43. What is the value of history?
Sometimes events make you reconsider. The demonstration in Bristol that included the lifting of a statue of a slave-trader and founding father of modern Bristol from its perch and its unceremonial dumping in the River Avon prompted one of those occasions.
In January 2022, Stewart Lee, the 41st best standup ever, wrote in his Observer column:
“… four committed young people, opportunistically identified as part of a much larger group that toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston (1636–1721) into the Bristol docks in 2020, were found not guilty of criminal damage. They clearly broke the letter of the law of the land and Colston’s sculpted, slavery-funded cane and fancy frock-coat coat-tails specifically were definitely criminally damaged during the toppling, but the jury acquitted the four by referring to a higher moral standard.
… In 2012, cowardly, woke council officials removed from the Scotstoun leisure centre in Glasgow a wooden effigy of Jimmy Savile (1926–2011), the predatory paedophile sex offender. New government policy surely means the Savile statue must be subject to the same “retain and explain” policy that Johnson has endorsed. The Savile sculpture must be retained and returned to its original position in the foyer of the leisure centre, with a small plaque appended to its foot, detailing Savile’s horrendous sex crimes.”
I like Stewart Lee’s comedy and I usually agree with his angry, humorous tirades but in this case I wasn’t wholly with him. Lee had several targets in the piece which included exposing the hypocrisy of the Johnson Government and raising a hand of support to the demonstrators. The Jimmy Savile analogy worked only in part for me, though. I think we should retain Jimmy Savile’s statue in a public place to remind us that we need to question our collective gullibility about crimes that are committed “in plain sight”, especially when the perpetrators are public figures who have been lauded for their charity work, been given a knighthood and so on.
This brings me to the point of this post: given that most people thought that Savile did a great job for many years, sufficiently so to gain the plaudits, why were so many of us so wrong? And what does this tell us about history and, given the revelations, about revisionism? We’re pretty sure that we have the right idea about Savile now but many other cases are much less clear-cut.
I am going to use Nietzsche as our guide to introduce the subject. Nietzsche thought that history must be a live subject, that it must be a stimulus to action, not dry and academic. He countered the objective view that some historians seek with a subjective one.
“We wish to serve history only insofar as it serves living. But there is a degree of doing history and valuing it that atrophies and degenerates life.”
Nietzsche thought that man’s (sic) purpose was to achieve greatness and that it could only be achieved by not allowing history to have a cloying effect. History should be made as a fight against history. Man should live by his instincts.
These ideas have historical echoes. One of Nietzsche’s conclusions is that the Ancient Greek proverb “Know thyself!” is a pointer to the way to live. Modern authenticity movements take a similar view. And they all suffer from the same problem: there is no unchanging, persistent self to know. Where might we look for such a thing? In the wordless early stages of childhood memory? If yes, our inarticulateness about those first steps is a problem. It is a history about which we cannot speak, at least first-hand. Our selves develop and they develop both emotionally and cognitively, each, to some extent, informing the other. So is our 4 year old self any more (or less) authentic than our 1 month old self? Nietzsche, if he were alive, may answer that the one month old is truer to itself, truer to its instincts. I argue that the 4 year old is neither more nor less authentic as a self, only more complex, and more clouded by this complexity.
Look at it another way. There is general agreement amongst evolutionary scientists that human behaviour is based both in genetics and in experience, and in the multiple complex relationships within and between them. Those promoting authenticity usually seek a prelapsarian self to be authentic to, a genetic self, so to say. But this is impossible; the genetic self at birth is not complete - the ontogenetic self is not fully expressed at birth - and cannot be separated from its environment, from experience. The value of history, then, is not in finding some personal authentic truth: authenticity keeps changing. If truth is what we are after, we must look elsewhere.
Nietzsche was alive to many varieties of history. He was scathing about the determinist view of history that needs only to be discovered or uncovered by diligent researchers. That is, about the notion that there is a historical truth about everything and it just waiting to be found. He concludes that:
“according to the cynical rule that things had to turn out just as they are now, that man had to be what man is, and that against this “had to” no one is entitled to rebel.”
Irony, which in Nietzsche’s world is bad enough, is replaced here by cynicism. When everything is determined there is no room for great men. Or great women.
Equally, history viewed as an objective study is viewed by Nietzsche with scorn.
“... naive historians call “Objectivity” the process of measuring past opinions and deeds by the universal public opinions of the moment. Here they find the canon of all truths. Their work is to make the past conform to contemporary triviality.”
