What is History?
Historia Docet
Rev dear Rev: If it is true that a stopped clock shows the correct time twice a day, and that there are some hills worth dying on for moderne journalists like the boys of GBNTV, then what to say about the occupation of history by the Woke historians of late in California? Are they right about the ongoing march of history, or must we wait for another?
E H Carr's book What is History? is worth a jolly good read in this connection, as is the book by G K Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross, for different views on the role of the historian. For Carr, history is a collective scientific endeavour of gathering as much evidence from sources as possible and then coming up with a populist thesis confirmed by all those who read the finished product, something the Lucy Worsleys and Californian woke historians and the post-structuralists and post-moderns before them might quibble with, but for Chesterton the historian is not such an eirenical unity-pleading figure, but rather the eccentric living on the verges and edges and extremes of the local village who finds a new thesis about commonly shared beliefs and produces at first an eccentric work but then one that finds gradual acceptance, so this image of the historian is one that woke historians might like since they are often the minority voice at present, this changing too before long though in all likelihood. Einstein too would approve of the Chesterton model of thinking since he too suffered at the hands of collective science orthodoxies when his doctorate struggled for acceptance at the University of Berlin. He was failed at his exam. A difficult experience. One that he would care to forget.
Like Laurie Lee's book As I Walked Out one Midsummer Morning, the minority history view is one that involves a walking out and a walking away from a received Weltgeist, and yet this is the one that is gaining ground of late, so once we accept that minority histories are possible, and we take cognisance of the old adage of Churchill that "history is written largely by the victors", then we can see that in the cancel culture wars, what began as a simple act of ecumenism and prudence and political correctness became gender identity politics and then critical race theory and the tearing down of old emblems of colonialism and the slave trade, so it is interesting to observe how a simple universal rule of prudence metamorphosed into something quite big and general in society, and one which is very popular among university students.
No criticism by the way intended, since the victors do establish the science of history as Churchill explained, and in the cancel culture of modern university marketplaces, more and more students are going over to some basic and minimal political correctness - slaves did suffer - it is like a moral maze or labyrinth that the modern student engages in, in order to reach the Minotaur of Knossos at the heart of the system. Still the underlying question of this question, What is History?, is the one that begs for a different more moderne answer in the modern era, and there are a variety of philosophies that are gearing up to answer that question and provide new answers, and even one or two practical disciplines of prudence and political correctness and safe dialogue from the Hillary Clinton schools of thought that are also vying for acceptance in the marketplace of ideas. Once again all comers are entitled to air their views and set out their stalls in that Freshers Mete of the modern academy and the modern university, it is simply a question of which philosophy gains the upper hand of Reason Unaided that will win this ongoing and open-ended cycle of more and more debates, but all are welcome to chip in, and demonstrate their private theses chiefly by the intermittent stepping stones of a Wensleydale river crossing in the field of human reason. It promises to be an interesting next 6 months in the marketplace of ideas.