HY4101

In this post, I will be talking about the historiographical issues of 1. Responsibility 2. Truth and objectivity: Politics and the national narrative, 3. The community of scholars, vis-à-vis the earlier posts made by Aidil’s on the defence of a practically motivated history and Huanyan’s post on writing responsible history.

Is responsibility even an issue?

Huanyan makes the case that irresponsible history is still going on at the present, such as writing of fictions based on historical events. The seizure of the public by ideas, albeit erroneous, will always occur because it is only human nature to be captivated by flights of fancy and imagination. Perhaps this harks back to our distant past where our tribal ancestors readily believed on mythopoeic conceptions of history. But is that necessary harmful? No one is going around the Vatican (and I was there this April, so it’s a verifiable claim) tearing down the Church; rather tours like the “Da Vinci trail” are catering to visitors all around the world who would like to experience an alternative means of exploring Vatican City. It is here I agree with Aidil that these myths, or practically motivated history, like the Kerajaan arguably (and I’m not even in Malaysian class), do have a historical value, but one has to mine it by ‘reading against the grain. People go for the “Da Vinci trail” not because they believe in it, but because they can see and learn other aspects of Vatican City, otherwise unknown (such as the escape route that the Pope uses when and if the city is invaded. It’s really there).

I believe that majority of the public are not as gullible as they seem, and are able to differentiate an explicitly stated fiction from a historical work. Why? Because historical works usually, to infer from Aidil’s statement, does not sell. People, with the exception of perhaps history students, consciously do not want to buy works of history. So where is this perceived danger? And who perceives this danger?

No offence intended here, but just for the sake of an academic exercise: Is it not interesting that some Christians are threatened by Dan Brown’s writings or a ruling political party is threatened by streams of perceived ‘irresponsible’ history writing? If we move the writing of the national narrative beyond the Hock Lee Bus Riots (Remember the HLBR! The Mr Brown Show, http://www.mrbrownshow.com/2007/10/11/the-mrbrown-show-methinks-thou-protesteth-too-much/) or away from Raffles and his arrival in 1819, is it ‘irresponsible history’? Don’t we, to take Huanyan’s stand of responsibility, have a responsibility to the public to write as much and as insightful about the past as well? Isn’t discovering more about the past, besides the continuous reproduction of state sanctioned ‘safe for consumption’ history, our responsibility as historians?

As Huanyan stated, there is a law of unintended consequences. That is very true. A historical work, albeit the intentions of the author may be seized by politics or other agendas.  But the sense of threat and danger comes only from of the parties involved with vested interests. A historian does not write for the interests of a select group of people; he writes for humanity. Do not forget also, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Hence, I believe that irresponsible history is a non-issue in historiography. Here, I agree with Brandon’s (what did I learn in HY4101) stand: There’s no good or bad, right or wrong, responsible or irresponsible history. There’s only either a well- or inadequately-argued argument. It only becomes an issue when it is seized by greater movements outside historiography. Writing a ‘responsible history’ or a ‘state-approved’ version is definitely detrimental to the practice of history.

Truth and objectivity : Politics and the national narrative

As gathered from the postmodern movement, it is extremely problematic to advocate about a single truth or narrative in historiography, because history is either politicized or seized by political agendas, albeit many other reasons. Here I use the word ‘politicized’ to refer to the use of history other than that as an academic practice, necessary implied by the search for a use of history. To use Lemon’s definition of the SPH:

1) SPH makes sense of the overall flow of history.
2) Function of restoring, or confirming, a meaning to the present otherwise lost or at least jeopardized by an unprecedented flow of events.
3) Prediction of future developments.

