writing History

Paul Scott writes, “To make the preparation of any account a reasonable account [the historian] would have to adopt an attitude towards the available material. The action of such an attitude is rather like that of a sieve. Only what is relevant to such an attitude gets through. The rest gets thrown away. The real relevance and truth of what gets through the mess depend on the relevance and truth of the attitude” All the while concerned about power, Michel Foucault writes about the representation of language/power as it is relevant to the construction of history and knowledge.  And history is just what gets constructed by the powerful, as we will see the Left rewriting and revising history based on “new revelations” (per: Charles C. Mann, in the work entitled 1491) or based on new research (usually qualitative).  The “sieve” which strains out the crucial data is qualitative research these days, though there is the sprinkling in of what may be considered objective, quantitative data. Historians in this time and age construct narratives with political agendas behind them. It takes quite a bit of teasing to work out the agenda from the data. The Left has so many weapons at its disposal that it nearly needs only to create an idea in history, then it is backed by media and educators.  It seems that truth is in the eye of the powerful, as most would agree, but from this point forward, the Left has a lot of momentum and loads of ideas arrived at in fishy ways. We all, indeed, have inherited histories, but the emphasis should be on arriving at truth or partial truth without the use of propaganda. The sieve should be based on more objectivity and less subjectivity, more science than so much personal at stake for the Leftist and the revisionist historian.   Aruna Srivastava puts it well when stating, “historical events then have no imminent structure, but only one imposed by an ideologically conditioned historian. Creating histories, then, is an ideological act designed to support political and moral systems.”

Peter Kemp advances the notion that the modern historian struggles with the tension between reality and posterity amidst the struggle with the linearity of history. Kemp is aware that “‘modern man’ who believes in his own historicity is a being who, despite historical finitude, has given birth to the illusion that he can dominate both time and the past by the sheer omnipotence of his thinking, as if there were no radical difference between now and then, between here and there, between the same and other” This quandary is both for the West and the East, as Srivastava points out, as well does any Western student of the philosophy of history.

So we return to the mix of ideology and historical research to the notion of “agendas” brought into play as histories are spun and formulated by the present-day historian. This seems to be a problem for those who have no foundation, no truth to guide their research.  The current politically charged environment has given the ordinary person the tools to restructure national, historical, and personal narratives.  This comes with a challenge: who steadies the course of the constructor or does one need to be steadied. Where does one hang their hat? What are the consequences of nonchalantly going about one’s business while the restructuring of history takes place by the Left? Are we willing to allow our children and grandchildren to learn from this construction of the world? What will we be willing to do? Should the Marxist Socialist agenda march on?   

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