The Meaning of History and Life, Concluded

I have argued that we face unusual, even unique, challenges as human being and historians in the modern western world inasmuch as we both live in fragmented societies that lack cultural coherence and have unprecedented opportunities to understand and shape our world.

To take advantage of those opportunities, though, to make our way through life's complexities, past and present, requires two broad sets of characteristics or practices.

First, we must resist closure.  All of our histories are open to revision.  There is no such thing as a definitive history of any important event or process, just as there is no definitive understanding of what it means to be a good spouse or parent or citizen.  As we learn more, we usually get closer to the truth.  But the truth remains elusive.

To accept this uncomfortable fact of the human condition requires steering between the temptations of certitude and cynicism.  There are many people who seem sure of everything.  There are many of us who seem not to care about anything.  Our job is care and to act even as our understandings and beliefs remain open to revision.  That is not easy, and it is not how our ancestors lived.  But it is where we find ourselves.

The Meaning of History and Life, Part VII

Thus far I've largely focused on the many disadvantages that those of us in  the modern western world labor under.  Since we no longer rely directly on the support of others, we often struggle with loneliness and isolation.  Most of us are not born into a coherent culture.  We are deeply divided over such questions as abortion and universal health care, political questions that often relate to broader religious differences.  Unlike the great majority of other people in the history of the world, we are required to work out our own answers to fundamental religious, philosophical, and practical questions.

That said, we have two major advantages in that work.

First, we have unprecedented freedom and access to information.  The great majority of us  have the time and opportunity to learn a great deal about a wide range of topics.  To be sure, the great majority of us are more likely to watch TV and play video games or otherwise divert ourselves than to, say, learn Arabic or conduct a serious comparative study of Hinduism and Christianity.  But it needn't be so.

Second, we have a tremendous amount of freedom to shape our world.  For a few dollars a day we can provide a mosquito net a day for a family.  We can write letters to our elected officials.  Or start a political-action committee.  Or a non profit.  Again, very few of us make these choices.  But a few people do, and some of them have improved or at least shaped the lives of hundreds or thousands or even millions of people.  For most people in the history of the world, such an influence has been utterly inconceivable. 

The Meaning of History and Life, Part VI

So, then, we find ourselves in a bit of bind, adrift with our meager intellects in a sea of uncertainty, a fog of confusion, a culture and society deeply fragmented and divided over why we are here, let along how to live and act.  This is the classic existentialist dilemma.

History can help.  What we must do, after all, is to live many lives, to draw from other people's experiences enough knowledge and wisdom to be able to construct--individually and collectively--a workable world view.  What better way to understand what humans are--and are not--capable of than to study what they have done?  To study history is to study the human condition.  What we are left with is not exactly a road map to or dictionary of life.  But certain patterns emerge, certain broad truths become manifest.  Experience, travel, study all have the capacity to get us outside our narrow perspectives, to season and broaden our outlooks and sensibilities.

This intellectual process is demanding, to be sure.  But the alternative, to live thoughtlessly, pushed and pulled by the whimsies of mass culture, is hardly viable.  The way out of the pain, as they say, is through the pain.

The Meaning of History and Life, Part V

If historical study reveals that life in the modern western offers unprecedented comfort, it also suggests that we labor under peculiar burdens.

Chief among the historically unusual challenges modern Americans face is a lack of consensus on what people are for.  People in most times and places are born with a pretty detailed instruction book attached to their wrists on what is expected of them, how they should act in various circumstances, what their society would define as a life well lived.  The modern U.S. lacks that sort of shared understanding.  In fact we divide sharply on all sorts of important issues, from whom we should marry to how to treat children to when force is appropriate--and of course whether or not God exists and, if so, what he (or she) requires of us.

These many divides over key moral and religious questions not only lead to bitter divisions in our national and even familial arenas, they also create a great deal of stress within individuals.  Evolution has not really fitted us out to create a workable philosophy of life.  The societies we are born into are supposed to handle that.  But we find ourselves confronted with many competing world views--as well as the pervasive consumer-oriented ethos touted in countless advertisements that admonish us to "have a good time, all the time," as a band member of Spinal Tap put it some years ago.

