The Historian's Conscience

Stuart Macintyre

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780522851397
• eBook ISBN: 9780522865578
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Eminent contributors include Alan Atkinson, Graeme Davison, Greg Dening, John Hirst, Beverley Kingston, Marilyn Lake, and Iain McCalman. They not only ask but answer the hard questions about writing and researching history. How do historians choose their histories? What sort of emotional investment do they make in their subjects, and how do they control their sympathies? How do they deal with unpalatable discoveries? To whom are historians responsible? And for whom are they entitled to speak? Intellectually provocative, often personally revealing, always engaged, The Historian's Conscience is a 'must read'.

CHAPTER 1

ALAN ATKINSON

DO GOOD HISTORIANS HAVE FEELINGS?

In reading our way through Australia’s History Wars we often see the work of revisionists condemned as chilling or cruel. But the condemnation rarely amounts to an argument. It is usually meant as a kind of supplement to the writer’s main points. However valid it might be as a moral judgement, from a scholarly point of view it is not clear what weight it is meant to carry. Robert Manne, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald about Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, volume one, remarks on its ‘pitilessness’ but then he quickly passes, in the same sentence, to a detailed account of the book’s ‘internal self-contradictions’. In Australian Historical Studies Stuart Macintyre sets the same work within the broad sweep of history-writing since the eighteenth century and then similarly goes on, in his final sentences (about the counting of deaths), to suggest that while historians might disagree on such points, ‘at the very least we expect to find sympathy and compassion for the victims. I do not see it’, he observes, ’in this book’.¹

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Thanks to Frank Bongiorno for his comments on this essay.

So what? Does thave emotional standards. Anthropologists have long knowhe presence or absence of sympathy and compassion affect the quality of a piece of historical scholarship? Or are such statements really superfluous to the central task? I argue here on one side only. Far from being superfluous, compassion (I leave sympathy aside) is good history’s main motive.

All scholarship can be weighed and understood as a social activity. It is anchored in shared habits of thought, in custom and communication. It not only takes place among human beings. It is also, in every way, an expression of community. But more than that again, it is mainly about human beings. It is a means of exploring, and also extending, the dimensions of humanity. History is one of those modern disciplines whose basic principles were set out during the European Enlightenment, the first age of humanitarianism. It qualifies as one of the humanities because it examines human experience and because it is a means of enlarging humane imagination. In a broad sense, it began as, and it still is, a moral discipline.

I mean ‘moral’ in an eighteenth-century as well as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century sense, in that collective and social—even ethnographic—sense still obvious in terms like ‘morale’ and ‘moral economy’. This package of meaning was not really possible before the eighteenth century, because only then did collective humanity begin to be interesting and to make moral claims in its own right. In 1985 the American scholar Thomas Haskell published a powerful argument on the causes of eighteenth-century humanitarianism. He wrote of a shift in ‘cognitive style’, in ways of perceiving the world and of dealing with humanity at a distance from oneself. The result was ‘a new moral universe’, a more complex and extended sense of moral responsibility. Haskell attributed this change to the way European imagination began to embrace wider patterns of cause and effect, largely as a result of the world-wide distribution of European capital and the stronger sense of agency which went with ubiquitous planning and investment. Men and women began to understand that their own actions might affect the lives of strangers much more than they could have done hitherto. A sense of commercial responsibility, said Haskell, gave rise to a sense of humanitarian responsibility.²

Haskell was mainly concerned to explain the rise of the anti-slavery movement. In doing so he explored the mystery of the suffering stranger—why do we, and why did humanitarians in the eighteenth century, feel moved to take deliberate action with the idea of helping men, women and children we and they never met?³ But he left out large aspects of the question. Enlightenment thought not only increased the geographical reach of humane imagination. It did the same across stretches of time, with historical competence. It not only widened the European sense of active moral responsibility. It also deepened feelings of moral involvement with strangers who could not be helped at all because, at least in many cases, they were long dead. Some, in fact, had never lived at all. They were fictional. The rise of the novel, which was closely tied to the rise of historical narrative, had a profound effect on sensibility of this kind.

