> I am hoping that my son grows up being taught by postmodernist that don't present history as fact
How else could it possibly be presented? Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say that history is "a perspective"? Can one change history simply by deciding to view it differently, somehow?
Our knowledge of the past is like memory - we don't actually remember what it was like when we were 3 - we remember remembering what it was like when we were 3.
It's filtered through secondary sources that are never completely reliable, and there is information lost because people die without telling anyone what they saw or did, or there's confusion, or, in war, the winner's perspective is presented as the only facts.
In the US, the obvious example is the history of the west, and the natives of North America. It was once viewed as the bringing of civilization to savages for their own good. Now its viewed as genocide. Because its being viewed from a different perspective.
Because pretty much all historical retellings are biased by the author/storyteller. There's both unintentional bias, and intentional bias in how historic events were portrayed.
History is not comprised of a set of value-neutral facts. History is a narrative constructed out of fact and interpretations, and every history has a viewpoint.
Without question, one changes history by deciding to view it differently. If it didn't work that way, we'd only need one history book and we'd be done.
Well actually, history does consist of value-neutral facts, but the sum total of all those facts is far too complicated for any one mind to comprehend. This atom moved there, that atom moved here, and so forth. Even if you scale up to the actions of individual people rather than atoms, we're still far beyond what we could comprehend... and in any case, most of it isn't recorded.
Having acknowledged the limitations of the historian's knowledge, though, the question is what do you do next? A good historian will use the fact that he can't divorce himself from his own viewpoint as a reminder to be extremely cautious. A bad one will use it as an excuse to indulge his particular biases.
I cannot agree. There are so many "facts" that the mere selection of which ones get recorded already puts an overwhelming bias on the stories they tell. History is obsessed with narratives, and there is an ineluctable requirement, when doing history, to create a story where earlier "facts" leads to later "facts" in a hypothesis of cause and effect. The requirement for a pseudo-logical story with internal consistency further cherry-picks the "facts", until you're left with a complete bowdlerization of reality. The truth is, there are enough "facts" that you can very probably tell a whole lot of different stories using the raw material, but people have a very strong disinclination to cognitive dissonance and won't do this. They'll pick one and stick with it, and argue it against other stories in ego-driven battles, until a consensus emerges as a sociological phenomenon, rather than a fact-driven one.
One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. Criminals often think they're justified in the actions they take; in fact, often they must self-justify their own actions in order to sleep at night at all, so they will have their own internally consistent narratives. It's extremely difficult to fight the dominant narrative once it has become accepted.
IMO, the highest value history has is in telling stories about a world which is different from our own, but for which we have somewhat believable evidence actually existed. The degrees to which it is different tell us what varies in human nature, and what stays the same, stays the same. It teaches us to not take the present moment too seriously as some kind of apex or nadir. But I don't think it actually tells us a whole lot about the past, per se.
A good historian will use the fact that he can't divorce himself from his own viewpoint as a reminder to be extremely cautious. A bad one will use it as an excuse to indulge his particular biases.
And a very bad one will pretend that he is being value-neutral and objective, and show no attentiveness to the interpretative nature of his work.
"A good historian will use the fact that he can't divorce himself from his own viewpoint as a reminder to be extremely cautious. A bad one will use it as an excuse to indulge his particular biases."
I'd say this is also true in the broader sense of how a person chooses to live in an inherently muddled world. You can take obstacles and confusion as a call to action and vigilant reflection, or you can use them as an excuse for giving up and accepting mediocrity.
Have you never heard the phrase "History is written by the victors"?
The problem is trying to determine what is objective fact - you often end up relying on witness statements, some of which will be lies or misremembered. And then you have to decide which facts are "most important", which events were the prime causes of a second event.
Unfortunately there is an unquestionably large amount of perspective and subjectiveness in history.
> The goal is not to determine what is objective fact. There is no such thing, not even in natural sciences such as physics. Dont forget that.
I'm not sure where you're going with that; follow that line of thought too far and you end up with solipsism.
Practically speaking, sure there are objective facts. The properties of mechanics and electromagnetism are facts, or close enough for everyday purposes. What happens when you throw a ball or turn on a light is not a cultural construct.
re: history, sure, no person has the Pure Truth, and any history reflects the viewpoint of its author(s). It's still useful to distinguish between things that happened and things that didn't happen.
For instance, World War II did not begin when Queen Mab, having been cast out of the Garden of Eden by Shiva, built a clone army in her underground fort in Antarctica then invaded Loompaland. That simply didn't happen.
It seems to me that there are objective facts; we just can't know them perfectly. Still, it's very useful to try to get an approximation.
The idea is that there are always too many facts and data, and it's a history textbook's job to present a curated set of information that forms an easy to understand narrative.
This often means that perspectives from less influential / marginalized groups are downplayed or even ignored.
Much of postmodernist history is about recognizing that this always happens and that there are always multiple perspectives to a historical event.
When the parent poster advocated having his children taught by a postmodernist, I think he more accurately wants teachers who can make students think for themselves. In the US you can be successful with a boring centrist mindset, you can go to graduate school and become part of the professional/political elite and not really think too much about things. Of course some elites are brilliant thinkers but DC is not exactly a hotbed of intellectual curiosity these days, and governance suffers.
Historical study can reveal a lot about the contradictions of ideology, the gap between political rhetoric/narrative vs reality. For this reason it can be a very politically charged topic. But even boring (to outsiders) topics are hotly contested—historical study is not ultimately the cataloging of facts, is it about the analysis of change in complex systems over time.
> Can one change history simply by deciding to view it differently, somehow?
It's often the case that history is not repeated as a mere sequence of events, but also as an interpretation as to _why_ those events occurred, and how factors at the time contributed to their occurrence.
Maybe we can admit that their is then also an element of conditioning to history as well as one of 'fact'?
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I agree completely; history is both what actually happened in the past, and the narrative that we construct for ourselves from those events.
What scares me about postmodernism is that many of its adherents seem to reject the idea of objective truth completely. That way madness lies.
History is replete with narrative fallacy. The only semi-accurate sources are from people who witnessed an event as it happened and wrote a blow-by-blow account of it as it was happening with little to no interpretation or explanation - a liveblogging/tweetstream of it, if you will.
Two meanings of "history" here: one is what has actually happened in the past, the other is what we claim (or teach) happened. The former is static and impossible to know perfectly. The latter is necessarily a perspective. Obviously the latter has no effect on the former.
How else could it possibly be presented? Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say that history is "a perspective"? Can one change history simply by deciding to view it differently, somehow?