Reading History

Richard Ostrofsky
(June, 1996)
Men and nations have been known to behave wisely, once
they have exhausted all the alternatives.
- Abba Ebban
It is easy, too easy, to ridicule the solemn search for a useable
past.
- Weimar Culture, Peter Gay

A techno-imperial civilization, self-confident and optimistic like North

America until recently, has little use for history. Its attitude, rather, is that
loyalties and grievances of the past are best forgotten, as so many obstacles
to Progress. There is a place for mythic history – the virtues and
achievements of the glorious ancestors – but critical historiography and
serious historical reflection are in bad taste to the extent that they expose
the lies and self-delusions on which that civilization developed, and on
which it rests. In any case, the very success of a civilization, as measured by
its assimilation or engulfment of alien peoples, renders its myths
increasingly threadbare. With the revisionist controversies that follow,
history loses its innocence and becomes a battleground in itself.
From the outset, the obvious motives for the study of history are
political: Together with language and religion, historical narratives bear on
our sense of identity – and are self-servingly selected to do so. Without
scholarly and critical exertion, what we remember of the past is comprised
of fragments from the most congenial accounts of past events. Blurred and
blended into one another, these eventually add up to an official myth of how
we came to be – and to be here – in the particular situation that we face
today. Such myths bear directly on our expectations, our sense of normality
and legitimacy, our political loyalties, our habits of obedience. As such,
control of the historical narrative becomes a matter for government policy
and propaganda, for factional elaboration, and for underground dissent.
Correspondingly, academic historiography – the writing and re-writing of
history – becomes a political arena where various groups and interests
contend for dominance.
The wars of interpretation never cease, and critical judgment is always
in part subjective. Yet it is wrong to lose sight of the distinction between
honest and dishonest narrative. Serious historiography, however partisan the
historian is more than propaganda. A propagandist aims merely to sway
emotion and judgment; a historian seeks to be truthful even in his values
and preferences – and in doing so, must attempt to do justice to the various
sides of a story, and even to viewpoints he dislikes. What he – and we –
must mean by “truth” finally, is the colloquy and clash of the significant
viewpoints, represented as honestly and fairly as possible.
Once we recognize that historical truth is polyphonic in this way – that it
speaks with many voices, so that the whole truth is never found in any
single version of a story – once we learn to pay attention less to the several
versions than to the whole pattern of argument – it becomes possible to read
history with some detachment.
Read this way, history does not merely strengthen our identities as White
European Males, or Marginalized Whatevers; rather it expands our
identities. We don’t become different than we were, but we become
intellectually larger than we were: we transcend ourselves a little. From our
comfortable reading chairs we contemplate the long parade of striving and
suffering, and learn to smile a little (as if we ourselves were above it all) at
the long spectacle of greed and folly. And we recognize finally that this
style of detachment is just one more of the stances in which men and
women (much like ourselves) have attempted to confront fate – a stance as
much a part of the historical record, and not much less or more effective in
the long run, than any of the others.
So what do we learn from history, finally? Probably not to act much
differently than we otherwise would do. We must still be what we are, must
still play for our own interests with the cards we have been given or can
grab. But from history we can perhaps learn to be a little less silly about it, a
little less prone to overplay our hands.