THOUGHTS ON HISTORY IN HISTORY
Created | Updated Sep 28, 2009
SECTION ONE: THOUGHTS ON HISTORY IN HISTORY
Introduction- The Value of a View of History
In 1951 “in spite of the disastrous shortage of paper and skilled labour” Odham Press published a 1000 page edition of W.N.Week’s “History of the World”. As the author noted in his Preface, the first edition had appeared during the Second World War, when presumably the conditions for publication were even difficult. But it is surely quite obvious why a treatment of World History that “took the record down to the day when Germany attacked Poland” should have been of interest to “ the ordinary man or woman” engaged in the most terrible conflict in history. The questions ‘why?’ and “what for?”- must have come to countless lips of people called upon to make all manner of sacrifices, including the ultimate one.
In fact, as J.B. Priestly afterwards observed, the British people achieved their “finest hour” during the war, not just by their actions, but also by the level of popular interest in the past achievements and historical role of the “Christian Civilization” that this conflict was supposed to be being fought to defend and preserve.
So it is not surprising that the first piece of text in Week’s ‘History’ is a quote from H.A.L. Fisher:-
“The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of History; but progress is not a law of nature. The ground gained by one generation can be lost by the next.” And that tidal surge swamping civilization once again seemed obvious to Fisher as he had written introducing the third volume of his “History of Europe” - “The Liberal Experiment” in 1935.
The period from 1789, he said, had been an massive attempt to promote individual liberty. It was an “experiment” because it was still very much ‘work in progress’ and - “the tides of liberty have now suddenly receded over wide tracts of Europe”. With the current propaganda claims about the positive achievements of totalitarianism, at a time when the democracies were suffering in World Chaos in mind, he went on “Yet how can the spread of servitude, by whatever benefits it may be accompanied, be a matter for congratulation? ...Only when the moral spine of a people is broken may plaster of Paris become a necessary evil.”
For Fisher a sense of History contributed to that collective “moral spine”: and , once the war was won, there was the new challenge of rebuilding, and building new and better. This too would need to be a great collective effort if the peace was to be “won”. So 1951 saw not only the second edition of Week’s ‘History’, but also the “The Festival of Britain” on the South Bank. It was an attempt to apply “the lessons of history”, creating the same kind of pride in Britain’s past, present and future that had been such a feature of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Yet this was still a very dark and troubled world, haunted by the aftermath of two World Wars and a fear of the next. History could be blamed for its own role in shaping the recent past, and it was possible to sympathise with those who said “Stop the world. I want to get off”- as audiences did in the Fifties with stage portrayals of “angry young men.”
In the early Sixties, as Professor J.H. Plumb observed in an article entitled “The Historian’s Dilemma”, it was an angry woman who was a great hit on Broadway in Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” ‘She’ is the historian’s wife and the message is clear. “History and life are doomed to live it out in hate, in distrust, in mutual failure. They are lost in timeless falsehood, bound by dreams of the past that may never have existed, and enslaved by their own lies about the future. And this, as the audience streamed out into the flashing neon lights of Broadway, seemed to have the force of truth. History is without meaning, without power, without hope.” And Professor Plumb asked “Is it?”
The article was published as Professor Plumb’s contribution to the collection of articles entitled “Crisis in the Humanities” in 1964; and in his editor’s introduction he wrote
“ [History].. has lost all faith in itself as a guide to the actions of men: no longer do historians investigate the past in the hope that it may enable their fellow men to control the future. Its educational value, they feel, lies in the exercises it provides for the mind and not for what it contains.”
The path of Progress that was so evident to H.A.Fisher was no longer so obvious. Almost ten years later in 1973 Dr. Jacob Bronowski, summing up his series on “The Ascent of Man”, could say “And I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into-- into what?... It sounds very pessimistic to talk about western civilization with a sense of retreat. I have been so optimistic about the ascent of man; am I going to give up at this moment? Of course not. The ascent of man will go on. But do not assume that it will go on carried by western civilization as we know it. We are being weighed in the balance at this moment. If we give up, the next step will be taken- but not by us. We have not been given any guarantee that Assyria and Egypt and Rome were not given. We are waiting to be somebody’s past too, and not necessarily that of our future.”
Of course in the absence of historians trying to give some overall view of the sweep of History, there are and were plenty of others putting forward their own more specific, partial and limited goals and visions. Thus President J.F. Kennedy managed to enthuse a generation of young Americans with his vision of putting a man on the Moon. The take-up of undergraduate science and mathematics courses showed the impact of his appeal. But the Earth has only one Moon, and, in any case, the grainy black and white pictures of the first ‘moonwalk’ meant very little to fifteen year old pupils watching this “historic moment” live without a real grasp of the history of human adventure and discovery.
More recently the US has set out the ambition to go back to the Moon. But this is a “Been there. Done that age” in which novelty has become a principal value. So Naomi Klein could write in “No Logo” in 1998:-
“In our final year if high school, my best friend, Lan Ying, and I passed the time with morbid discussions about the meaninglessness of life when everything had already been done. The world stretched out before us not as a slate of possibility, but as a maze of well-worn grooves like the ridges burrowed by insects in hardwood. Step off the straight and narrow career- and -materialism groove and you just end up on another one-the groove for people who step off the main groove.”
She goes on to say - “Of course it’s a classic symptom of teenage narcisism to believe that the end of history coincides exactly with your arrival here on earth-” But here she is merely commenting on the on going failure of History and historians to show how a dynamic and changing past was still producing a dynamic and changing present in which there are moments of real choice in which people can seize the shifting instant that is all we really possess and consciously ‘make History’. But people generally need to answer the questions ‘why?’ - and ‘what for?’- before people can commit themselves wholeheartedly to any cause in this way. So those questions do not go away just because the Humanities subjects have abdicated the role that they once established as their own special province.
In the end Naomi Klein, a child of “Woodstock 1969 ” vintage parents, found her own field of struggle for the future, when she watched on TV coverage of the over-commercialised Woodstock 25th anniversary concert as it turned into a battle ground. She wrote “No Logo” as a new call to arms for a new anti-establishment, counter-culture, global movement that trying to invent an alternative future worth working for.
But why did Albee’s characters feel so bitter and angry. Why did the woman, “a screeching American version of the Earth Mother”, possessing “all the force, the violence, the passion of an instinctively living woman” feel so angry at the impotence of her husband? What had raised an expectation that historians should be more than verbose, confused and inadequate?
Answer- The key role of History and a sense of the dynamic of history of the previous 150 year - the period of Fisher’s Liberal Experiment. So Section One tries to show what History had accomplished in its prime.
