History as a Humanity

The old notion of 'humanities'--studies of the nature of others that informed us about ourselves if we but had the understanding to forgive--has long gone by the wayside. Boris Johnson, for instance, was praised yesterday for an interesting new take on the crusades which he has broadcast because it was 'relevant' to modern society. I'm fairly sure that he didn't care if he was or not, and more power to him for it.

This yearning for relevance is essentially a fetishized product of the social sciences. For the past one hundred and twenty years or so, the life of the mind has been assailed by two ideas. One is that no statement, behaviour or action can be taken on its own terms or as an insight directly to the soul of another, but that all are in some way deluding themselves.

Christopher Lasch associated the mindset with Sigmund Freud, and it did reach its greatest extent of elaboration with him; but I'd look back to a misunderstood Vico, or Jean-Martin Charcot (who is pictured going about his doings) for the origins of it. It is now pernicious.

The other is the idea that history has to be useful, an effective function of the social science mentality that would derive meaning from figures and pretended taxonomies.

But where does all this lead? I remember the nineteen nineties, when the shelves were heaving with triumphalist accounts of world war two in which the counterfactual narrative of how Hitler could have been stopped by the western powers (with some suggesting that he actually was) grew into the idea that tinpot client states in the middle east should be viewed as the new Reich. From this grew the idea that they should be subjected to shock and awe bombardments that killed between sixty thousand and a million people depending on your point of view. That wasn't useful history was it?

Noting that a tougher form of appeasement would have, if combined with brinkmanship, caused the generals to bring down Hitler in 1938 and to normalise a demented Germany under a junta didn't sell. I only proffer it as an alternative view, much closer to the reality of Iraq than the previous analogy. Nobody thought it useful, though.

History used to be useful, and moral. By understanding others, especially the worst, we might understand the forces in ourselves and in our lives that were immoral, and develop ways to limit them or to keep them in check. I make no pretence of any moral superiority myself, except in that I realise my own badness occasionally.

This effort in itself would allow us to understand, to forgive, to judge and to see badness for what it was, though. The problem is that, that moral approach is out the window once relativism and the idea that worlds are limited by contemporary language come into play.

I wish it wasn't. The west is in deep cultural trouble. I think that we need to find a sense of proportion and a doctrine of limits, so that we can use our reason to proceed. We aren't. We have become a herd of nonconformists encouraged by the legacy of modernism to devalue the ordinary and to glamourise shabbiness whilst those who were always rich and who always exploited of every creed and stripe harvest the fruits of people's lives. The professional and managerial classes of the west all think themselves Bedsit Baudelaires, even whilst they spend the last of their credit to aspire to a sort of Cary Grant borghese chic.

What is history? A prop to group identity or a form of intellectual self discipline that enables the inference of moral logic from the synthesis of classical and judaeo-christian values? A meaningless, and convoluted question, but one that plays on my mind this grey-white morning.