Incomplete History

All history is incomplete. The telling of a story is an act of definition and therefore exclusion. How the story is told, whose stories are included, are all part of the process that deems importance and sets a trajectory of the communal memory of a people. I was reading Zinn's history of the American people. It is told from the perspective of the "underclasses" and attempts to bring an unabashed leftist lens to the heuristic task. While I read it occurred to me that the heuristic task is complicated by the loss of memories that may give significance to documents, events, and people that were "in reality" - a problematic phrase - significant in the moment. History can record events, attempt to reconstruct motives and means, articulate sequence and ascribe meaning. But it is never complete.

This does not mean that historians are not doing thorough work or that history is somehow flawed. It is simply the nature of the art. I like the image of a trellis. I can follow the growth of a vine, tracking its changes and meanders over the trellis. I can observe its inter-relations with other vines, but I cannot catalog the whole experience of the whole because there are events that are speculative and remain unknown, many of which may be significant. What of the trellis itself? How could this have changed the life of the vine? I may speculate and extrapolate, but if I am to be a good historian I must note that I am engaging in speculation (however well informed).

History is as incomplete - and as valuable - as the memories of the people whose past it seeks to memorialize. How we got here is as important as that we are here. What we will do will depend by and large on what we did. The past is the fountain from which the present flows.

I recall when I was in grad school I took a class in historiography, the art of writing history. There have been attempts to present "objective" histories. These become little more than recitations of dates. That, to my mind, is not the art of history. History is the willingness to ask what happened and why. It is attempting to understand not only the sequence but what motivated the whole thing. Consider the American Revolution: We forget that this was an issue of controversy in the colonies as well as in England. The "Founding Fathers" had no idea how the damn thing would turn out. There was no certitude and there was certainly no consensus as to what the new nation(s) should be. All could have been hung for treason. None lived with the knowledge that they would be victorious. There was no doubt a synergy of events, most of which are unknown to us, that allowed the course of history to run in the direction that it did. What were these events? They remain lost in the mist of memories forgotten.

I tend to believe that all human knowledge is tenuous. We know only partially and never with absolute certitude. Much of what we "know" is simply the consensus of convenience. "Turtles all the way down... " because we cannot propose a better explanation. For years the conventional wisdom was that the world was flat. That made sense. Looking toward the horizon the curve of the earth could not be imagined. And when water runs over a sphere, it does not cling evenly. Gravity was known but not understood - not that we understand it now - in the context of planetary orbits around a star. It is all too easy to think, how quaint of them, poor ignorant bastards, they didn't know. But what would it look like if it were flat? All things being equal, the simplest explanation is probably the best.

But not all things are equal. And indeed we do not know all.

But we keep asking...