the story to you, and hopefully in the most entertaining fashion possible.

Now, it's time to talk a little bit about some of the interpretive frameworks for history. There are many. There are as many interpretations of history as there are historians. I've chosen out chosen a few famous historical styles of interpretation to talk about. It's not exhaustive. There are more, but this is something you need to know in order to read historical historical literature critically. You need to know something. You need to try to understand the interpretive framework from which the particular historian is working. So I want to introduce you, at least a little bit, to how to think about that and some of the possible interpretations.

This doesn't mean that you should, reading history critically and understanding a historian's interpretation, it doesn't, it's not a weapon to attack the historian personally, let's put it that way. There's so much of that in our political discussion today. Finding out that a historian is a Marxist doesn't mean that his or her history is a bad history. It might be very good. And so the aim of this isn't to help you attack the historian for his or her beliefs. The point isn't to say, "Ah, this history book is written by a Christian, therefore it's stupid." That's not my point. But a critical understanding of history, you have to under, for a critical understanding of history, you have to try to understand a little bit about the interpretive framework that a historian is using.

So let's jump in here. And by the way, these interpretations of history, they're a little bit chronological. They start with ancient and move toward modern, although that's not my aim. And another point is, I, I'll give a little criticism of each one, probably, but it doesn't mean that one's right and one's wrong, and one's better and one's worse. That's not the point either. So, um, let's get started here.

Probably heard people say, "History repeats itself." It's kind of a cliche, but kind of true. That is an interpretation of history. Probably it's the most ancient way to look at history. And that makes sense if you consider the fact that for most of human history, human beings have been much more tied to agriculture than we are. So, and people tied to agriculture, of course, are dependent on the seasons, and they have to come up with a calendar. And one of the things they quickly realize is that history does kind of repeat itself in the natural world, in the growing season, but also in the, in human life, with birth, childhood, reproductive age, old age, and death. And there seems to be cycles in history. And so there's nothing wrong with saying that, and to some extent, it's true.

I'm not sure how useful it is, and or how satisfying it is to most human beings on many levels. And again, this isn't to say that it's wrong, only to say that, well, historical interpretation is more than just looking for cycles. In one sense, it, some people might find it a little fatalistic. It kind of feels like the ancient Greeks see it as kind of fatalism, or think of Hindus in the constant recycling of birth, life, and death. Much of Hinduism is careful thinking about how to escape that because it seems endless and fatalistic.

But there's another thing too about cycles. There's a certain truth, but it's the kind of truth that doesn't, isn't particularly useful sometimes. Like everybody's heard of business cycles, and I'm pretty sure they do exist. And you can follow the trends of, for example, investments. Some of you probably study economics and investment. And we all know there's cycles. If you want to invest in, let's say, gold, or real estate, let's stick with one, gold. We all know it's up, and it's down, and it's up, and it's down. And we can kind of correlate those changes with what's going on in the world.

But, you know, the problem is with, with things like economy and investment, say you want to invest in gold, is that we know it's up, and someday it'll be down. And it's down, and someday it'll be up. And that, that's a recurring cycle. But we don't know the details. We don't know exactly when and how that's going to happen. And so the recognition that it's sometimes up and sometimes down, it's kind of, it's kind of like, well, it's sort of like, well, it's going to rain again. Sure, or it's going to rain. But when? We might be all dead before the next rain comes.

So, the, the usefulness of viewing history in terms of cycles, some, sometimes is problematic. It's, there's not a lot you can do with it. So maybe, um, on our, if we again, do this chronologically, the idea of the next idea is that maybe history is a story. Maybe it's not just an endless cycle of events that repeat themselves, birth, death, birth, life, death. Maybe history is going somewhere. We talked about this a little bit last time with the, the date system, the dates. Maybe it's useful if I can draw here. So maybe there's a beginning. And I think, let me just say, maybe the first people to conceive of history as a story, maybe it's the Hebrews. But they, they're one of the first people to come up with writing, and they're supposed to write down and remember their story. And there's a story. There's a creation story, and then there's progress along the way. There's Abraham, and he makes a contract with God, and God says, "You follow me, and I'll be your God, and you have children, and you'll be my people." And then there's Moses. He's got a contract with God, and God gives him the laws, and the people are more developed. And there's a whole story. One day there'll be an end. There'll be a final kingdom, and God's people will have a king, and justice will reign. And, and so the all of history is the story of God and his people, let's put it that way. And I think most people that think about it credit the Hebrews with that. If you look at the Old Testament, it's the story of history is all the story of God and his people.

