Is History Dangerous?
By: Rory Cockshaw
Tags: Philosophy, Israel, History, Palestine, War

History is in a fascinating grey area between the sciences and humanities. It is unique in its conception in that history is in fact more a tool than anything else, akin to the discipline of engineering, in which materials are manipulated to achieve one end or another: to build a chair, a car, or a plane. But engineering techniques can also be harnessed to create an arsenal of weaponry, one that’s capable of terrible things — events like Hiroshima, or simply the invention of gunpowder. It can be extraordinarily dangerous for those who are capable of it.

Yet we do not often call engineering a ‘dangerous’ subject; we don’t think it harmful, nor warn people away, because we are conscientious objectors to the idea of applied science, or the use of mathematics to solve real-world issues. These are necessities to our very way of life; to the advancement of civilization. It seems absurd to follow the common proposition that history is dangerous (for instance, by Eric Hobsbawm), for the same reason as it is for engineering, but it is also equally absurd in the light of sequences of events in Kosovo and Palestine to assume that history is totally harmless.

To get anywhere towards resolving this paradox, we need to imagine that we have totally forgotten history, and any form of the historical record is immediately inaccessible. Surely, the first thing that would happen is total confusion, for humans are, at heart, simple animals (and revert to such especially when frightened) and it is only the complexity built up over thousands of years that have brought us to the level of human affinity at which we find ourselves today.

We understand that we are closely allied with our fellow humans because of historical happenings and treaties: we English were unified in the 10th century, and, ignoring the various squabbles and scuffles of the Normans and Vikings, have remained that way ever since.

It needs no saying that we do not remember these treaties, but their effects on us are enormous and such that they are ingrained into us at an early age with the concepts of ‘country’ and ‘mother tongue’. But if this history — our history — is lost, there is nothing to tell me that my homeland is my motherland, that my compatriots are my friends, and that my neighbor is anything but my very worst enemy.

Allegiance with one’s neighbors is everything, in modern culture. Not necessarily the ones who live next door, or over the road, but all of your fellow countrymen, your compatriots, your colleagues at work, your teachers and classmates, even, in the online age, those who live abroad but connect with you via blogs or vlogs, through tutoring or social media; these are all your allies, built on a shared history, somewhere, somehow.

History gives us the foundations of all that we see around us — it allows one friendly action to not simply be lost in the mire of the past, but to allow the fruition of allegiance in the future, which in turn leads to progress. But all that progress, therefore, boils down to is the past; no past, no progress, and we’d never get anything done.

With only a little imagination we can see how this would turn out if applied to everyone, everywhere: the world would be a bleak, isolating, counterproductive place. Our species has thrown winning rolls and been climbing ladders since the earliest apes could use tools and developed a system of coarse communication, and losing history would be landing on a snake that took us right back to the start.

A priori, history is a necessity and a beneficial one at that. But a posteriori, history can be manipulated. It can be taken advantage of, and it can be used to take advantage of others. Think Kosovo, think Palestine. Think the thousands of little (and large) untruths that build up the bigger picture of political propaganda in every era, in every nation. History is not always as harmless as building a chair or a car or a plane; sometimes history is the weapon.

History is the kind of subject where if you ask a thousand people, you’ll get a thousand answers. It might be written by the victor, but it is experienced by everybody, and, increasingly in our Internet generation, historical sources are not only available but are also written by every single person with access to the World Wide Web. There are more of them than ever before. But history is also the very apotheosis of quantum uncertainty; by that, I mean that events don’t have a value until you ask someone about them, and only then do they take on character and meaning, like Schrödinger’s cat.

These two ideas together mean that history has so many more ‘values’, so many more perspectives than it has ever had before, that it becomes more and more powerful every day to understand them and to use them to understand the increasingly complicated world around us.

Very theoretical, I know. But take the Israel-Palestine conflict, for example. Here are two accounts of it:

“Hamas is regularly described as ‘Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.’ One will be hard put to find something like ‘democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus’ — blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.” (Noam Chomsky, 2009, Gaza in Conflict: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians) “ISIS and Hamas share a fanatical creed, which they both seek to impose well beyond the territory under their control. Listen to ISIS’ self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. This is what he said two months ago: A day will soon come when the Muslim will walk everywhere as a master. Muslims will cause the world to hear and understand the meaning of terrorism and destroy the idol of democracy. Now listen to Khaled Mashal, the leader of Hamas. He proclaims a similar vision of the future: We say this to the West — by Allah you will be defeated. Tomorrow our nation will sit on the throne of the world.” (Benjamin Netanyahu, 29/09/2014, speech to the UN General Assembly)

Both of the above quotes, from people noted for their political weight in the conflict — Noam Chomsky, MIT professor of linguistics and prolific writer on politics, history, language, and Palestine, and Benjamin Netanyahu, the only Israeli Prime Minister to ever be elected three times in a row, and currently serving his fourth term, respectively — draw from the very same set of facts of Hamas’ involvement in the conflict, but spin two totally contrasting points of view. Neither is more objectively correct than the other — they are equally valid — but their correctness or incorrectness depends totally on the subset of facts from the infinite complexity of history that the reader chooses to accept.

Israel: a land of divide. (Photo credit: Haley Black)

If a statement is not an outright, bare-faced lie, and draws somewhat from the set of historical facts, and the rest from opinion and personal experience, then it is just as justifiable and just as valid as any other version of the same history, because all do exactly the same thing, regardless of claims of impartiality. It is then out of the question as to the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of the statement but instead becomes subjectively judgeable.

And this is where history can be a danger — there is a fine line between drawing a conclusion from a very limited selection of facts and a large amount of rhetoric and anecdote, and drawing a conclusion from absolutely no facts at all; it is this distinction that many people fail to grasp, and which leads to scandals, propaganda and fake news. By these methods is history taken from being an innocent study of the past to an immensely potent feat of social engineering.

History perhaps shouldn’t be compared with engineering so much as it should be with the practice of medicine. Engineering is somewhat brutal and impersonal, whereas medicine has a much more human goal. Both history and medicine take infinitely complex systems — of the past, with its millions of accounts and trillions of events; or of the human body, with its intricately folded proteins and genomes of 3.2 billion base pairs — and attempt to simplify them to a point of understanding and of treatability. Both are delicate systems that can be affected by the very tiniest and seemingly most insignificant of events: Napoleon’s hemorrhoids being the downfall of the French Empire, and the chemically identical stereoisomers of thalidomide being either sedatives or volatile teratogens, causing massive birth defects in children.

Both, also, deal with abstracted subject matters but spin them in a perfectly homocentric manner, for the benefit and the knowledge of mankind. And, most importantly, both have, through their inherent power and importance, a great potential to be abused. In the case of medicine, we find instances of surgeons, like Ian Paterson, who grossly disfigure vulnerable patients; in these circumstances, we never consider medicine itself culpable, but it’s the surgeon — it’s Dr. Paterson — who is at fault.

I believe we should have the same standards of history: that it should be practiced responsibly, precisely, surgically; and if it is found misused, it is not history itself that should be deemed dangerous, but, instead, the practitioner — the human — who is accountable. History is a victim of the people, and not vice versa.