Cleary, SPH’s are not just a description and to make sense of the human world, but also serves as other purposes. SPH’s are born of the period and seeks to address the problems of societies of the historical context then. This is why a succession of SPHs has arisen from Vico to Marx, and arguably from the Greco-Roman period to Vico as well. Especially so for the last three great philosophers of history, all of them offered a solution within their SPHs: An enlightened Monarchy in the age of Man, absolute Freedom achieved from the conception of the nation-state (in the French Revolution) and a communist revolution and utopia respectively. Yet why are they still accepted by rational and reasonable historians and scholars and exalted as classics? I will talk about this at the last part of my post.

So is history about Kings and Battles? Perhaps not for the past, but I believe it is so in the times we live in now, because human history has become so much more intrinsically linked to political developments than ever before. Anachronistic as it sounds, kings and battles more relevant now than in the past ironically because intentionally or not, a movement towards mass politics in history can be observed in history. Be it totalitarianism, liberal democracy or nationalism, politics pervades our lives. The construction of national narratives is the result of this politicizing of history.

We do recognize that the national narrative can be as valid as any other historical argument. That is not my bone of contention. It is as Lemon puts it, a practically motivated historical work, entirely valid. But the problem with the national narrative is that sometimes, it is not a historical argument but a pure nation-building exercise.  What we challenge is 1) the veracity of the narrative and 2) it speaks to represent a single truth in a postmodern world. I say again, not all national narratives are constructed this way. The Swedish national narrative (I was at the national museum in Stockholm) does not claim to speak of a single truth, but rather, is self-reflexive and suggests on its own the multiplicity of narratives. For example, they question the narrative of Sweden as a purely a descendent of a Viking nation, and suggest a national narrative that incorporates the narratives of recent immigrant populations as well. The “Singapore Story” on the other hand, does not even consider the possibilities of other narratives but actively seek to reinforce its one single version of history, an archaic practice in a postmodern world.

This raised the question of the possibility of writing an objective history. The debate between the positivist and the idealists is about whether we can ever reach objectivity at all. Recognizing my postmodern inheritance, I certainly do not believe that a historian can be purely objective. But that is not what I question. Objectivity as an ideal in no way suggests, and I believe that the positivists and idealists will agree, that we should stop pursuing objectivity. It is not useless or meaningless. As Lemon puts it aptly, it does not matter of the motives behind the scholars, but rather it is how well you do it (Lemon p. 323). And the veracity of the Singaporean national narrative, in textbooks and the national museum, demonstrates that a lot more can still be done. Yes, it has definitely improved since its inception. So does it mean we pat ourselves on the back and rest on our laurels? I say no. A practically motivated historical work will be invalidated by false accounts and distortion (Lemon p.329), and that my friends, as we’ve all learnt in our various classes, is still present.

Community of scholars

Hence, I disagree with Aidil that the ‘circle of esteem/academia’ upholds a parochial or idealistic notion of history. To reiterate the three schemata that binds a historian as stated by Dr. Mark:

1) The historical method is different from that of the scientific world.
2) The claims the historian makes must be verifiable i.e. substantiated with hard evidence
3) The work of the historian must be accepted, recognized and used by a community of historians before it is accredited the status of a ‘historical work’.

What David Irving transgressed is not the accepted boundaries of the historical discipline, but rather, moral and ethical boundaries at large; he was seized by the same unintended consequences and imagination of the public. The professionalism of historians would have allowed for the recognition of the validity of his historical method; equally so would the credibility of the argument be questioned by academia in light of other historical sources and works on the same issue. This should be our focus as historians, not the implications on politics or ethics.

It is not that we are self-reflexive because we want to please the academia; rather, we want to be self-reflexive because we are moving towards the goal of constructing a credible argument and interpretation of the past, through verifiable claims and a solid historical method. The result will then naturally be accepted by academia. Looking at the speculative philosophies of history by Vico, Hegel and Marx, it is not that what they argue for is absolutely true, respectively: recourse and providence, the journey of the spirit actualizing the idea of freedom and the communist utopia; rather it is their historical method: the master key, the dialectical method and historical materialism, that is reasonable, rational and hence convincing, that makes their arguments convincing.