Many of my acquaintances, to varying degrees, are having emotional problems brought about by the daily news. Hysteria has also gripped numerous op-ed writers for major newspapers and, I strongly suspect, various cable news commentators. (I don't watch them.) I certainly agree that the United States and the world face a very serious situation in many ways. Our leadership not only wants to exert an unprecedented level of control over much of American life, but also lacks any real understanding of many important issues, and thus will make our lives worse on many fronts. President Trump is abdicating from the role the US has played in the word since 1941. Things will almost surely get a good deal worse before they get better, and by the time they get significantly better, many or even all of my contemporaries will probably have left the scene.
I do not share one of the worst symptoms of this emotional trauma: the belief that changes so alien to what I think and feel simply cannot be happening. This malady is very strong among op-ed writers like Thomas Friedman and among many historians because for decades they have presumed to tell us all what is wrong with the world and what should be done about it. Such hubris pays well, but it often comes before a fall. So it is today. I don't share it, probably, because I have had to cope with the destruction of my own profession and of the discipline of history for about forty years, and because of my own historical work. I spent many years studying the middle third of the twentieth century and have a keen sense of what made that period great, and how we have left its key features behind. Looking back on the Vietnam War in 1999, I wrote, "The disintegration of the civic order that the war had begun still continues, and seems to be leading inexorably to some new and unforeseeable crisis." That has come to pass.
More than hubris, however, is involved. For 250 years our society and the whole western world has cherished the idea of progress, and despite certain catastrophes on an unprecedented scale--the two world wars, and the effects of totalitarianism in the USSR and China, and elsewhere--we have lived through remarkable progress. We naturally have come to assume that it will continue forever--but history never really did suggest that was the case. Antiquity saw significant progress of many kinds, and particularly in the intellectual sphere, but that progress was largely interrupted for about 1000 years after the fall of Roman Empire. A remarkable book, The Closing of the Western Mind, suggested to me that Christianity destroyed most of the intellectual heritage of antiquity in the same way that new ideologies have undermined our intellectual heritage in our own time.
I am also convinced that the human spirit will survive whatever lies before us. Forty years ago I began teaching a course in historical fiction of the great crises of the first half of the twentieth century, including works by Pasternak, Malraux, Fallada, Orwell, Silone, and Solzhenitsyn. Dr. Zhivago and The First Circle celebrated the ways in which extraordinary men and women kept their sense of the value of life alive in the most difficult circumstances imaginable. I am going to give a shortened version of that course in a program for retirees this fall. If Russians could endure those times, we can endure ours.
For more comfort I have turned to some short selections by the great German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), often regarded as the founder of modern history, Not only did Ranke write multi-volume history of the papacy, England, France, and Prussia in the early modern period, he also thought a great deal about the purpose and the overall lessons of history--and by lessons he did not mean guides for action in the present and future. His ideas on these topics are scattered among various works, and I have found an excellent 8-page collection of them online here. No one has successfully translated Ranke into graceful English, but I think these passages are clear enough--and they have critical lessons for our response to the present, as well as the past.
Blind in old age--probably simply from cataracts--Ranke spent his last years dictating a world history, focusing on the development of civilization as he understood it. He scattered more general intellectual reflections through it. Here are the first paragraphs that I want to discuss.
"It has often been noted that there is a certain contradiction between immature philosophy and history. Some thinkers have decided on a priori grounds what must be. Without observing that others, more doubting, will disagree with their ideas, they set forth to rediscover them in the history of the world. Out of the infinite array of facts, they select those which they wish to believe. This has been called the philosophy of history! One of the ideas which is continually repeated in the philosophies of history is the irrefutable proposition that mankind is involved in an uninterrupted progress, a steady development of its own perfection. . . .If [such a scheme] were somehow true, then universal history would have to follow a progression, and the human race would travel in its appointed course from one age to another. History would be completely concerned with the development of such concepts, with their manifestations and representations in the world. But this is largely not so. For one thing, philosophers themselves are extraordinarily at odds about the type and selection of these dominating ideas. Moreover, they consider only a few of the peoples in the world's history, regarding the activity of the rest as nothing, merely superfluous. Nor can they disguise the fact that from the beginning of the world to the present day the peoples of the world have experienced the most varied circumstances."
