Introduction To The Study of History
(essay by Peter Landry)
That history contains errors, will not come as
news to a person who has reflected on the topic. The very first history, a Greek
one, History of Herodotus, written around 450 BC, likely had quite a number of
fictional details so as to effect its purpose. Those parts of our history which
are suspected to be fiction are, at least, through research and comparison,
salvageable. What, however, is possibly more disturbing than the realization
that, in general and throughout, our history is wrong (a sub-topic which I shall
treat to a greater extent further on, herein) is the realization that there are
great gaps in it. We have failed to record and gather together the little human
events which make up the fabric of history: it is little events, strung together
and accumulated over time, which account for our place in history.
Though it may have been, in certain of its parts, reconstructed incorrectly and
small shards are missing here and there, history, by a well-read and descriptive
author, like a Grecian urn, is a spectacle to behold; like man himself --
fascinating, seductive, intriguing, and spectacular. It maybe, that I, like
most, enjoy looking in on, at a safe distance, the follies and misfortunes of
his fellow man, a method to gratify the natural curiosity that most of us have
about such things. History, written in a lively and descriptive manner as the
best are, so to grip and hold the reader, have, veiled and concealed as it might
be, a lesson or moral such that the reader might modify his view of the present
and his forecast of the future. This, incidentally, is the principal reason that
history ought to beat the core of any scheme of education. In this light, as
John Morley observed, the actual twists and turns of the great historical
happenings are not so important in themselves, "except as it enables me to see
my way more clearly through what is happening to-day."
While its primary allure is like that of gossip, history is important because it
is the story of the collective self, the story of passionate man. Fiction,
coming as it does from the imagination of some fellow human being, does not have
the same attraction, at least, not for me, simply because it is not true. What I
need from my reading is to learn something, and while I shortly will come to
listing the lessons of history, the principle lesson is this: that while the
ages and the settings change, the actors in history are guided by the same
passions of human nature: there is in all histories a similarity. As Emerson
wrote in his Essays: "Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a few
laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations."
Theories of History:-
There is no reason that I can think of that
makes it necessary to make history a complicated subject, but strange thinking
men have attempted to do just that, to make history into something that it is
not; everything from the moving hand of God to that which resembles a living
creature, metaphorically moving in a progressive way from stage to stage.
The biblical theory can best be briefly dealt with by quoting Leslie Stevenson
of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland:
"When the Jews fail to obey God's laws, there comes the idea of God using the
events of history, such as defeat by neighbouring nations, to chastise
them for their sin (a theme which recurs throughout the histories and prophets
in the Old Testament). And then there is the idea of God's merciful forgiveness,
His blotting out of man's transgressions, and His regeneration of man and the
whole of creation (Isaiah chapters 43-66)." [Seven Theories of Human Nature
(Oxford University Press, 1987) at pp. 48-9.]
As the living creature theory: one of the strangest, and, as it turned out, one
the most destructive, was the Hegelian theory of history. Hegel was a
philosopher and his view was that there are fundamental laws which drive the
development of a culture or a country; that a culture or a country has a kind of
a personality of its own, and its development is to be explained in terms of its
own character. In later years, a fellow German, Adolf Hitler, rose to this
Hegelian bait, and through the Third Reich brought misery to millions of our
fellow human beings.
Marx picked up on the Hegelian view and asserted that there were fundamental
laws which drove the development of a culture or a country.
These notions of historical development and of alienation were to play a crucial
role in the thoughts of Marx. Marx had a deterministic view that all events
(economic stages) come about as a result of the inevitable progress of history.
Well, personally, I do not subscribe to any of these fancy theories. History is
but a series of past events of which we have become conscious. Each event is a
very thin and a very short fibre like that of the countless number which make up
the great rope of humanity. The position of any particular fibre and its
contribution to the whole is almost entirely a matter of chance. I doubt, to
continue this metaphoric vein, that the rope of humanity has any particular
purpose or that it has a predestined end.