More notes on history and presentism
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17th century portrait of Clio, muse of history
Today, via my Facebook memories, I revisited this line from the great Herbert Butterfield’s great study The Whig Interpretation of History:
[T]he chief aim of the historian is the elucidation of the unlikenesses between past and present . . . It is not for him to stress and magnify the similarities between one age and another, and he is riding after a whole flock of misapprehensions if he goes to hunt for the present in the past.
A serendipitous quotation to run across, as yesterday I read this post from Alan Jacobs’s blog, an extract from the longer Substack essay “On Compassion” by philosopher Justin EH Smith. (The full essay is, unfortunately for me, paywalled.) Smith, as quoted by Jacobs:
History in general is easily manipulable, and can always be applied for the pursuit of present goals, whatever these may be. It has long seemed to me that one of the more noble uses of history is to help us convince ourselves of the contingency of our present categories and practices. And it is for this reason, principally, that I am not satisfied with seeing history-of-philosophy curricula and conferences “diversified” as if seventeenth-century Europe were itself subject to our current DEI directives.
One particularly undesirable consequence of such use of history for the present is that it invites and encourages your political opponents likewise to marshall it for their own present ends. And in this way history becomes just another forked node of presentist Discourse—the foreign and unassimilable lives of all of those who actually lived in 1619 or 1776 are covered over. But history, when done most rigorously and imaginatively, gives breath back to the dead, and honors them in their humanity, not least by acknowledging and respecting the things they cared about, rather than imposing our own fleeting cares on them.
Compare with this from Niall Ferguson, whom I quoted here two years ago in another post against presentism (having begun that post with the same Butterfield quotation):
In my view, applied history, making history, as it were, useful, is all about trying to learn from the past, to understand the experience of the dead, and see how it can illuminate our own predicament. The exact opposite approach is to say “Let’s take our norms and let’s export them to the past and wander around the early seventeenth century going ‘Tut-tut, wicked white supremacists’ at all the people we encounter.” But that’s become the mode in history departments all over this country to the point that they are deeply dull places that don’t in fact illuminate the past, they just import an anachronistic set of values and rather arrogantly condescend to the past.
(Side note: I’m struck that both Smith and Ferguson, in dramatically different contexts, used the seventeenth century as examples.)
All of this falls under the concept, which I borrowed from Chesterton, of “the inside of history”—a concern never far from my mind. (So maybe the above coincidence wasn’t so serendipitous after all.) I’ve written about getting at the inside of history, the charitable attempt to understand our dead forebears from the inside out, in more detail here.
What can we get out of history when we try to do it this way? A final line from Smith:
[A] thorough and comprehensive survey of the many expressions of otherness of which human cultures are capable in turn enables us, to speak with Seamus Heaney in his elegant translation of Beowulf, to “assay the hoard”: that is, to take stock of the full range of the human, and to begin to discern the commonalities behind the differences.