‘Responsibility’ is still the right word. Historians thus began, if very slowly, to take on the multifaceted labours sketched out above, so as to be accountable in various directions at once. It is possible to suggest invidious distinctions between moral responsibility tied to deliberate action, as with anti-slavery, and moral responsibility which is expressed in thought, speech and writing, about events long past and events which never really happened. The latter is surely the moral responsibility of the mere ‘bleeding heart’. But in fact the two belong together. Humanitarianism relates to both humans and animals. In just the same way it involves both action and thought. All are parts of a single pattern of sensibility.

Edmund Burke was an Enlightenment thinker. In his own way, he was also an advocate of humanitarianism, as an aspect of collective humanity and civilised imagination. Burke was speaking of all forms of scholarship when he said in 1790 that nothing ‘can give true weight and sanction to any learned opinion [but] . . . the common nature and common relations of men’.⁴ In other words, historians are accountable, by Enlightenment criteria, to those who read or otherwise consume their work, as with any tradesman or manufacturer who places products in the market. But they also work within a wider and more diffuse body of moral opinion. Like medical practitioners, they are accountable to their subject matter, because that subject matter is human. And beyond that Burke’s reference to ‘the common nature and common relations of men’ brings in the larger question of community.

Burke made a great deal of the virtues of civilised community, or, as he called it, civil society. He thought of intellectual achievement as something completely shaped and determined by collective existence. After the statement already quoted he went on to explain that ‘without civil society man could not by any possibility arrive at the perfection of which his nature is capable [and he meant perfection of all kinds], nor even make a remote and faint approach to it’.⁵ This sounds like platitude. But workers in the humanities, in deciding why and how they do their job, are really obliged to think about the mechanics of the cause—effect relationship outlined by Burke. What is the exact connection between civil society and good argument about the past?

Common humanity, as it was defined by the best Enlightenment writers, partly involved shared feeling. The brilliant impact of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, another Enlightenment work, was partly owing to the fact that the author wrote with an unprecedented vividness. His style might seem latinate and courtly to later generations, but its success was a result of the way in which he entered into the common emotional experience of the people he wrote about. Gibbon’s own emotions were central too. Humanitarianism of the kind he subscribed to involved a nakedness of feeling which exposed the human quality of the writer himself. ‘The bloody actor’, said Gibbon (and he meant anyone who acts a violent part on the stage of history), ‘is less detestable than the cool unfeeling historian’.⁶ The intellectual power of Gibbon’s work depended on its emotional energy. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a work of compassion, in the original sense of the word—of shared feeling, something larger than sympathy or pity. ‘Empathy’ might be a better word, except that it too means less now than it once did. A combination of intellectual and emotional force makes Gibbon’s book a subtle and penetrating account of humanity. The result, in Enlightenment terms, is fundamentally moral.

It is easy to see now that Enlightenment writers, such as Gibbon, did not make enough allowance for the diversity of emotional and cultural experience among peoples. They assumed that human feeling always took the same form, whatever the time and place. They took too little account of the varying impact of cultural circumstances. During the nineteenth century the tendency was just the opposite. It was understood then, in reaction to Enlightenment doctrine, that feeling varied enormously—that intense feeling, for instance, was proof of high civilisation. It followed that the poor and ill-educated had duller feelings than the rich and refined. Other types of humanity were also supposed to feel less than Europeans did. Charles Dickens gives a picture of this attitude in David Copperfield, when he describes the villain of the story, the gentleman Steerforth, talking about the poor—’that sort of people’. ‘Why, there’s a pretty wide separation between them and us’, says Steerforth,’. . . they are not to be expected to be as sensitive as we are. Their delicacy is not to be shocked, or hurt very easily . . . they have not very fine natures; and they may be thankful that, like their coarse rough skins, they are not easily wounded’.⁷ As for feeling and race, Keith Windschuttle offers a fairly precise reflection of nineteenth-century ideas when he himself states that the Tasmanian Aborigines necessarily lacked ‘humanity and compassion’. These were ‘concepts’, says Windschuttle, which ‘they would have regarded with complete incomprehension . . . It was the European Enlightenment that founded the idea of the unity of humanity and the Christian religion that originated the notion of sharing the suffering of others.’⁸ Such feelings were therefore beyond the Tasmanians.