This paragraph defined the great vice of the historical profession: the tendency to start with a conclusion and mine the evidence to support it. Nationalism (of which Ranke was remarkably free) and ideology probably provide many historians' conclusions ready made. Thousands of pages have appeared explaining how the Confederacy should have been able to win the Civil War, or denying that Germany started the First World War, or celebrating Britain's political and moral superiority over continental European states. At least 95 percent of the writing on the JFK assassination is devoted to proving one pre-selected thesis or another. Marxist history inevitably looked for evidence that each class was playing its assigned role, and postmodern history sees every issue as a function of race, class, and gender. All of these approaches, Ranke is suggesting, are historical dead ends, because they deny the complexity of history, which I would add reflects the complexity of human nature.
Continuing, Ranke presented his view of how historical knowledge could be acquired.
"There are two ways to become acquainted with human affairs: through the knowledge of the particular, and through the knowledge of the abstract. There is no other method. Even revelation consists of the two: abstract principles and history. But these two sources of knowledge must be distinguished. Those historians who disregard this err, as do those who see history as only a vast aggregation of facts which must be arranged according to a utilitarian principle to make them comprehensible. Thus they append one particular fact to another, connected only by a general moral. I believe, instead, that the science of history is called upon to find its perfection within itself, and that it is capable of doing so. By proceeding from the research and consideration of the individual facts in themselves to a general view of events, history is able to raise itself to a knowledge of the objectively present relationships." This is what I attempted to do in my most ambitious book, Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler. I spent the better part of a decade exploring Ranke's broader legacy, the enormous literature on European international politics from the mid-16th until the mid-20th century, with particular attention to four periods of general European war. It took years, but that allowed me to establish patterns of conflict--what wars were about, and how successfully nations managed to achieve their aims--that changed over time. Over the centuries power shifted from aristocracies to states, until in the era of the two world wars war became too big for European states to compete with even large entities.
In lectures on world history delivered in 1854, Ranke tackled the issue of progress. He rejected the ideas either that a supreme being was directing the course of events, or the Hegelian view of "an onward-marching progression of the spirit which necessarily drives [humanity] towards a defied goal." He noted that the same political, intellectual and spiritual changes did not occur simultaneously in different parts of the world, with Asia losing ground to Europe since antiquity. The movement of mankind, he wrote, "refers to the great spiritual tendencies which dominate mankind, which arise alongside one another, and which fall into certain arranged patterns. But in these tendencies there is always one certain direction which prevails over the others and causes them to recede. Thus, for example, in the second half of the sixteenth century the religious element was so overpowering that the literary was forced into the background. By contrast, in the eighteenth century, utilitarian efforts at social and economic improvement occupied such wide territory that the arts and related fields had to yield. In every epoch of humanity certain great tendencies are expressed. Progress consists in this: in every period a certain movement of the human spirit is revealed, by which for the first time one or another tendency becomes pre-eminent and maintains itself in its own way." Technological and intellectual changes, I would argue, are changing fundamental aspects of human life and culture once again, and we cannot foresee the outcome. Then Ranke comes to the heart of the matter.
"To adopt a contrary point of view, asserting that progress consists in each epoch's raising the life of humanity to a higher power, and that every generation is more perfect than the preceding one, with the later always the preferred one, the earlier ones only porters for the following generations, would be a divine injustice. For such a preceding generation would have no significance in and for itself. It would become meaningful only insofar as it became the steppingstone [sic] to the next generation, and would not stand in any immediate relation to the divine. I would maintain that every epoch is immediate to God, and that its value consists, not in what follows it, but in its own existence, its own proper self. This value gives to the contemplation of history, and of individual lives in history, a unique delight, so that every epoch must be regarded as something valid in itself, fully deserving of such respect.
"Thus the historian must direct his principal attention to the way in which the people of a certain period thought and lived; he will find that, apart from certain unchangeable main ideas, every epoch has its particular tendency and its own ideal. Though every era has its own justification and its own worth, we should not overlook the results which it causes. Secondly, the historian must discover the differences between the individual epochs, in order to consider the inner necessities affecting the way in which they succeed one another. A certain sort of progress in the process cannot be denied. But I would not want to argue that it moves forward in a straight line. It is more like a stream, whose course winds about in its own way. It seems to me—if I may dare the remark—that God, existing in no particular time, gazes over the whole historic humanity in its totality and finds them all equally valuable. Although the idea of the education of humanity has some truth in it, from God's point of view all the generations of mankind have equal rights, and this is the way the historian too must regard them."
