On the moral responsibility of the historian

(and other such heavy-duty ponderings...)

I’ve just been on another residential seminar at the university for the paper I’m taking in Advanced Historiography. Basically, this is the study of how historical knowledge is generated and transmitted, and incorporating a soupçon of methodology and a tasty portion of philosophy. This is a required paper for postgraduate students and a number of my classmates were having a good old moan about it, expressing the desire to just do history, without having to think about how and why they’re doing it the particular way they’ve chosen to do it.

To each their own and all that, but I’m actually really enjoying this paper. I’ve discovered some interesting (if sometimes irritatingly pompous) late-nineteenth and early twentieth century writers that I probably wouldn’t have read otherwise, and I’ve gained a better insight into French culture and politics by engaging with the work of the Annales school. In particular, I’m really enjoying wrestling with poststructuralist approaches history, in both their ‘standard’ and overtly feminist guises.

Poststructuralism’s challenges to the claims empirically grounded knowledge are inherently and deliberately destabilising, so they make many people (including most of my classmates at this seminar) deeply uncomfortable. And, as usually happens when people start questioning the possibility of eliciting objective truths about the past or questioning the politics involved in creating knowledge, it’s not long before the phrase ‘moral relativism’ gets an airing, closely followed by a reference to the David Irving case.

Fear not, I’m not about to get into the ins and outs of that story here. But what interested me when we discussed the case in class were the questions raised about whether historians have some sort of moral responsibility in society (over and above their responsibilities as professional scholars). Lord Acton, Cambridge Regius professor and first editor of the Cambridge Modern History, certainly thought so, advocating “it is the office of historical science to maintain morality as the sole impartial criterion of men and things.” (Incidentally, he was also the guy who said “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” in a debate over whether popes and kings should be judged by the same standards as us mere mortals.)

The question of the historian’s moral role is one I find somewhat difficult to resolve myself. For a start, it’s much easier to suspend moral judgement and remain neutral when it comes to issues and actions in the distant past – whether or not Richard II betrayed the people after the Peasants' Revolt, for example – than it is when it comes to much more recent historical debates, in which there seems to be much more at stake for those of us living now.

When this discussion came up during our seminar, I was also struck by the question of ‘whose morals?’ At first, there seemed to be an implicit assumption amongst the other students that we all shared a common moral standard, broadly based on a Judeo-Christian belief system. When I pointed out I was not a Christian – indeed, that I didn’t believe in any god – that created a plenty of consternation. It seems to be a widely held belief that if you don’t at some level believe in a god (and in my experience, the assumption generally seems to be a Christian god), you have nothing on which to base your morality. (And as an aside, I find it deeply strange that people feel they’re free to talk to me about going to church, god etc., but if I say I’m an atheist, they get very uncomfortable all of a sudden. It’s a real conversation-stopper.)

I find the idea that you can’t be moral without a god to be bizarre, and frankly, a bit offensive. But then I end up struggling to find some philosophical position from which to argue for a fundamental human morality that doesn’t require god as an enforcer. I tend to end up with three options. The first is that humans are naturally and inherently altruistic (perhaps we could call this the Jean-Jacques Rousseau theory), but frankly, looking at the world around me (and human actions throughout history), I have some trouble really accepting this. The second is what I guess falls into the category of evolutionary theory, whereby we assume that humans, as social animals, can only survive by helping each other more often than we hurt each other. This seems a bit too essentialist to me, and doesn’t leave much room for individual or group agency, or for any higher ideals above purely survival of the species. It also smacks of sociobiology, which I’m keen to avoid like the plague for all sorts of political and practical reasons.

So finally, I’m left with falling back on the values of liberal, secular humanism, but I recognise that these ideals are historical products of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment west. I’m also aware that while on the surface, they may seem (at least to many of us in the west) flawless in theory, if not in practice, their history means they carry their own problematic meanings and associations.

Eh, I guess I’ll be pondering this for a good long while, and may even resort to reading something like this. (Though the reviews aren't that promising. Any other suggestions most welcome!)

In the meantime, I think I'll leave the last word to Ricky in Trailer Park Boys: “I’m not a pessimist, I’m an optometrist.”

(And if this post made your head hurt, here's some more Rickyisms to alleviate the strain.)