And then along come the Christians. Saint Augustine, for example, is a famous Christian philosopher who has a Christian view of history. And so for the Christians, again, and think about the way Christian chronology works, it's everything is a, is a story about God and his people. Just now, the people have changed, and now Jesus is the center. And from here on out, it's the story. It's all really for Christians, the story of Christians and their God. And the Hebrew story is just kind of chapter one to that. To be entirely fair, the next step is Islam, um, because Muslims, as we'll see, uh, well, as, in the 600s, right, Islam is born, and the Muslims adopt Christian figures and Hebrew figures into their story. And so this just is moving on, um, and it's just history. It's still the story of God and his people, just the people, the people are different. They're Muslims now, and Christians and Jews are volume one and volume two. But the real story is starts with Muhammad, and that's all progressing toward an end, by the way. And that's really interesting too. I won't, don't think I'll take the time to go into it here, but that's an interesting part of history and the interpretation of history too. Uh, what if it's all moving to some kind of end?

Well, so the idea of history as a story, as the story of God and his people, moving from a beginning, a creation, to some kind of hopefully good end, maybe with some judgment, that was extremely influential. Now, if you look at history's all the histories in Europe, really, even through the Renaissance and Reformation, and it left a mark on people who weren't particularly Christian, as I'll talk about in a minute. So all started, and this is why, you know, people in Christian Europe, they'd write histories starting with Adam and Eve in the garden. And it, because it was important to them that, and then the whole aim of the historian is to, to show their place, or the place of their people, or their kingdom, or whatever they're interested in, in that timeline. So if you pick up any history for about a thousand, fifteen hundred years, or maybe until the Enlightenment in Europe, it's very centered on a Christian perspective. And people think that they can see the hand of God working in history.

Well, anyway, talked about Augustine of Hippo, but, and the Christian view, and the Hebrew view, and the Muslim view, the story of God and his people. But let's play a little, let's put some variation into that. Now, and we'll go back to the idea of the story. But maybe the story is different. Maybe there's still a story. Like, oops, sorry, there we go. Like, if this makes any sense to you, maybe there's still a story. But maybe it's not quite the story we thought.

So a couple things happen, and I just want to describe them briefly. I teach other classes where I'm more specific, but there's the Enlightenment, an important intellectual movement in Europe in the 18th century. And the Enlightenment, part of the idea of the Enlightenment is about the idea of progress through education and learning. It's very, in some ways, optimistic. I mean, you could argue that point, but in many ways, the Enlightenment is, it's a new way of looking at learning and human knowledge. Is very optimistic about the ability of human beings to improve themselves, especially through education and study and science. It's not an entire rejection of Christianity, but it does kind of take the traditional, it, it's, it rejects for the most part the traditional Christian view. It's not just simply the story of God and his people, but there is a story there.

And then there's the French Revolution in 1789, and that's a really complicated affair, and it's not entirely successful, but some new ideas are planted. Your 18th century and 19th century liberalism, and there's some really powerful ideas there about political participation. Let's just make it short and say, well, things, something we'd call something like democracy, and constitutionalism, and the right to vote. And it's not entirely successful, but it does plant some those ideas deeply in the minds of people. And so if you think about it this way, I think you could argue that in the, the 18th and then the 19th century, pretty much throughout Europe and America, it is the story of the broadening of political participation. More and more people are allowed to vote and participate in politics and have some influence.

And then there's the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. Now, there's a lot of different ways to see the Industrial Revolution. A lot of people don't see it as a good thing. But, and again, I'm not being very specific here, but one way you could look at it is, well, the way we, a lot of people look at technology today, it's making the world better and easier and more efficient. And that's exactly how a lot of people in the 19th century looked at it. I know a lot of people think of child labor and dirty factories, but a lot of people at the time saw the inventions as conveniences that made their lives better and easier.

