Patrick Porter, a recent reinforcment for Oxblog, noted the other day that writing history is not as easy as it looks. He was referring to the recent practices of US historians, writing about US social practices of the past that have political implications for today.
Cynics have long known that ‘history is written by the winners’, but the 20th century showed that history could be used and abused to fight political battles that are in dispute. Unlike more traditional readers, I myself have no objection to writers of history using their works to advance an agenda, so long as they are upfront about what that agenda is. Much value can be gained by looking at an old question with the different view that a blatently political or social agenda can provide, regardless of whether or not I agree with that agenda. As a blogger writing for Samizdata.net, it should be obvious that I do have an agenda of my own- the advancement of liberty and against statist values. Given the nature of this blog, that hardly requries disclosure on every post.
The benefits of this are obvious- the reader knows exactly what the intellectual meta-context I am operating from, and can read into what I write to take from my writing what they will. I think that is far more honest then pretending an objectivity that I can not in all honesty claim.
I was moved to remark on this subject not by any historical event, but by a series of historical novels, Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series. For those that are not familiar with these six novels, Colleen McCullogh has novellised the fall of the Republic of Rome and the rise of Julius Caesar, based on the best historical information that she possesses, and uses her writer’s talent to ‘fill in the gaps’. While not to everyone’s taste, I have enjoyed the series and they have sparked in me a great deal of curiousity about classical history. However, I must raise the objection that McCullogh seems far too partisan towards Julius Caesar then seems to be reasonable. At times in the later novels, one is left wondering if this is not hagiography. What is the agenda here? Or is it just that with my libertarian meta-context, I have too much objection to someone who was ‘Dictator’?
Historians must interpret, so they have little choice but to advance views based on a set of presuppositions about the way the world works. Where I differ from you is that I don’t think they are entitled to a completely free hand to advance an agenda, provided it is declared.
I think that an honest historian – and this is what divides an historian from a simple propagandist or cut-and-paste annalist – has a duty to take note of evidence that is awkward for his interpretation, and to draw attention to it. He cannot in quite the same way as a scientist propose null hypotheses or experimental disproof, but he should be alert to, and accept the possibility of, being wrong about what the facts are and what they show.
History is most in danger when the writer sets out not to tell a story or investigate an incident, but to adumbrate some grand theory by examples from disparate places and incomparable sources so that it is difficult for the reader to challenge the interpretation, even if they recognise it as such. That’s why I find nominally accessible anecdotal historians such as EP Thompson so much more troubling than similarly ‘committed’ ones such as Christopher Hill, whose theorising is near the surface. Generations of students have swallowed Thompson’s implicit narrative of developing class-consciousness without questioning whether it was even meaningful to talk of a “working class” in the Marxian sense he assumes.
Concerning Coleen McCullough, I guess she was writing from the point of view of those times. For example, a discussion between Sulla and the good guy of the first book, Gaius Marius:
“”I couldn’t agree more,” said Marius. “However, there are three slaves who know a little something, since they’ve been giving you language lessons. Do you want them sold and shipped overseas somewhere?”
“Why go to so much trouble?” asked Sulla, surprised. “I intended to kill them.”
“An excellent idea. But you’ll lose money on the deal.”
“Not a fortune. Call it my contribution to the success of the campaign against the Germans,” said Sulla easily.
“I’ll have them killed the moment you’re gone.” (said by Gaius Marius)
A decision to murder three people with zero qualms or questions, as if it is obvious.
That’s the world she’s describing. And in this world being a Dictator is something to be proud of.
Guy Herbert writes:
I think that an honest historian – and this is what divides an historian from a simple propagandist or cut-and-paste annalist – has a duty to take note of evidence that is awkward for his interpretation, and to draw attention to it.
I would even fortify that. Here’s my version:
I think that an honest historian – and this is what divides an historian from a simple propagandist or cut-and-paste annalist – has a duty to seek out all the evidence that is awkward for his interpretation, and determine whether his hypothesis is, or is not, a load of bullshit.
Hence a genuine historian may start off with one agenda — then discover that her agenda was mistaken, and end up with something completely different: wie es eigentlich gewesen.
Having the intellectual ability and the moral courage to change your agenda mid-stream is what distinguishes the ideologist from the truth-seeker — regardless of political persuasion.
A historian, like any scientist, must follow the data wherever they go.
Oh, I like that. That’s very good that is.
I rather like the fact that McCullough doesn’t tend to fall into the trap of looking at Roman practices through modern eyes.
I doubt that even the Roman “reformers” viewed their slaves as anything other than property, and that’s likely because to the Roman point of view a slave was already dead… The only reason a slave was still breathing was because their master has decided not to kill them. They wouldn’t even view killing a slave as murder, just as I doubt destroying my computer could be viewed as murder. I’d just be choosing to destroy my own property.
Sure, this is all abhorrent to the modern view, but so were a lot of practices in classical antiquity. Infant exposure, for one. Or how about the concept of patre potestes? The eldest male of a family had absolute control over every member of his family, from his own children, to his nieces and nephews, to the wives of his sons. Anything they owned was his. He could beat them, kill them, even sell them into slavery, and that was his absolute right.
