Why the way we think about history is important

There is a notion that history consists of ‘the facts’ – that all you have to do is discover ‘the facts’, which are literally true at face value, and that these ‘facts’ then ‘speak for themselves’. Such thinking, among other things, has fuelled the kind of dribble that I see pouring from the minds and mouths of such lobby groups, here in New Zealand, as ‘Hobson’s Pledge’. Why they named themselves after a brand of furniture polish has never been clear to me.

From the perspective of professional history what such groups are doing is Dunning-Krugerism at its finest; they are so ignorant of the basic principles of the profession that they aren’t even aware of their ignorance. But the purpose of such lobby groups is not to explore the past to understand it. What such groups are doing is weaponising selected data from history to suit their agenda – all the while insisting they use ‘the facts’ and that those they criticise, somehow, are ignorant of them. The usual comment ‘Pledgers’ make on their Facebook page, is that ‘[Historian’s name] should know that…’ followed by some data-point they’ve dredged, out of context and without meaning, to support their own claims. I once got into discussion with one of them who cited a source as actually stating his argument. I had the same source and told him this material made no such statement, at which point he admitted he had made up the meaning. Spotting the ‘leading questions’ by which these people try to trap actual experts into ‘admissions’ is like shooting fish in a barrel.

It is, of course, very easy to select isolated ‘facts’ and use them to ‘prove’ a general point. This is known as the ‘association fallacy’ – the supposition that because one data-point suggests something, that must be true of the whole. One of the first to do so historically was the Roman writer Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (c56-120 CE), whose Annals and Histories were written during the first decades of the second century CE, and selected data to portray Emperors of the previous hundred years as progressively more foolish – leading up to Domitian, who was obviously bottom of the heap. It was a deliberate ploy: Domitian – under whose rule Tacitus had grown up – was a narcissistic authoritarian who made himself chief censor.

Do the facts really ‘speak for themselves’? It’s a fact that it has 1930s cars in it and a 1932 building behind. So when was the photo taken?

It is for these reasons that professional historians put a good deal of time and effort into thinking not just about the subject, but also about how we think about it. It’s known as ‘historiography’. And it goes further than evaluating sources, although that’s an important element. Historiography also helps historians understand the limits of knowledge, and guides new questions about the past. Think of it as the ‘wisdom’ that gives shape to the ‘knowledge’ provided by raw data.

The historiographical framework is, of course, bedded in contemporary thought; the sort of questions asked by historians in the nineteenth century differed from those of the twentieth, and those asked today are different again. Changing society offers different perspectives – and reflects the fact that history isn’t just about data collection. Data is, naturally, the first step; but then we have to understand what that data means. History as a field of investigation is about understanding the human journey from past to present. The ‘present’ is, inevitably, a constantly changing commodity – and so the questions we ask of the past change with it.

New Zealand’s own historiography has gone through several phases, usually generational. The first explosion of historical writing began in the 1890s and was wrapped around a validation of colonialism and the period fantasy that Maori had been ‘integrated’. It’s worth noting that a lot of the Hobson’s Furniture Polish data comes from writings and interpretations of this period, which extended well into the twentieth century. On the odd occasions they come up with archival research, or cite academic research, this same thinking wraps the meanings they put around it – as I discovered in that interchange above.

The 1890’s history was only the beginning of New Zealand’s view of itself from the historical perspective. By the mid-twentieth century such thinking was joined by the notion of New Zealand as an emerging nation – ‘colony to nation’.

That, in turn, gave way to the reversal of earlier colonial-era attitudes and the so-called ‘post-colonial’ or ‘revisionist’ thinking that emerged during the 1970s and beyond. There was also a sense by this time that history was multi-faceted; there was not ‘one’ history of New Zealand, there were many. This reflected the fact that any complex society cannot be reduced to a single idea or concept.

It took time for this approach to emerge, but by the time I was first introduced to the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography in the early 1980s – for which I subsequently wrote some entries – the notion of the past being ‘histories’, not a single defined ‘history’ to which a ‘final answer’ had been found, was well embedded in the academy. And it made sense; the past did not just consist of great people in government, directing the masses; or of war leaders. It could be told from the perspective of ordinary people – whose perspectives and tales were very different – or from the viewpoint of race relations, or from that of any defined group.

The specific New Zealand experience reflects wider world trends in the historical field. Current historiography, worldwide, has emerged from this vision and is, of itself, also changing as time goes on. What it does is give us a way of understanding the past – both in its own terms, and in the way it then led to the present we know today.

The only problem with the professional approach, when dealing with the ‘Pledge’ brigade and others of similar ilk is that they either will not, or cannot, accept that a historiographical and professional analytical approach is valid. Nor, on my experience, do they accept that their rejection of it leaves so little common ground that it is impossible to discuss anything with them of that nature – any such point is, usually, received as ‘proof’ of a ‘conspiracy’ by historians to Hide the Truth. Sigh…

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2019