Trueman Histories and Fallacies

Problems Faced in the Writing of History
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2080-8
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Recent years have brought about a crisis of confidence in the historical profession, leading increasing numbers of readers to ask the question: 'How can I know that the stories told by a historian are reliable?'   Histories and Fallacies is a primer for those seeking guidance through conceptual and methodological problems in the discipline of history. Historian Carl Trueman presents a series of classic historical problems as a way to examine what history is, what it means, and how it can be told and understood. Each chapter in Histories and Fallacies gives an account of a particular problem, examines a classic example of that problem, and then suggests a solution or approach that will bear fruit.  Readers who come to understand the question of objectivity through an examination of Holocaust denial or interpretive frameworks through Marxism will not just be learning theory but will already be practicing fruitful approaches to history. Histories and Fallacies guides both readers and writers of history away from dead ends and methodological mistakes, and into a fresh confidence in the productive nature of the historical task.

Carl R. Trueman (PhD, University of Aberdeen) is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is a contributing editor at First Things, an esteemed church historian, and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including Strange New World; The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self; and Histories and Fallacies. He is a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Trueman, Carl R.

Leseproben

One of the popular clichés of contemporary culture is that all truth is relative.As one pop song once expressed it,“This is my truth,now tell me yours.” This relativism has manifested itself within the historical profession over recent decades in terms of a rising epistemological skepticism, if not nihilism, that has tended in the most extreme cases to make all narratives simply projections of the present-day circumstances and opinions of the historian. This has been fuelled in part by the impact of some trends in continental philosophy and literary theory, and also by an increasing realization that the historian’s situatedness, choice of subject, selection of evidence, etc., all have an impact on the nature of the historical narrative that is being constructed. It is now generally accepted that no history is “neutral,”in the sense that it just gives you the facts.Said facts are selected and then fitted together into a narrative by historians who have their own particular viewpoints and their own particular ways of doing things. For example, if I were to sit down and write the history of the French Revolution, various factors would shape the final product: my nationality; my particular approach (am I interested in economics, or literature, or politics?); perhaps even my own views on whether monarchies are a good idea—all of these things will impact how I write and what conclusions I draw.After all,history is not simply “the past”but is a of the past by someone in the present; and a history of the French Revolution is a representation of the events to which that term refers by someone who has a variety of commitments that impact the historical task. As John Lukacs defines history,it is“the remembered past,”andas such is inevitably shaped by those who do the remembering.

In this context, claims to neutrality are vulnerable to the kind of criticism launched by Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, and which also resonates with the thought of those other great masters of modern suspicion, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx: the claim to neutrality is merely a specious means of privileging my point of view—disguised as the simple truth, so to speak—over that of everybody else. I have truth, pure and simple; they have spin, propaganda, hidden agendas, etc. And, even if we do not go all the way with the criticism of a Nietzsche or a Marx, we must acknowledge at the outset that history written without a standpoint is not simply practically impossible—it is also logically inconceivable.

But does this acknowledgment that no history is therefore require that all histories are, ultimately, biased to such an extent that we must acknowledge the validity of all? Is the history that says that John Lennon died in 1980 as valid as the history that claims that he was kidnapped by the CIA and is being held prisoner in Guantanamo Bay? Our instinctive reaction is to say no, of course not. But then the question must be asked: can we justify that claim? Why do we hold that the former is true and the latter false? If no history is neutral, then why can I not resolve the differences in these two narratives by seeing them in terms of the viewpoints of the two historians?

It is in this context that an important distinction needs to be made: the distinction between neutrality and objectivity. Only when this distinction is understood can we begin to see how we can acknowledge the valid insights of much modern and postmodern critical thinking about the practice of history while yet avoid the kind of epistemological anarchy that some would wish to see wreak havoc.