The fascinating thing for me, is that even as nasty as some of these practices are, other societies in the ancient world were far worse. Carthage, for one, practiced human sacrifice on a massive scale by tossing children into giant fires to appease Baal. Unsuccessful generals were killed along with their entire families. What I find amusing is how often a society like Carthage is portrayed as the poor, plucky underdog when they were every bit as ruthless, and probably more societally brutal than the Romans could ever hope to be.
‘history is written by the winners’ hmm
i think that is being changed to “history is written by whinners”…
Taking wikipedia for example, there is a concerted effort by a group to enforce a historical orthodoxy there of a particular political stripe, generally leftist in nature. In some ways it is subtle: whitewashing the pages covering left politicians, pundits and persons. Deleting pages covering subjects they don’t want in the public eye (such as the Republic of New Hampshire, Neo-Luddism, the Precautionary Principle, among others). In other ways it is vicious: conducting vandettas against wikieditors who post information that provides truer portrayals of real history, getting them banned from the system, etc.
History is written by all, but history that survives is only that which those with the lowest ethics are willing to allow to survive.
Hank Scorpio: “Sure, this is all abhorrent to the modern view, but so were a lot of practices in classical antiquity. Infant exposure, for one.”
Peter Singer’s doing his best to bring that back.
Meanwhile we have legal, medicalised, taxpayer-funded abortion, which has killed over 30m Americans in 33 years so that today’s slaves– illegal aliens–can be imported to keep wages down, while the sheeple gorge themselves on the modern equivalents of bread and circuses: junk food and TV. In our Pax Americana, we seem to be breeding political dynasties: the clans of Bush and Clinton, with their gaggles of clients and advisers and their huge spending to curry favor with the electorate.
Like Rome at the time of Caesar, the old vigor and participation of republican democracy is giving way to the rule of rich oligarchs as imperial overstretch threatens to empty the treasury and immorality saps moral fibre within the citadel.
Good points all Millard,
But *real* power is accumulated by the stealthy. Hence a Ted Kennedy, Harry Reid or John McCain can do more damage via the accumulation of power by way of seniority (and the financial perks that follow such) than some poor fool who as president, flashes with a short term brilliance but is gone in 4-8 years.
Uh-oh! Assertions of a causal relationship between abortion, illegal immigration and (by implication) capitalism! Shades of NWO!
ALERT! ALERT!LaRouche sympathisers on thread!! ALERT! ALERT!
Hey great website! This is a fantastic Blog. I look forward to stopping by often!
Take care,
Mark
http://www.americanlegends.blogspot.com
Patrick-
Read any tome about imperial Rome and you will find Millard’s post to be spot on and then recall
…… something about those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it……..
Also, I think you give the LaRouche types too much credit, vis-a-vis an ability to connect disparate issues to form a trend.
Mike Lorrey,
Very interesting, what you say about wikipedia. Is there a web site that keeps track of this? I would really like to know its spin and viewpoint to qualify what I read there.
Wikipedia is a very useful and comprehensive site, but banning certain topics! That’s a dead cert give away that something ain’t quite right. But their tech info sure is comprehensive and reader friendly.
So I ask the question that Claire Wolf’s been seeking an answer to since the early 1990’s, when she said “It’s too late to fix the system and too early to shoot the bastards.” So, is it time to start shooting, yet, or are we actually going to wait for them to actually change the title President to Emperor?
Is it actually that bad yet? Some are fighting back, different ways. Vermont towns are passing resolutions calling for Bush’s impeachment, several states have now passed eminent domain limiting constitutional amendments, and NH (of course) is rejecting the REAL ID Act and prohibiting its enforcement in the state.
As with the example of Killington, VT and its quest for secession from its state to return to NH (which originally chartered it back in 1761), we need to exhaust every possible means of seeking redress of greivances, oppose every vote, to establish as large a list of unaddressed greivances as possible.
Some, however, would argue that we have long since passed the point which offended the Founding Fathers (and those who led the Glorious Revolution, for that matter) so much about the monarchy’s behavior in those periods. There was about 90 years between the Glorious Revolution and the American one. We’ve gone 230 years since then (though Britain dealt with Indias independence, and the whole anti-colonial era by themselves).
Jefferson said every generation should have a revolution, feeding the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and patriots. Problem is, people have lost the guts to call tyrants by their proper name, and even when they do, they haven’t got the courage of their convictions to do anything about it besides rage and stomp around. Blackstone justified revolution in that kings or elected officials who exceeded their authority under the Constitution were themselves the true traitors, not those who rose up to remove them from the seats they abdicated by their actions.
“Treason doth never prosper. What is the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
The tyrants are the true traitors, yet while they gather the tools of tyranny about them, and practice the tactics of fear and intimidation against any legitimate authority capable of restraining them behind Constitutional fetters, those who would oppose tyranny suffer from fear of losing their privileges, wealth, titles and comforts of life and luxury. They suffer from fear of impotence, of an inability to oppose tyranny due to the differential of force between themselves as individuals, and the massed power of the police and soldiery of the tyrant. Too many wait too long before they reach a crisis of concience.
