The Historian-Pundit: Oxymoron or Moron?

The American Historical Association is encouraging historians to engage issues of public concern more actively. I am not sure I think that good historians are or should be particularly effective in such a role, and I fear that this may encourage historians to become pundits.

I strongly agree with the somewhat skeptical response by Tomiko Brown-Nagin at the Legal History Blog. Dr. Nagin, who teaches American social and legal history at UVA, writes that the historian may not be suited to advise on policy in large part because of

the "problem" of historical indeterminacy. Good history is multi-layered and may not provide definitive answers to questions posed. Historians may discover new facts or offer interpretations that illuminate public controversies, but they do so—at their best—through nuanced discussions of the past. Such nuance often make history less "usable" in the context of policy and adversarial legal settings—where clear answers and easily packaged explanations of complex phenomena have the greatest currency.

She does suggest that historians should play a corrective role of sorts in the public sphere.

When history is featured in policy battles or litigation, partisans much less inclined than professional historians to tell the truest story possible, given the available evidence, often are the first to trumpet historical arguments. Or, the partisan in question might be a professional historian, one who clings to the virtue of "objectivity" while engaging in partiality—excluding certain actors, viewpoints, events, interpretations, and analytical tools.

In these situations and others, perhaps it is irresponsible to disengage from public conversation. And one can appreciate the request to "say something historical!" and oblige. Context is everything.

Again I can't agree more.

I do not think historians ought to be saying things like, "History teaches us that [insert highly dubious claim]." There are fewer more misleading phrases than "history shows/teaches..." That really means, "I am using historical evidence [of whatever accuracy or truth] to argue that..."

I do think historians ought to complicate simplistic pictures and correct untruths, and that, if they feel so inclined and are capable, they ought to do so for the public.

This brought to mind a passage from Timothy Garton Ash's In Europe's Name (1993). He writes

…the end of Soviet communism and of the Cold War posed the largest questions to those disciplines, or branches of disciplines, that made some claim to quasi-scientific prediction.

Most historians make no such methodological claims. Some would agree with E.H. Carr that they should at least have in their bones the question ‘whither?’ as well as the question ‘why?’ Others would dispute even that. Yet in his wry way, Adenauer identified a real problem. It is surely reasonable and right for politicians to ask historians to make informed personal guesses–so long as everyone clearly recognises that they are just that: personal guesses. These guesses are related to the history they write, but separable from it. The history may be good but the guesses bad–or even vice versa. . . . [These guesses] can be overtaken by events in a way that the historical analysis cannot be. For the one thing historians can confidently predict is surprises.

I have to add that Garton Ash has been doing quite well for himself writing on current events for the Guardian.


Do read the rest of Dr. Nagin's excellent post. And a hat tip to Peter Haworth at FPR for bringing Dr. Nagin's post to my attention.

The most important election since... well, since the last one, I guess.

I find it distressing that grown adults exist who truly believe (a) their causes and candidates are uniformly righteous and/or (b) their opponents are unreservedly wicked. At the same time, I am a little jealous. A small part of me wishes I were capable of seeing the Democrats as god-hating Commies or the Republicans as power-hungry fascists.

That kind of clarity of vision has its attractions--else Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann would be jobless. It certainly tends to be more appealing than uncertainty, indifference, and confusion. Most of us would rather embrace a selective clarity, an artificial certainty. It's easier to get through the day. There are few things more central to one's identity than assurance that they are a bunch of idiots. Nothing brings a group together like the certainty that outsiders are the spawn of Satan. Hatred is better glue than love.

But that's the thing. The world is confusing. People are clueless sinners.

I'm going to vote, and I'm not happy about it. You also ought to go do your civic duty and vote for someone who will probably destroy your community, if they do anything at all.

Election 2010

I can't vote for anyone. Either I'm voting for the war-wild nationalists who want to destroy the earth--after conquering it for American freedom and all that--or I pick the selfish socialists who think that morality is encouraging people to indulge in their appetites no matter what. Not much of a choice there.

Both of them scramble like mad to assure us that our unchecked consumption need not slow or decline--the former say so because the earth simply cannot be used up, the latter because technology must provide new ways for us to do what we do. Limits don't sell. Jimmy Carter taught us that thirty years ago, and no one on either side of the aisle has yet forgotten.

Jason Peters over at Front Porch Republic recently wrote a brief blog about a New York Times article on alternative energy. "It is predicated," Peters writes

like much of our fantasy life, on the assumption that technology and energy are interchangeable.

(It’s true most of us know this assumption to be false, be we know it to be false the way we know that there’s no monster following us up the stairs from the dark basement, which is to say we don’t know it. Otherwise we wouldn’t be sprinting.)

I’ll grant that the article does attempt to focus on energy rather than on the gee-whizzery by which we get it, but still the underlying assumption is that when we finally crash into the natural limits of ancient sunlight, we’ll simply flip a switch and be on our merry way. We’ll hit the pedal and drive away from the wreck, this time on cotton (which isn’t cotton but “pure cellulose”) or lithium or Lucky Charms or used golf balls popping in popcorn poppers or hamsters running in their exercise wheels.

A second assumption at work in the piece is that of course we’re going to keep the world that we’ve built running. A third is that we’re going to keep it running the way it’s running–at current speed and across great distances: that is, according to specs.

I haven't and won't read the article, but Peters' analysis applies equally well to dozens of other articles on alternative energy that I've perused over the years. Do read the rest of the blog.