Objectivity Is Not Neutrality

In a popular book on the Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern literature, Peter Enns asks the following question:“Is there really any such thing as a completely objective and unbiased recording of history, modern or premodern?”1 The question is posed rhetorically—after all, what fool would today answer in the affirmative?—and it seems, at first glance, to be a good one; but it also contains a huge assumption that is highly problematic. Perhaps it is unfair to expect a scholar of biblical languages to be familiar with debates from within the historical field, but the assumption that Enns makes is that and seem to be two words for the same thing; and, of course, on the grounds that nobody today would argue for the unbiased nature of any historical writing, the implication is that nobody can argue for the objective nature of historical writing either. Yet most historians would, I believe, both acknowledge the biased nature of the history they write and also maintain that they aspire to be objective in what they do. As we shall see below, the fact that Richard Evans and David Irving approach the Holocaust from specific viewpoints and perspectives does not mean that their respective histories are equally valid; there are ways and means of comparing them that indicate that nonneutrality does not equate to solipsistic subjectivity.

In an impressive study of the American historical profession, Robert Novick has shown that the search for objectivity has been the chimerical goal of the profession for over a century.2 His argument is interesting, not least because he does demonstrate how the ideal of objectivity itself has been transformed over the years. In the late nineteenth century, it is arguable that the notions of objectivity and neutrality were essentially the same thing, with the terms being virtually interchangeable. Over the years, however, a gap has opened up between them. In addition, as at least one significant reviewer pointed out, there is an interesting disjunction in the book between what Novick and what he actually . On the face of it, his argument is that the quest for objectivity is a fool’s errand; yet this argument is made in a book which, for me as for numerous other historians, meets what we would regard as decent standards of objectivity. The book is surely not neutral, but its argument is testable by public criteria and demonstrates precisely the kind of method and approach to the evidence that could be described as objective. Sure, Novick has his biases; he is no more able to divest himself of his own prior commitments and opinions and analytical frameworks than anybody else. But he does not write gnostic history that only he and his followers can understand; his arguments are public ones that can be evaluated by others. In arguing against the possibility of objectivity, then, Novick has produced a first-class piece of objective scholarship, a point made pungently by one of his appreciative critics!3

At the heart of the historian’s task is this matter of verifiability and accountability by public criteria, and the criticism of Novick’s approach is to the point: there is a lot of postmodern rhetoric around about the possibility of history and of representing the past, but the bottom line is that most historians do acknowledge in their procedures and methods that such public criteria do exist, and that it is practically possible to make a distinction between a history that asserts that Henry V defeated the French at Agincourt and a history that would even deny the very existence of Henry V. Thus, to demonstrate what is at stake, let us now turn to an extreme modern example of history that is really no history at all.

The Ultimate Test Case: The Holocaust

It is, of course, one thing to play academic games with notions of history, neutrality, and objectivity, but quite another to see where this can lead in its most extreme form. The most notorious example of this is the phenomenon of Holocaust Denial (HD), an approach to the history of the Nazi genocide in Europe between 1933 and 1945 that dramatically downplays the number of people killed and rejects the notion that there was any organized and state-sanctioned campaign of mass murder. To many it seems incredible that such arguments could ever be made with any plausibility; but if historical knowledge is impossible in any ultimate sense, then the Holocaust too, vast and well-documented as it would appear to be, is also negotiable as an object of our knowledge and narratives.

Before we look at how HD functions in terms of historical method, a few preliminary comments are in order. First, it is important to understand that those who argue for HD are generally not radical postmodernists who are skeptical of all claims to historical knowledge. They may deny the Holocaust, but they do not deny the possibility of historical knowledge. Far from it. In fact, the very opposite is the case: they want to argue that the accepted narratives of the Holocaust are wrong, demonstrably wrong, and that their alternative narratives are demonstrably true—or at least more true and coherent as interpretations of the evidence.

Second, the issue with HD is therefore not that its advocates propose a postmodern method; HD is rather a challenge to the mainstream historical guild and its flirtatious relationship with postmodern skepticism. This is where the postmodern question of the nature of knowledge comes in. We must all acknowledge that, as no history is neutral, so no history of the Holocaust can be neutral. But does that mean we have to concede that all accounts of it are equally valid or deserve a place at the table? Is HD a problem of historical method, or merely...