And so what I'm getting at with these three things in the 18th and 19th century, and I'm being pretty vague, but it was kind of easy to look at history for some people and say, "Look, history, there is a story there. It's not necessarily God and his people, but it's the story of human beings and their progress." And so we kind of have this same scenario where we start as primitives, and we get better and better and better throughout time. It's a positive story of everything is about human progress, politically more sophisticated political systems that allow more participation, widening education, and industry that makes our lives generally easier and makes us wealthier. That's a really influential perspective on history. A lot of, I think of history, I think a lot of people still view history that way. A lot of the discussion about science is like this. People love science, and people think that, you know, it's the, it's the key to human history because we solve all of our problems through science. And we just, and by the way, I share a lot of this as well. When I look at my own lifetime, and I look at all of the inventions and the technology, and I think about the things that I have, especially everybody thinks of electronic things, it's incredible what I have, and I, what I didn't have when I started my life. But not just electronic things, just products that I have available that are cheap and easy to get, that when I was 12 years old, I never thought I'd see in my life. So it's easy for me to say, "Yeah, we are getting better."

And again, my point is not to say that that's wrong, because there's something deeply powerful about that, and probably in certain areas true. On the other hand, there are some issues. A lot of people began to question that in Europe, particularly around the time of, let's say, 1914 to 1918, World War I. Just after that age of progress. And then, uh, you think of 1914, World War I breaks out, and all of that industrialization that made people's lives better, well, it also produces machine guns and poison gas. And the most civilized, most in their view, civilized, most educated parts of the world decimate each other for four years and kill something like, depending on how you account, 18 million people. And so that same wonderful science and technology that gave us all of those great products and made us richer and saved lives and raised literacy rates, also, you could use it to kill millions of people in four years. And so people began to question, are we really moving toward progress?

The other issue with progress is, progress for whom? Because while this is going on, of course, there's imperialism. And while World War I is shocking, how many people were lost in the Belgian Congo because of Belgian imperialism, or German Southwest Africa, or India? So progress for whom? And also toward what? It assumes that we all agree on what progress is. It's another issue. And then one more thing that I'll say, and I think it's a big problem for a lot of us moderns, is that so we, we think we're so arrogant, right? We think we're so great. Maybe somebody will be viewing this in a later year, but right now, it's 2020. And so this very, this view of history as progress tends to look back at the past because, and say that it's all stupid, right? We love to do that. Everything everybody thought in the past was stupid because now we have the latest information. And there's this real bias toward the latest discoveries, the latest information, which is all well and good, except that someday it's going to be not 2020, but 2050. And so all the things that we're so sure about that were right, and everybody else before us was wrong, well, someday somebody's going to look back at us right now, who we and the stupid things that we believe, and we thought we were so smart in 2020, and it's all going to be irrelevant and stupid someday. And so that's, for a historian, that's a, a problematic way of looking at the past. Everybody that said something before 2020 wasn't irrelevant and stupid. A lot of times they were really smart.

So anyway, um, it's not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with the idea of progress, and it's, as I said, it's a very, very influential work, and I think modern people are very influenced by it. But it's also worth thinking about some problems with it as well.

Another hugely influential way of looking at history, especially in Europe, is this: all history is the story of the nation. In Europe, this is a particularly big issue. So, and again, it's basically the same time as the Industrial Revolution, that in Europe, there's a new conception of nation. And that's very confusing because that's a really old word, and it's meant a lot of different things in different eras. But it has this kind of modern conception. And I don't know if I really want to get into all of that. But the modern idea of nation is probably born mostly in the 19th century. The two famous historians, Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm, are the most famous figures that historian scholars that argue that basically the idea of the nation, it's a pretty new idea, comes from the 19th century, the modern idea of nation. It, but it did spawn a lot of history, a lot of history, and still, in fact, a lot of textbooks are written from this perspective that all of history is about the story of the nation. It's not about tribal people. It's not about an empire or like the Roman Empire. People are organized in lots of different kinds of cultural groups, not just the nation. But it's the, but the 19th century, for many, it's the history of the nation. And so historians wrote fantastic books. They're very good, by the way, many of them, very detailed. And they traced the past, the nation. It has to go all the way back into at least to the tribal people in the Middle Ages, the Anglo-Saxons, they have to be the embryonic English people, the Germanic tribes, the Slavic tribes. Now, today, most modern historians would say they're looking for something that just simply wasn't there, or it didn't exist. But there, my point is that a lot of history is written from this perspective. It's, it's an interpretive perspective. And it's really, really important for the way a lot of history is written, even to this day. It's still very influential. I mean, in some sense, it's good because it kind of questions too, the idea of progress, right? The idea of progress is that we all agree, and we're all heading towards some kind of universal good, that some, there's some good for all humans everywhere. And the idea of the nation kind of challenges that, says, well, no, wait a minute, we don't all agree with what's good. We're divided into these groups, and they have their own ideas about what's good. And so there's something kind of, there's a kind of good corrective about that. On the other hand, it's also a very influential, influential interpretation that you need to be aware of.

