What is History?
Why Ideas and not Events Should Take Center Stage
At some point during my education I was told that history, as opposed to pre-history, began with the invention of writing and essentially consisted of a record of important events that had transpired since then. If you’re a certain age, you likely heard something similar. And as in my case, the fact that your teachers started out with this definition of history likely had some important consequences for the way they taught it to you.
When you think of history as a written record, you reduce it to an inert catalog of events, of “names and dates.” You are trained to ask “who, what, where, and when?” but probably not “why?”. And eliding the significance of events prevents you from thinking about how that significance can vary depending on who you ask. History is presented as an objective set of facts rather than the contested narrative it has always been. It’s just that the winners of the contest are the ones who get to pretend their version is the objective one.
I’m a lawyer by training, and I’ve been a stay-at-home father for nearly ten years. I know all about how the same events can appear very differently through different sets of eyes, and different sets of interests. Whether it was the litigants whose opposing briefs I had to read and analyze, or my own twin sons coming to me to adjudicate a dispute, I always knew, not necessarily that truth had to lie somewhere in the middle of their warring versions, but that at least I needed to consider those versions carefully before I could hope to guess what the real truth was.
Now I am in the process of getting certified to become a high school history teacher, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how my (hopefully more mature) understanding of history differs from what I was taught as a child. For me, history isn’t so much a matter of record as of reflection. Some think of history as the collective memory of a people, but that analogy is only apt if you realize that memory itself is less recording than reconstruction.
Thinking of history as reflection on the past, as the abstraction of events into concepts and narratives that structure our experiences, offers a more dynamic way of looking at our species’ journey through time and space. That means pushing the advent of the historical era back much further than the invention of writing some five and a half thousand years ago. I would go back to the first signs that humans could think abstractly and represent their shared thoughts in shared spaces. A good candidate might be the earliest cave paintings, which pre-date the earliest fully-fledged writing systems by 30,000 years.
I like this idea of defining history as the era of shared abstraction for two reasons. First, because I think it constitutes a more logical delineation between the era when our species was simply one of many life forms on our planet, and the era in which we came to be the dominant species. By the time writing was invented, we were already well on our way to either subjugating or marginalizing every other species of plant and animal. The real fork in the road for us came when we acquired the ability to transcend the categories of thought prepared for us by evolution, and to ask what it all means.
As I wrote in Truth Evolves, there are plenty of intelligent animals on Earth, with “the ability to really look ahead, think back, make plans, and consider a variety of courses of conduct and their consequences. Yet in spite of their intelligence, they are still very limited in their ability to conceive of how the world is, or how it might be. They operate within the confines of their own species’ intuitive ontology, and even the most intelligent, or the most self-aware among them, could not think of asking, as the Buddhist philosophers did thousands of years ago, whether the objects of experience, and indeed their own selves, were really just an illusion.”
The second reason I prefer this definition of history is because it places ideas at the center of history, as opposed to allegedly important individuals and their exploits. In his novel War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote: “In historical events great men — so-called — are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself.” To think of history as a catalog of events is to miss that those events, and the famous people associated with them, are just the crests of waves, but all the water under them are the people who bring those events about, and the tidal forces pulling them are the ideas that inhabit their minds and give meaning to their actions.
As I embark on a new career as a history teacher, this is how I want to focus my lesson planning, so that students come away from my class with the feeling that history is an unbroken dialogue about the meaning of existence, stretching back for tens of thousands of years, and in which they will be called to participate. I will consider myself successful, not if they can answer a bunch of multiple choice questions about past events, but if they can intelligently discuss contemporary political, ethical, and epistemological questions by drawing on evidence from the past and demonstrating its relevance to the present.