History: A Portrait From Life When the Subject is Dead

I read quite a bit of history one way and another. I think largely because I have too much time on my hands. History is fascinating and it teaches many important lessons. The first lesson it teaches is that people haven't really changed all that much in the last ten thousand years or so. The second lesson is that you should really never trust historians.

There are plenty of reasons why you shouldn't trust historians and the first although by no means most important is the likelihood that they just don't know what the hell was going on. The study of history has been likened to attempting to do a jigsaw puzzle with no picture and 98% of the pieces missing. The more comprehensive and detailed the information the more likely it is to have been extrapolated into existence from a pitiful handful of clues which are usually open to multiple interpretations. Especially if you want to open them to multiple interpretations. This leads me to my second reason for not trusting historians; they usually have an axe to grind.

If you have made the study of history your lifes vocation, to the point where you are now writing books on the subject then history is very important to you. You will no doubt have your own theories on how to interpret evidence and your own opinions on which events were the most significant and why. To put it another way when you write your work of history you are not telling what happened you are telling what you think happened. Or what you think ought to have happened. Or what you really would have liked to have happened. Or possibly you're just a pathological liar. Even if you strive for objectivity your own opinions and the quality of your education will colour what you write.

History should really come with a disclaimer, something along the lines of "the following is a true story only the facts have been changed" or rewritten, or misinterpreted. Anyone who reads this blog (hi mum) will know that I toss in some historical comment myself. Anybody whose knowledge of history was nil could be forgiven for thinking I know what I'm talking about. And I really don't. To write the history of anything well you have to like it and if you like it then that noise you hear is your objectivity quietly leaving the room.

I'm fascinated with the Byzantine and Habsburg empires. I buy every book I can afford on both subjects. I have built in my own mind a structure of what each empire was like and even I am capable of telling that it is probably wildly inaccurate. The Byzantine empire lasted for over a thousand years, the Habsburg empire for half that long. To accurately document the complete history of either is probably impossible. Neither was particularly interested in leaving a disinterested summary of their successes and failures. The result is our sources tend to praise them to the skies or consider them to be harbingers of the Anti Christ. At various times and places either description has a certain amount of justification.

Edward Gibbon did such a knife job on the Byzantine empire that it took a century for scholars to get a slightly less jaundiced view of it. Yet Gibbon wasn't deliberately trying to make Byzantium look bad, he just thought it was bad and wrote accordingly. The first book I read on Byzantium was written by someone who obviously loved it tremendously and he was a good enough writer to impress that on me to the point where I wanted to know more. Since then I have read several more balanced (or at least more detailed) histories and know that the first gloss wasn't necessarily accurate. Nevertheless that first impression has never quite faded and it would be a braver man than me to accuse the author of gilding the lily. He wrote as he saw it and he wrote well.

My own little historical bits are somewhat less forgiveable. I don't actually make things up but I rarely strive for historical accuracy to the exclusion of a good (or bad) joke. And my fact checking makes Wikipedia look like the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is my dearest wish that one day some deeply ignorant person will download one of my historical blogs and use it as the basis of an essay for which they will confidently expect high marks. Imagining the look on their face when their paper is returned gives me a little malicious amusement.

Another thing which threatens to make history less accurate is the desire (frequently unconscious) to make it conform to modern attitudes and behaviour. Terms like "balance", "cultural sensitivity" and "social relevance" wander through modern discussions of history like plague rats through seventeeth century London. Sometimes there is no balance. Sometimes one group were a pack of psychotic maniacs and that's it. As for cultural sensitivity and social relevance the only relevance and sensitivity history can possess is that of the time being documented. If that doesn't happen to conform with todays standards then that's just tough.

History gets rewritten on an almost daily basis as we either discover more or wish to hide more. Opinion is divided as to which of the above is gaining the upper hand. The kindest thing one can say about history is that it is absolutely fascinating. Maybe things did happen the way the historians said and maybe they didn't but whichever it's a great story. It's the story of people and however wrong we get it as long as we remember that its about people we won't get it completely wrong. Unless you're using this blog to help in your studies of course.