So maybe there's lots of examples I could give with this. A lot of textbooks even today are written from a very national perspective. But maybe one thing we can talk about is the way archives are organized. So archives, before about the 19th century, and it happens in different places at different times, but the archives were never organized to tell the story of nations. So the keeping of records, there weren't national archives. Never. Local aristocrats had their own archives. I've been to some of them in Europe, and they were taught, designed to tell the story of an aristocratic family. Often they were very, by our standards, cosmopolitan, by the way. Uh, the church had different churches had their own records, records that they kept, historical records. The Jesuits, they're very famous records, but they're not designed to tell the story of the nation because nobody thought of the world like that. They were designed to tell the story of the Jesuit order, or a particular church somewhere, or bishopric. Towns have their own archives to tell the story of the town. So nobody was trying to tell the story of the nation. Nobody cared. Nobody was interested.

And then in the modern age, archives are organized around the idea of the nation. And so literally, the old archives are ended, they're canceled, and the documents are moved into these big national archives, and they're catalogued in such a way to tell a particular story. And so it's kind of misleading when you go into the archives because they've all been rearranged. Some things that were thrown away that were deemed irrelevant because they're all arranged in a new way to tell the story of the nation. And so they call them national archives, and they tell a different story. They don't tell the story of a particular noble family in Europe that probably didn't ever even consider itself part of a nation, or at least not in the modern sense, or a church chapter, or a town. Now they're all reconstructed and rearranged to tell a different story, the story of a nation. And this happened throughout Europe in the age of nationalism in the 19th century. And it's really important to understand if you pick up a book, especially written in Europe in the 19th century, that this is the interpretive framework on which it's based. And if it's such a book written by one of the great 19th century historians, um, it's bound to, part of what it's going to do is trying to find, it's going to try to find the national history and to place it as deeply into the Middle Ages and as far back in time as possible because that's the mission of a lot of these nationalist historians. Every European national cultural group has them.

So anyway, the story of the nation is hugely influential. In fact, one of the most influential interpretations because 19th century, this is the time when you first had really professional historians, and chairs of history are founded at various European universities, and the whole purpose is, the purpose of them is to tell the story of the nation.

Well, let's move on to the last one. Economic determinism. This is very modern. And so this kind of historical interpretation will, for a lot of you, be easy to understand because a lot of our public discussion occurs within this kind of interpretive structure today, in, in some form. So it has to do with the writings of Karl Marx, who is a very complicated thinker. You should read his books, Capital, for example. It's very complicated, and I'm not doing justice to it, I'm sorry, I'm simplifying it too much. And when I say this, I know all of the simplifications that I'm making. But Marx says that what really drives history is basically economic interests, economic motivations. It's a little more complicated than that. It's the means of production, in the Marxist vocabulary. But basically, economic interests, which, by the way, sounds so, so modern.

Um, you know, today, well, I'll leave the critique for later. Philosophically, let's see if I can do this. Marx is a materialist. Now, sometimes we use that term to mean like greedy. That's not what we mean here. He's a philosophical materialist. He believes that material is the ultimate reality, and ideas are secondary and derivative to material interests. Um, easy. Everybody knows this is easy. Everybody knows Marx's famous quote, "Religion is the opiate of the people." So for Marx, religion is not really a grand idea. People might believe it, but they don't understand really why they believe it. It's not really the point. It's an opiate, basically used by the ruling classes to keep the proletarian classes, the working classes, quiet and subservient. It's an opiate. It puts them to sleep and makes them happy. And so religion is the opiate of the people. There's no great ideas there that you should really consider. They're not important. All that is important is how religion serves the material interests of the ruling class. That's important.