Objectivity makes history tame and does not provoke us into action.
Against these shortcomings, he proposed three ways to address and use history:
All can be misused: the monumental may become static or hero-worshipping, the antiquarian, when it treats everything of history as equally valuable and everything new as unworthy; and, criticism when it becomes a game that does not produce action other than more criticism. All three must have the object of action.
The value of history is not in the universal but in the particular. Universals can be reworked, changing a general truth into one that is original, “an entire world of profundity, power and beauty”.
Nietzsche is a great provocateur. We can use his excesses as challenges and indications rather than prescriptions. How can we respond?
I’d like to go back to the example at the top of the post before attempting a conclusion. What happened to Edward Colston’s statue? The statue was subject to controversy years before its toppling in 2020. Subsequently, local and national politicians, political, cultural, academic and community figures all weighed in with their views on what to do next. In 2024, a solution was found: to place the statue in a horizontal position, defacement and all, in a permanent display in Bristol's M Shed museum, as part of an exhibit about protest.
How would Nietzsche have viewed it all? Well, he would have supported the action, the rebellion. It was, quite literally, taking his view on monumentalism seriously. He may have expressed the view that no great men (or in today’s language, person or people) emerged from the deed, but the actions may have contributed to changing the view of the history of slavery and how we mark it. He would have hated the bureaucratic wrangling that followed and would perhaps have preferred some “martyrdom” for the protestors rather than acquittal. Is there any more to history that this? I think so.
Just as we, as individual selves, run a programme that continually asks Am I ok? as a basis for our assessment of our own states, and we narrate the various results from time to time in a way that generates a relationship between many of these states that we call an enduring (but revisable) self,? collectively we ask a parallel question: Are we OK?
Are we OK? is a more complex question than Am I OK? There are more “we’s” to consider, such as family, friends, neighbours, workmates, communities of interest, regions, nations and many more. And there are more dimensions to assess the outcome. There are in-groups and out-groups and, within them and between them, both collaboration and competition. But both questions generate narratives, the first giving rise to a personal history, the latter a collective history. Neither are objective, even in the scientific sense. My self (and yours) is necessarily subjective - it has a first-person perspective albeit informed by a triangulation of views (also subjective) from other people. Our collective selves may seek and sometimes achieve a higher level of objectivity but, ultimately, we rely on a process of arbitration, such as position of authority, legitimate or otherwise, to decide which version of the truth we want to accept. The test of truth may vary considerably in rigour and other aspects of quality according to context. For example, a group of children discussing a game of sport are likely to require a lower standard of truth than a Public Inquiry into such things as the Government’s handling of Covid-19, but both are based in a subjectivity, the subjectivity that decides whose objectivity will be applied.
Nietzsche was too individualist in his view of history and too focused on competition. Yes, we have our own instincts but we also are emotionally constructed to relate to others both as collaborators and competitors. History is more than great individuals. It is about our shared cultures as well. History must consider a tangled web of facts, theories, measurement methods, tools and so on. In this, it is much like science. However, every part of the ‘tangle’ is less robust than in science. Furthermore, we need to place much greater emphasis on who is telling the story and what agenda they wish to prosecute in telling it.
Another challenge for history is that the questions we ask of it change in importance. Can history help our country to be more productive? was a highly germane question to ask in 1776 when Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations. It appears that this question should no longer be at the top of the list. Finding a question that keeps humans surviving and thriving into the next century looks much more important today.
Value in history concerns the stories we tell ourselves. History is a way of making sense of the past and the present and, as such, may reassure or frighten us. But, as Nietzsche said, unless it also provides a driving force to action, it may be little more than a parlour game. Like many things, the value of history is in its utility rather than in its accuracy. You can fairly ask: Useful for what?: for binding us together?; separating us from others?; prompting or restraining actions of particular kinds? In contrast to Nietzsche’s answer, in many cases the answer demands verisimilitude, not merely persuasiveness by force or sophistication.
It is important that we assess value in the immediate sense, that we ask the question Are we OK? now. But history gives us a valuable longer-term answer so we must ask the question at different levels simultaneously. We also must consider whether there is any evidence that we might not be ok in the future.
The answer given by electorates to the Are we OK? question in many countries in the world during this decade is ‘Not really’. In ecology, the ‘we’ is far broader than humans would habitually consider. And if we don’t take the ecological lessons of history seriously, the answer to that question may soon be a blunt ‘No!’.