Here we have it: a blunt denial that history can be seen as one progress towards a pre-determined goal, and a declaration that every era deserves our respect. I, a lifelong unbeliever, would revise the sentence, "I would maintain that every epoch is immediate to God" with "Every epoch highlights different features of human nature," while adding that, for better or for worse, they are all equally human. I would similarly revise the second paragraph above. Donald Trump has brought an unprecedented authoritarian style and approach to executive power to the White House, but that proves only, to me, that our institutions and traditions could only keep those tendencies in check for so long. The same apparently applies to the whole regulatory structure the government has built up since the New Deal, which the Trump Administration is now trying to eliminate. Meanwhile, our deeply bureaucratized world, which includes our state, federal and local governments, our health care system, and our educational system, has become sclerotic and has failed to deal with many problems. We are now heading in a new direction--the one development that history can reliably predict.
Ranke was twenty when the Napoleonic Wars ended, and he was never a soldier. He lived the rest of his adult life during an era of progress, interrupted by a brief an unsuccessful series of German revolutions in 1848-9 and the three relatively brief wars in the 1860s that created the German Empire, which he welcomed. His views, in short, did not have to face the kind of crisis undergone by another great German historian, Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954), who in 1946 had to write the very painful short work, The German Catastrophe. Yet I believe that Ranke's views of history can help us deal with whatever the next few decades might bring.
Human history can inspire us despite the presence within its most impressive eras of cruelty and bigotry, especially if we situate those characteristics within the context of their time and recognize the long-term response to them. Yes, the federal constitution of 1787 tolerated slavery where it was still legal, but opposing views towards slavery repeatedly generated huge political controversies from the constitutional convention itself all the way to the Civil War, which abolished it. Wars throughout the ages have taken millions of lives--culminating in the two world wars of 1914-45--but peoples and nations have consistently shown extraordinary powers of recovery, and the greatest wars have often secured decades of peace for them, most notably from 1945 onwards in Europe and much of Asia. And throughout the centuries, the arts have given us works of eternal value, many carefully preserved to this day, which confirm our very real kinship with men and women of eras past. That remains the lesson of Yeats's great poem, "Lapis Lazuli," written on the eve of the catastrophe of the Second World War. Our frustration with today's world--which for the moment remains relatively peaceable and prosperous--reflects the extraordinary good fortune that we have enjoyed for the last 80 years. They two have had their own tragic episodes in South Asia, in China, in Vietnam, and in many other places as well, but they have compared very favorably with many earlier periods.
For four years, early in my career, I helped teach a course, "The Uses of History," at the Harvard JFK School of Government. I eventually concluded, however, that the real function of history was defined by Dr. Johnson as the function of literature: "Better to enjoy life, and better to endure it." And rereading these lines of Ranke's, I understood why I have never had a moment's doubt about my vocation as an historian.
"To make a true historian, I think that two qualities are needed, the first of which is a participation and joy in the particular in and for itself. If a person has a real fondness for this race of so many, so varied, creatures to which we ourselves belong, and for its essential nature, always ancient and somehow always new, so good and so evil, so noble and so brutish, so refined and so crude, directed toward eternity and living for the moment, satisfied with little yet desirous of everything; if he has a love of the vital manifestation of humanity at all, then he must rejoice in it without any reference to the progress of things. To his observation of humanity's virtues he will add an attention to its accompanying vices, to its happiness and misfortunes, to the development of human nature under so many varied conditions, to its institutions and customs. In summary, he must seek to follow the kings who have ruled over the races, the succession of events, and the development of the chief undertakings. All this he should do for no purpose other than his joy in the life of the particular individual, just as we enjoy flowers without considering to which genus of Linnaeus and Oken they belong. Enough: he must do this without thinking how the whole appears in the individuals.
"But this is not enough. It is essential that the historian also have an eye for the universal. He ought not to conceive of it a priori as the philosopher does. Rather, his consideration of particular individuals will show him the course which the development of the world as a whole has taken. This development is related, not to the universal ideas which have ruled in one or another period, but to something completely different. No people in the world has remained out of contact with the others. This relationship, inherent in a people's own nature, is the one by which it enters into universal history, and must be emphasized in universal history."
The first paragraph explains why I have never had a boring or unhappy moment in an archive, and why I still find magic in the stacks of Widener library, even though I very rarely see another person during my visits there. The second expresses the real nature of historical change--unpredictable, often random, never final, and often spectacular. It gives all of human history the capacity which Orwell, another inspiration of mine, ascribed to England in his pamphlet, The Lion and the Unicorn, and which I already paraphrased at the end of Politics and War: human history, like all living things, has the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same. These are much easier truths to live by in periods of relative quiet in which generations like Ranke's and mine grew up, but those who can still grapple with them can fit literally anything into a broader sense of history that remains inspiring.
