From Bede to Bloch
A couple years ago, I wrote an essay that considered the work of the modern historian Marc Bloch (who was a hero), as described in The Historian's Craft, and the work of the medieval historian Bede. Here's the conclusion:
The powerful intuition of students of history, amateur historians, and the general educated public has always been that history is a "mirror" of present society. Beginning with the decline of God (who had kept Descartes' evil demons at bay), many thinkers in the nineteenth century began to doubt both the existence of objective reality and our ability to perceive it if it does exist. This extreme skepticism led some scholars to completely solipsistic worldviews (like existentialism or Freudian analysis of history, for example). On the other extreme, this skepticism was wholly rejected by some theorists like Marx who held that we could measure the arc of history using economic rubrics alone. Against this backdrop, historians had to find a way to justify their discipline both to themselves and to others. Some turned to very narrow specialization in an effort to make history more like a science. In fact, there is a direct echo of this sentiment in Marc Bloch, who very much wanted to consider "history" the "science of men in time." If there is one thing that scholars have learned from twentieth-century science it is this: even overwhelming intuitions can be wrong, the paradigm case being Einstein's special relativity. But even with such a powerful injunction away from assuming the historian can purport to learn how the world "really was" at a certain time, it is nonetheless overly cautious to treat all societies (or periods) as if they happened in a vacuum. It would be overstating Bloch's case to accuse him of doing this, but it is clear from his fear of seeking origins that he is more sympathetic to this counterintuitive idea than he is to a sober application of the traditional norms. Bloch's skepticism of our ability to make objective judgments about history extends beyond the idea of origins:
Are we so sure of ourselves and of our age as to divide the company of our forefathers into the just and the damned? How absurd it is, by elevating the entirely relative criteria of one individual, one party, or one generation to the absolute, to inflict standards upon the way in which Sulla governed Rome, or Richelieu the States of the Most Christian King!
And it is here, finally, that the medieval historian (Bloch) can learn from the medieval historian (Bede): humans are not so incomprehensible that we of one generation cannot learn to consider the values of another's. There is nothing that is so alien in human experience that we cannot, with open minds, learn to grasp. We may never appreciate the desire to enslave Africans and abuse them as human chattel, but surely, as uncomfortable as it would make us, we can understand that desire. We cannot be compelled to sacrifice our own children to Baal, but we can find powerful modern analogues to approach an understanding of how Carthaginians would be driven to do so. Unlike Bede, we may not be able to apply a stable moral framework (i.e. the relatively stable absolute morality of orthodox Christianity) against the deeds of our predecessors, Bloch is right in that; but this should not mean that we cannot purport to understand our forefathers nor should it mean that we cannot trace our own origins to those very slaveholders and child-sacrificers. It is, after all, not just to them, but also to the people whose values we still share that we owe our present. It is no wonder, after all, that Joseph Strayer, who obviously admired Marc Bloch, wrote the introduction to the English translation of The Historian's Craft. Indeed, Bloch is right to describe the ideal historian: "This faculty of understanding the living is, in very truth, the master quality of the historian." In order to understand the living, Strayer and the overwhelming majority of historians before him (and a growing number today, even) are right to seek the origins of our social structures, biases, institutions, and cultures in those of our past.
Labels: europe, historiography, history, medieval