Most of us bumble along as best we can, trying to "have a good one," as the saying goes.  But this leaves us feeling a bit like Homer Simpson, beleaguered and confused by why we are here and by what life throws at us, especially when we encounter--as all of us must--suffering.

With great freedom comes great confusion.

The Meaning of History and Life, Part IV

So far I have dwelled on how history reveals the limitations of historians (and other human beings).  Now I am going to turn to some broad generalizations about what history reveals about our current state, particularly those of us living comfortable lives in the western world.

Historical study and a bit of travel have underscored to me how peculiar the modern western world has become.  The scale of our affluence is staggering.  We live much longer and more comfortably than have any other people in the history of the world.  We also have tremendous freedom, are free to abandon our parents, spouses, even children--let along friends and neighbors.  Though we still rely closely on others for food, clothing, and a multitude of other requirements, that reliance has been obscured and monetized.  Most adults can meet the basic obligations of life pretty easily (food, clothing, shelter), and without having to rely on direct collaboration with others.  This means that we can, if we choose, dispense with family and friends altogether.  Most of us are free--again, if we choose to arrange our lives that way--to spend hours every day playing video games, volunteering at soup kitchens, watching porn, mastering a foreign language, collecting salt-and-pepper shakers, lobbying our elected officials, or training for tri-athalons.

From an historical point of view, this degree of freedom is bizarre.

The Meaning of History and Life, Part III

Historians are constrained not merely by their humanity, by their finite intellectual and moral capacities.  They are also limited by the nature of the evidence with which they work.

We commonly think of history as a noun, as everything that has happened.  But we are able to retrieve only a tiny, tiny fragment of what has happened.  Until recently, few human lives generated any evidence to speak of.  Even famous people, such as queens and generals, recorded just a small proportion of their thoughts and actions.  Those recordings, moreover, are always at least a bit biased, at least one step removed from what actually happened, are never quite the same thing as the thought or the action itself.  Most letters, for example, are written not to capture precisely what one thought or did, but to create a certain (usually favorable) impression.  And, as the saying goes, the winners get to write the histories, for the winners are most apt to have the opportunity to write, preserve, and disseminate their versions of given events or processes.

This is why books that set out to offer you the voice and perspective of the "subaltern," of poor people who lived on the margin, are often so deadly dull, a succession of statistics or abstruse theories--or tell us instead about what elites thought about the poor suckers they oppressed.  It is not that the authors would not like to quote the diaries and letters of enslaved Chinookan Indian women from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Rather, such documents simply don't exist.  The descriptions we do have of such women are both very rare and biased, coming from people who had neither much respect for of knowledge of them.

Pity the poor historian!  Not only is her vision beclouded, her hearing impaired; the fragmentary, dim figures and sounds she perceives are more often than not vaporous or false.

The Meaning of History and Life, Part II

Not only are we limited intellectually and morally.  We are also bound socially and by mortality.

All of us can count on decaying and dying.  This is, to be sure, a truism.  But it's one that modern western society does its best to disguise.  But there is no cheating death.  And death is a process.  Each day one is closer to it, and as middle age approaches, life goes South in many respects--literally as well as figuratively.  Our body, brains, and mental faculties decay.  Everything that seemed to distinguish us, to set us apart, gradually dissolves.  Aging humbles us.

We are also bound socially.  Foucault remarked years ago that eighteenth-century Europe essentially invented the individual.  And it may have been wrong.  Evolution, after all, is more of a social than an individual achievement.  Humanity learned how to speak, travel long distances, organize itself into family, kin, and other social groupings through shared rather than individual endeavors.  Again, modern life obscures this fact, tempts us to think that we are the captains of our own ship, autonomous actors, heroes in our own movie.  But our food, clothing, homes, ideas, and peak experiences are the work of many hands.  We are socially imbedded in all sorts of networks, seen and unseen.

In sum, history suggests not simply that the each human being is limited in her/his capacity.  Her/his very existence as an individual, discrete entity may be something of a modern misunderstanding.

Next week I'll examine the limitations of historical evidence and, therefore, inquiry.