The Cursed Question

If Clio is your girlfriend, you'll be asked from time to time, "Why her?"

"What do you like about history?" "Why do I have to study history (the perennial question of hundreds of thousands of ninth graders)?" This question is absolutely tortuous to most people who love history. Why? Question, why do I hate thee, let me count the ways.

First and foremost, both the value and interest of history is so self-evident to those who love it that there is always an instant tinge of sadness that it has to be explained. Imagine that a friend who has a six-month-old asked with total earnestness, "What are the reasons that people like their kids?" You can explain the wonder of making new life with another person, the awe at having someone 100.0% dependent on you, but at the back of your mind you'll be thinking, "Why am I having to explain this?"

Closely related, because the pressure is on to justify something tremendously important, there is almost always a sense of inadequacy to the task: too terse and uninspiring, rambled too long and reinforced the stereotype of the history windbag, too narrowly defined or idiosyncratic. I know I always feel a certain burden not just to answer the question, but to inspire the questioner to feel the answer, to recognize that ignorance of the past is to be a kind of orphan. Thus the tepid, "Okay" in response to my explanation will always sting.

Then there is the inner turmoil. Any historian simultaneously knows that 1) everyone should know history for rock solid reasons of virtue and 2) the love of history, almost like romantic love, is animated by matters of personal preference. In the course of answering this dreaded question I often realize that why I should study history and why I actually study history are quite distinct.

This naturally leads into the affliction I'll call the embarrassed romantic. To anyone who continues the slog through academic history, his ability to keep putting one foot in front of the other has to be at least partially attributable to an idealism that makes him squirm to expose nakedly to the acid of cynicism. My canned bit on this is that I hope that when people see the chain of some 200 generations of their family going back through the 5000 years of recorded human events into the mists of prehistory they have a greater reverence for the links that came before and will come after them--we're just one single link between our ancestry and our posterity. I like to think that I bat about .300 on that having any effect on my listener. When I strike out, I feel that self-doubt that maybe I'm just boring people with what fascinates me with the additive of self-importance.

There are many more reasons the question is loathsome, but I'll wrap up there and say this: any historian should consider it a duty to craft personally an answer to that question that fits each listener--you better not say the same thing to a fifth grader that you do the entrepreneur in his mid-30s who fancies himself a futurist and remembers only dates and unrelatable dead people from his history classes. Barbara Tuchman, whom I consider one of the best historians of the twentieth century, wrote, "Why cannot history be studied and written and read for its own sake, as the record of human behavior, the most fascinating subject of all?" I feel you Barbara, I really do, but to answer your question, because many who study, write, and read, don't get it, and we have to give them more help than the Kantian principle.

Specialization and Obscurantism

It's been a little over 20 years since the physicist Alan Sokal spoofed Duke University's journal Social Text with the satirical "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutic of Quantum Gravity," in which he argued in totally meaningless, turgid language for the nonexistence of gravity, and indeed, reality itself. The "Sokal Hoax" is an outlier of editorial misjudgment, but I fear that the Academy was too quick to dismiss it as such and has still not taken the incident's full import to heart. The specialized terminology should provide progressively deeper understanding and clarifying language, and accessibility to an intelligent layperson should be among a good scholar's goals. I'm not sure why the dictum to use the most common word that fits the bill is so resisted by modern scholars, but I cannot help but suspect in many cases it is a cloak for unoriginal and/or weakly-supported ideas. Some of the early Critical Theorists were perhaps attempting to engage in a discourse that could get them fired from their university posts by using equivocal, and therefore plausibly denial language, but I doubt that has ever been the true explanation in most cases.

Here are some principles I think that many contemporary historians need to consider:

1. Historians should write to help their readers understand.
2. Problematizing is valuable to clear away (oversimplified) misunderstandings, but the vacuum should be filled. People rarely abandon an explanation without an alternative to take its place.
3. All knowledge, all people, are unified, so understanding is never complete. A historian can help to understand a part or a few parts of the past--defining what part(s) is a critical step to a good scholarly work. 

I hope all my work passes the muster of these starting principles (moving forward)--it is not my goal to transgress their boundaries.

Passion, Bias, and Audience

The inspiration for this essay is somewhat sensitive material, so I'll have to be circumspect--fortunately I am all-too-comfortable with abstraction: if you write without passion, without at least a strong sense of purpose (beyond a deadline, in this case one past), your readers will likely be bored. It will be clear that you do not care much, and so why should they?  That same passion essential to lively writing, however, can cloud your judgment in myriad ways and doom your work to mediocrity--inadequately-supported arguments (it seems obvious to you), glossed-over weaknesses, snarky comments that alienate the unconvinced and repel those who expect fairness to all sides.

There is a reason passion is often linked to the metaphor of fire.

The best way I have found to modulate my biases effectively, is to imagine a reader who is basically like me, but for one basic difference: all of his life experiences make his intuition or gut lean the other way. I think people are naturally selfish, this person had an early indelible encounter with someone winsome who convinced him that at worst we live in a tension between our natural altruism and the desire for personal gratification. Things have generally worked out well for me, while this person has known innumerable unjust encounters with chance and his fellow human beings.

To be clear, I do not think in these biographical terms; whatever I am arguing, I imagine a person who sees some of my self-evident or probable premises and doubts every one of them. In brief, this gives me a fairly reliable Muse, even if she is something of a taunt. Who do you imagine when you write history?

Experience and Interest

In 1985, Gary Larson's off-beat newspaper cartoon Far Side featured a single panel, one which many found utterly inscrutable. It shows an old wizened traveler in a wagon pulled by two oxen moving from left to right across a desert landscape. The man looks straight ahead with an expression of bored detachment, but the two oxen's heads are both craned hard to their right, more or less looking toward the viewer. In the foreground, resting in the sand, is the large skull of a steer. There is no caption. In his post-retirement retrospective The Prehistory of Far Side, Larson testified to receiving many letters from confused fans puzzled, unable to find the joke. (I would reproduce the cartoon, but since his retirement Larson has explicitly requested that people not post any of his work online. Darn artists trying to make a living.)

The "joke" is simple though, and I've always found it quite profound: we notice those things which directly concern us and our type, and have no interest in those things which don't. For historians and educators, this is a truth that in our bad moods leads us to self-righteous gloomy pronouncements about people's selfishness, but 1) this makes us far less winsome, hurting the fields, and 2) we are hypocrites: I've never met a historian who does not have some historical topics that he respects but in which he cannot muster much interest.

The key is to unpackage each criterion: direct concern and our type. The fact of the matter is those two can change, and quite dramatically. The better we understand how we form in our minds what concerns us and what doesn't, and who are like us and who are not, the better our history will be. Closely related, we need to recognize that bridging gaps of interest and identity often comes down to artistry: the Wars of the Roses are of interest to many because of Shakespeare, and the Crimean War because of Tennyson. And of course who apart from American historians and numismatists would have been able to recognize this Founding Father before 2015?

Alexander Hamilton says do not throw away your shot to reach the maximum number of people with your historical work.