Obviously, the search for difference can be too eager and too absolute. It ought to be clear from both these examples (Dickens meant it to be clear) that too much cultural relativism weakens common humanity, which is not only a moral but also (the main point of this essay) an intellectual failing. Historians who deny or who minimise feeling in their subjects, and/or their own participation in that feeling, write under a self-imposed disability. Gibbon was right to condemn, as a destroyer of life, including intellectual life, the ‘cool unfeeling historian’. At the same time, historical writing has moved forward and Gibbon’s dictum has been qualified by other insights, especially since about the 1970s. In 1985 Peter and Carol Stearns published in the American Historical Review an account of the progress of what they called ‘Emotionology’, the new study of the history of feeling.

[S]ocieties [they said] have emotional standards. Anthropologists have long known and studied this phenomenon. Historians are increasingly aware of it, as we realize that the emotional standards of societies change in time rather than merely differ, constantly, across space. Changes in emotional standards can in turn reveal much about other aspects of social change and may even contribute to such change.⁹

‘Standards’ might seems a curious term here. It betrays a belief in absolute measures of feeling, characteristic of what was then the new sub-discipline of psycho-history—at least insofar as clinical ideas about emotional health were applied to past societies. The former psychiatrist Lloyd de Mause, for instance, had used his book, The History of Childhood (1974), to argue that the feelings of parents for their children were typically much more impoverished in the past than they were in the present. This idea of variety has a lasting importance. Also de Mause’s suggestion of a progressive refinement in sensibility was an improvement on the dichotomous ideas—us and them —of previous days. But more recently again, the best scholarship has moved beyond the one-dimensional implications of work like his.

To repeat—writing history, or presenting it in any form, is a social activity. It depends on an assumption of shared humanity. That assumption involves feeling, and not just as an ornament and selling point. It follows that historians who fail to register the importance of feeling, whether explicitly or not, cut themselves off from the roots of their discipline.

Gibbon might rail against the ‘unfeeling historian’ but it took two hundred years for scholars to begin to come to terms with what a ‘feeling historian’ might be like. During most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there seemed to be an urgent need to think of history-writing not as a social activity but as a science. Scientific knowledge was then the supreme index of truth and professional respectability. Legitimacy, as so often during that time, depended on the refinement of technique—in the case of historians, on thorough, accurate documentation and on objectivity, a clear line between subject (researchers) and object (their material). Peter and Carol Stearns joked in passing about ‘the historian of emotions’ and ‘the emotional historian’, as if the two were utterly distinct. They looked forward, in 1985, to a type of scholarship which took full account of feeling. And yet they still resisted the possibility that their own feelings might be matched and compared with those they wrote about. History was to remain nothing more or less than a body of steadily accumulating, solid information. It was not to be understood in terms of accountability to human subjects and to readership. In principle, once again, there was only one obvious ethical question. Was the writing correctly tied to the evidence? Keith Windschuttle, harking back to the habits of an earlier age, makes the point perfectly: ‘I’m trying to find the truth of the matter . . . My self is really irrelevant in this’.¹⁰

As I say, historical scholarship has come a long way since 1985. Few good historians could now write about the study of past emotion as the Stearnses did then. ‘One of the challenges of research in this field’, they said, ‘is to sort out the durable (animal) from the transient (culturall...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• STUART MACINTYRE
• 1. ALAN ATKINSON
• 2. JOY DAMOUSI
• 3. GREG DENING
• 4. GRAEME DAVISON
• 5. RHYS ISAAC
• 6. BEVERLEY KINGSTON
• 7. JOHN HIRST
• 8. MARILYN LAKE
• 9. PENNY RUSSELL
• 10. FIONA PAISLEY
• 11. GELNDA SLUGA
• 12. DAVID CHRISTIAN
• 13. IAIN MCCALMAN
• INDEX