The Historical Event

‘“History”, in spite of its efforts to become scientific, remains indentured to mythical notions of the cosmos, the kinds of events that occur in it, and the kinds of knowledge we can have of them.’

This, so far has been a year of change for me. Slowly, and systematically, I realized that the few absolutes that I did hold in life deserve to get shot down to the cold, murky and disorienting depths of subjectivity. Oddly, all those “absolutes” I held were all bred from Western modes of thinking. Science? Check. Philosophy? Check. And now, history?

But, it makes sense. For the western world, the method for discovering truth arguably lay in the (deceptively simple and seemingly faultless) empirical methods of scientific thought....so it figures that the body of knowledge which acts a collection of facts, or truths, would be built up from this same foundation, and hence deserves the same critique. But, more surprisingly, and as the quote points out, it turns out that even this system had its flaws, or at least its application was seemingly with abandon. History never served to become this ultimate collection of facts that it made itself out to be, because it could not escape the inherent subjectivity which followed man’s involvement in its creation. Not only did he edit it mercilessly so that it depicted only what he thought was important, he ended up editing it such that, if anything, a largely incorrect view of the past was being passed down, and to an extent that these very scientific processes that underlay history were being undermined.

History has become largely a collection of “significant” events....the significant ones being those that actually stick out among the vast collection of events that made up the past, and enter the collective memory. And which are these? The ones which resulted in large-scale change: conquests, genocides, revolutions, wars, crusades, natural calamities, plagues assassinations.......and so on. To any non-human being visiting our planet, our comparatively short span as a civilized race would seem pretty dramatic. But the problem here is that the past wasn’t just constructed in this way. Catastrophism is the branch of thought that maintains that our human and planetary history was shaped by few, but cataclysmic events, which then were the main factors in shaping how the present has turned out. This mode of thinking seems to have seeped into the creation of history as well...but it arguably should not be so. The purely teleological view of history may work on these principles, but a radical rethinking of history is clearly required, one which understands that there are various interconnections which exist, and no single strands, or plots. It’s true that these “significant” events played a major role in shaping our present, but it in no way means that they alone were instrumental in this process.

The paragraph also makes a distinction between “historical” and “natural” event, saying that natural events do not require these tags, but i personally don’t see why we split these two types of events into separate streams. I feel the two are intimately linked, and this distinction is just a form of over-simplifying, which in turn just furthers this incomplete view of history that we already hold. There should be a unified, interdisciplinary study of the past, so that connections can be more varied and easily drawn. However, this is probably a little idealistic considering our limited human minds, so maybe that’s a thought best left for later.