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.