In the modern world, and no modern historian can ignore the Marxist interpretation of history. There's no way around it. You have to take it into consideration. And it's a very, very powerful way of thinking about the world. In modern political public discussion, we always take into consideration people's material and economic interests. I'll use a famous example from American history. Take the Constitution of the United States. So there's this historian in 1913, Charles Beard, who was influenced by Marx. And he writes this kind of controversial interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. So for a lot of Americans, the Constitution is about the big ideas, participatory government, rule of law, separation of powers. And the way you've, people talk about the Constitution in the United States, you know, the Founding Fathers, and there are intellectuals who study the ancient Greeks and Romans and have these high principles. And Charles Beard comes along and says, "You know, we need to study their, the Founding Fathers. We need to study their economic portfolios, and we need to look at their economic interests. Not always believe their big ideas, or they might have their big ideas, but that's not really what's motivating them. What really motivates them is their economic interests. And they're all wealthy landowners, and, and they all loaned money to the revolutionary cause in the revolutionary war. The Constitution's only written a couple years after the revolution against Britain. And so they're wealthy landowners who want a stable, conservative society to protect their own material interests. It's not just a, don't, it's not just about the big ideas. Don't just believe that they're altruistic and they just have big ideas and that's all there is to it. No, they have economic interests, and in a way, they formulate those ideas to protect their own economic interests." That's a powerful, powerful materialistic view of history. And, uh, very influential. And you see that all around you today. And I think it's easy for all of us to understand, in a way, because it's just part of the air we breathe, in the water we drink. And there's no way around it. And it's important. No historian today simply assumes, you just can't get away with assuming that there's no material or economic interests involved in or behind what people say. And so there, it has to be recognized and taken into account.

However, I would say this. I don't think that this is an adequate explanation of all human behavior. I, by the way, I'm a, in a way, a fan of Karl Marx. I, I like Capital. I won't get into it here, but I think he explained a lot of things about the Industrial Revolution very well. But I'm not a materialist, or at least not an unbridled materialist. I do think human beings have ideas. I think some of the ideas in the U.S. Constitution are very good ones, or the French Revolution. We all have material interests. So what? So what the American Founding Fathers were wealthy landowners? They probably did partly design the new system to protect their own economic interests. So what does that mean? They didn't have any ideals? Does that mean that ideas are useless and meaningless, and that really they only are about protecting material interests? You have your own economic interests, by the way. Not only rich people have their own economic interests. Poor people do too. They better, especially as you get older and have a family and have little kids to take care of, and people depending on you. Or there's nothing bad about having material economic interests. I hope all of you do, and I hope you look out for them. And probably as human beings, I think probably we do kind of construct our ideological world sometimes to kind of protect our own material interests. And I do think we should be careful about that too. I think that sometimes we lie to ourselves and say we really believe things when we don't. We're just trying to protect ourselves. And finding ways to become more honest about that, let's put it this way. Pretending that you don't have any material or economic interests is not a way to become more honest about that. Admitting them is how you're more honest about it.

But, but so what? So what you have career interests? You have economic interests? You have to earn your daily bread. Does that mean you have no ideas? And that ideas are unimportant? And then you don't believe things? Because we do have record in history of people who are actually willing to give up their lives for their beliefs. Marxists, by the way, who are willing to die for their beliefs. And so if you die for your belief, then what does that get you? Right? But we have people like that that are willing to sacrifice material interests for their beliefs. So I would only argue that I do, there's no way around the, around economic determinism in, as a modern historian, you have to consider it. It's very important. You have to consider people's financial and economic motives. I don't think that's a good reason to stop listening to their ideas, though. Sometimes we get so caught up in talking about people's economic agendas and social agendas that we don't listen to their ideas.

And that brings me to the end. There are lots of ways to interpret history. And so I want you to be aware that all historians bring some kind of interpretive framework to their understanding of history. And that should give us a little bit, make us a little bit humble. As I started saying at the beginning, the aim isn't to find out the secret agenda and then criticize the historian for his or her secret agenda. It's to understand it, and then to evaluate it. And one tool that helps you understand it is to understand that history is interpretation. And so when you find out a historian's point of view, it helps you critically evaluate that history. And his histories written from many different points of view are very good histories. And I would argue that's what has the potential to make history good. The fact that, and I think, and that's why I would say it's very dangerous, and I said this in part one, it's very dangerous when only one particular pre-approved group gets to tell us what the real history is. That's dangerous because they have an interpretation too. What we need is people with lots of different points of views who can have an open discussion about the past and criticize each other and critique each other. And by doing that, we help each other because we all tend to see only what we want to see. But, and that's the beauty of having other people, because they tend to see what they want to see. And only when we put ourselves together, and sometimes confrontationally, sometimes we argue, but only when we put ourselves together do we ever have any chance of getting anywhere close to something that you might call truth in our stories about the past. Thank you for your attention.