This is the nature of the “steamed lobster”: as others have commented on many a time before: by the time the lobster realizes he’s in danger, he is long since too late to do anything about staying out of the pot. Those who value liberty should be as allergic to heat as to being cooked.
I agree that wikipedia is really good for technical topics. But once you start dealing in subjects that are either overtly political or historical topics that have political implications or overtones, every leftie with an axe to grind pops out of the woodwork to nix your page or edits.
For example, I wrote a page about the neo-luddite movement, and all the leftie luddites jumped on it with a vote for deletion. I won that cause I rallied the extropian troops, but it ticked the lefties off.
I then documented on the page about Thomas Dodd (father of current Senator Chris Dodd) about how he based his 1968 Gun Control Act on the 1930’s Nazi National Weapons Act, how he used a copy of it he obtained as a Nuremburg prosecutor, had it translated by the Legislative Research Service (they still have records of it) and adapted to our legal system (all documented by the JPFO). Whew! There were lefty nuts going around investigating every edit I ever did on any page and reverting them, etc, instigating revert wars against me, they got a kangaroo court of hand picked mods together, and finally banned me from editing for six months.
Now, I’m trying to create a page documenting the history of the Republic of New Hampshire (Like the Republics of Texas, Vermont, and Hawaii, which all have their own pages separate from pages for the current day state), and there are lefties jumping out trying to accuse me of being a militia/supremacist nut, etc. They’ve got a vote for deletion of the page going. I’ve provided tons of documentation to support the page, so now they call it “original research”. They’ve got little rules to use as excuses for getting rid of anything they don’t like.
http://wikipediareview.com/
Appears to be a pretty good critic of all things wiki.
“A historian, like any scientist”: you gonna tell us about your controlled experiments, then?
Dearieme writes:
“A historian, like any scientist”: you gonna tell us about your controlled experiments, then?
Very much to the point — I should have left out the qualification ‘scientist’. Perhaps I should have written:
a historian. like any truth seeker, should follow the data wherever they go.
I stand corrected.
As far as Ms. McCullough’s portrayal of Gaius Julius Caesar, I think she fell, just a little, in love with her portrayal of him. It’s a frequent problem for biographers, and that it happened doesn’t ruin the series for the reader.
The best novels ever written about Caesar are Rex Warner’s incomparable ‘Young Caesar’ and ‘Imperial Caesar’. By contrast, I found McCollough’s series both ponderous and curiously insipid. Avoid Alan Massie’s version as well, though his ‘Augustus’ and ‘Tiberius’ are must-reads. And for whimsical cameo, nothing beats Talbot Mundy’s ‘Tros of Samothrace’ series, where Caesar appears as a unscrupulously scheming Hitler. Which, in the eyes of his victims, is likely spot-on.
But then, history is only read by losers…
At a guess the agenda is the old one of supporting the Popularies against the “aristocratic” Senate.
Basically Julius was a dictator, but these nasty conservatives forced him to it – and then they murdered him.
Of course the Senate was almost entirely made up of people who had served a term in one of the high offices of the Republic (offices for which the Citizens of the Republic voted). At the end of one’s time in a high office one became a Senator. And the Senate (like the councels of elders in some Greek cities) had the right to decide what measures were put before the Assembly (where the citizens voted by their tribe) and could organise the trials of officials of the Republic (including Generals).
Not how the Senate is presented of course – but then “the winners write history”.
Julius (like Marius before him, and the Gracchi brothers before him) did make a show of standing for the ordinary people against the old Patrician familes (although the he was from one of these families himself – although the Plabian Marius was his uncle).
But it was not the Optimates (as the foes of the Populari were called) who supported a policy of conquest and plunder in order to fund “bread and games” to buy votes at home. Nor did the Optimates favour allowing Romans the chance to buy provincial governorships and bleed the locals white (free from any threat of being put on trial by a Senatorial court).
It was Sulla who tried to put a stop to the public bread fed rent-a-mob who had come to dominate elections in Rome (citizens had to go to Rome to vote – so if there was a very large number of people kept, at public expense, in Rome they were likely to outvote citizens who had to come from far off in the country).
And yes Sulla was a killer – but Marius and the Populari were also killers and they did it first.
As for the worship of Julius (the butcher of Gaul, hundreds of thousands of men women and children died, and destroyer of the Republic), it is on a par with the worship of Pericles of Athens.
Anther man who claimed to stand agains the rich landowners. Pericles did indeed tax the rich and he taxed the allies of Athens in the Delian League (thus turning allies into ememies). All to buy votes with public works projects in Athens (such as temples to the very deities who the men of Athens had sworn by in their treaties of friendship with the cities they plundered) and to simply pay citizens to turn up to public events.
Get the picture?
Progressive politicians in our own time are the successors of the great Julius and the great Pericles. And their foes are corrupt old aristocratic land owners who get their money from the soil rather than by conquest or government contracts like the Roman Publicans so beloved by the Populari (oh dear I added a bit to what the books say).
Of course all of the above ignores slavery. But then all sides in ancient politics practiced it.
As legally minded Romans said – slavery is against natural law, but it is upheld by the laws of all nations, so it is also upheld by the laws of Rome.