What is History?

Towards an explanation of the culture wars.

What is history? I think a common answer to this question is that it is the sequence of past events pieced together by historians drawing inference from evidence and source material about who said and did what, where, when, and why. Or independently of what historians say, history is simply the things that occurred in the past whether described accurately or not.

Another answer, offered by a philosophical movement called historicism, is that history is the development of human ideas; from the earliest conceptions of ourselves and others, to ideas about community, freedom, justice, social and political institutions. The world around us and our sense of self has always appeared seemingly immediately in human consciousness, and we have always offered ideas to categorise what appears to us. In Douglas Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, two nuclear warheads are vanished by the improbability drive only to be transformed into a bowl of petunias and a sperm whale.

The whale, suddenly having to come to terms with its existence while falling to the planet below, begins to question its existence before naming his head, his tail, the wind, and the ground that he eventually collides with. This is what it has been like to be human, here we are all of a sudden and there is everything else, and then it ends. Human history, by this answer, is the development of our concepts and ideas about ourselves and the world.

From this view, all human societies, suffering and flourishing, peace and war, are interactions of ideas about the world generated from the mind of human beings. There is no world per se, only what we say about the world, ourselves, the other. This might seem strange but let me try to show you how we can arrive there. Before I do, I should say that there are historicists who do not reject the world but still place heavy emphasis on our interaction with the world as interactions with thought and its development.

Any rational or empirical investigation of the world takes place in the mind of man. Logic and mathematics are powerful inventions, but inventions that appear and operate within human consciousness. Observations with our eyes, the James Webb telescope and electron microscopes, capable of detecting what we cannot, produce representations of what seems to lay outside of us that we conceptualise with our minds. If the tools we use to understand the world, and the world as we then understand it appears in our minds, do we ever grasp the world itself? And if all we ever have is what we say about the world and not the world itself, how do we know there is world?

History, the development of human thought which comes to contain an entire universe, then becomes what is most real. Reality is mind. And without any certainty of an objective external world governed by universal laws, we can then ask: beside the universality of history itself as the place where the contents of mind manifest, are there any other universal laws?

Historicism has an answer. No. There are no human universals. There is nothing that can be said of ourselves or one society or another, that it is not possible for some other time, some other place, some other culture, to conceptualise differently. Notions of a people, their purpose, descriptions of their relationship to one another, what is good, what is bad, what is heroism, what is terrorism, all of these can be conceived of differently relative to the moment in history you are situated in. Different modes of society may make claim that their ideas and ways of doing things are, or are based on, universal principles, but the historicists reject these claims as narrow-minded and short-sighted obsessions.

Okay, so why am I telling you this? So what if there is a philosophical and historical method that, in the abstract, dispenses with the world and places the human mind and change as the only knowable truths? This kind of analysis can be harmless, and interesting. As I argued in one of my final undergraduate essays, a historical analysis can be informative about the articulations of any given epoch alongside narrowing in on those articulations. However, its conclusions, when advocated for and adopted in practice can dismiss the well-being of individuals, even children and entire social orders, in commitment to the historical fluidity of concepts and change. Your attachment to a way of thinking about and doing things demonstrates your ahistorical mind and neglect of history and its occupants. A prime example of this can be found in recent public discourse and practice around sex and gender.

Following the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of ‘woman’ in the context of the Equality Act (2010) – an adult human female of course, it has been commented that it is strange to have required the highest court in the land to adjudicate on something foundationally understood by most children. With male, female, adult, child, being some of the earliest categorical distinction conceptualised in the minds of young humans.

I think we have ended up here because these concepts do not escape the historicist analysis, and when fused with a Marxian and Postmodern bent, giving us queer theory, notions of sex and gender are seen as social constructions imposed upon society that oppress and marginalise everybody, especially gender non-conforming people and those who feel internally that their physical appearance doesn’t match their felt sense of self. It is of course overlooked that these conceptions also do not have universal truth, but they are understood to be in opposition to the status quo and play a role in the agitation of society and its notions so that it can continue to change in the direction of justice away from the oppressive status quo... Fingers crossed.

Following the Cass Review, the WPath files, an increasing number of books and online discussions on this issue, it is coming to light that these conceptions, based on an historicist analysis of resentment, has led to irreparable harm to children, families, men and women and those who have stood up against this activist theoretical movement as it has gained institutional and political sway.

I have suggested in earlier posts that I think certain subsets of academia, particular those of the critical social justice movement are engaged in unethical scholarship. Given their openly political and activist mode of scholarly operation for the end of changing the concepts we use to think about society, agitating for policy informed by these politicised ideas, and thereby changing society itself while bypassing the democratic process. I have also suggested that some kind of intervention is not unreasonable as actual harm is being done and what is the point of having ethical frameworks if not for the protection of men, women, and children from zealous intellectuals convinced of their power to change reality through the implementation of ideas in practice.

I hope this and future pieces will help support this argument and that I can contribute somehow to allowing us to tackle this with precision and clarity. By understanding that there is as much a landscape of ideas that we have to contend with as there is a landscape of things and that the culture wars is very much a battle for how we conceive of ourselves and our place in the world.