ABOUT US
TESTIMONIALS
SECTORS
ABOUT EPS
RECYCLING
NEWS AND OPINIONS
CONTACT
Soldiers of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) march in Beijing, China, in 2019. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters
I’ve written elsewhere, on more than one occasion, though not always particularly deftly, on the witless ways in which political animals of all stripes attempt to co-opt history. History, I should stress, with a big H. I had sort of assumed, by and large, that I had very little left to add. Or indeed the energy to voice it. But this, I’ll have to say, is an exceptional case.
History is pre
occupied with fundamental pro-
cesses of change. If you are al-
lergic to these processes, you abandon history and take cover in the social sciences. Today, anthropology and sociology flourish. History is sick…
The cult of “quantitative” history, which makes statistical information the source of all historical enquiry, perhaps carries the materialist conception of history to the point of absurdity.
EH Carr, circa 1980, from unpublished notes toward a revised preface to What is History? It's easy to lampoon Carr as the Eric Morecambe of the History Game - lots of absolutely right insights but not necessarily any of the right conclusions. Where History by Numbers is concerned, though, few would disagree.
Sorry – that sounds not just unkind but desperately intemperate too. It isn’t though. It really isn’t.
This history of world conflict in 21½ paragraphs is peppered with depressingly awful “clunk” moments and in some respects the first is the worst – I can’t even get to the end of the headline without experiencing a horrible sinking feeling.
“Can history teach us anything…?”
No, Laura, it cannot. Heraclitus applies here m’dear. As countless numbers of rather more gifted writers have pointed out down the decades, we cannot step twice into the same stream.
* * * * *
COINCIDENTALLY, by sheer happenstance, I’ve been reading EH Carr’s What Is History? – a text published in the early 1960s but revered by Guardianista historicists right up until the evening of 9 November 1989. 32 years ago today. Just think. Doesn’t time, even time so heavily freighted with History, fly? Carr, a sometime apologist for Stalin and the Soviet Union, answers his own question by arguing that history (we simplify and exaggerate here, clearly) cannot, by its very nature, be objective and apolitical.
All is rhetoric. He prefigured our modern understanding, its cruder aspects at least, of the political facets of history. For those on the Left, History teaches us that soi-disant Progressives (like Calvin’s Justified Sinners) inhabit, by definition… er, um, ah… the Right Side of History; and for Liberals and Conservatives, History teaches us that nothing has piled high the corpses more ruthlessly than the charnel house that is Socialism.
* * * * *
WHEN I READ a car crash of a feature like Spinney’s, an article so ghastly that it is almost a hallucinogenic experience, my first thought is that I’m terribly glad I’m a mere dilletante, not a professional historian. How on earth would you explain to your contemporaries that your discipline it is not as plain ridiculous as is sometimes made out? But then I remember that the profession, such as it is, is often its own worst enemy.
Historians are, by and large, teachers. But they tend to justify their existence by insisting that they have much to give a wider world, one well beyond their tutorial rooms. They believe their ultimate role, should anyone care to listen, is to offer sage counsel, insights derived on the soundest of methods, when it comes to political decision-making and the conduct of public affairs.
And indeed, members of one of the profession’s oldest and most important client communities, the Foreign Office and its sister Diplomatic Service, have always assumed that history is of direct interest only inasmuch as it makes a contribution to the formation of policy.
* * * * *
It was the year when they finally immanentised the Eschaton. On April 1, the world's great powers came closer to nuclear war that ever before, all because of an obscure island named Fernando Poo...
History by Numbers exercises like this rogue Observer feature, no matter how sober (or just plain dull) they may seem on the surface, should also, if they aspire to revelation, be viewed against a backdrop of a counterculture fascination (it waxes, it wanes, yet it endures) for Occult History. Three generations now of Stoners, going right back to the Vietnam War era, have had a penchant for paranoid conspiracy theories – the notion, generally, that beneath the “official” narrative versions of world events, there are hidden histories.
There’s a spectrum in play here, naturally. At one end there are all sorts of random acts of adolescent and emotionally-charged revisionism; and at the other… well, that’s where the Looney Tunes live.
Notable media-friendly productions include, in no particular order, The Illuminatus Trilogy, The Da Vinci code (and the book it ripped off, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail), JFK by Oliver Stone (and in fact JFK Occult Histories comprise a particularly virulent sub-genre), In God’s Name by David Yallop and a more recent magnum opus, Can’t Get You Out of My Head by Adam Curtis.
This is a twilight zone in which you’re invited to flirt eternally with (and occasionally em-brace unashamedly) pastiche and low com-edy; and yet seemingly sober editors on seem-
ingly sober platforms, especially if they’ve grown up believing in lurid insinuations of political prophesy, find themselves drawn to it, despite their better instincts.
A dangerous fascination. But you can sympathise: this is a world crackling with exotic forms of energy. Even the merest familiarity with it can be wonderfully liberating… and in all sorts of unexpected ways, as in, for instance, if you’re charged with sourcing illustrative material for, say, a feature on the immanentisation of the eschaton.
IT WOULD BE CHURLISH of me if I failed to acknowledge (and relish) a rich vein of burlesque implicit in the publication of Spinney’s stonking think-piece. You can sense, shimmering just below
the surface, a glorious comedy of errors here – the sort of tomfoolery captured deftly for almost two centuries by satirical writers familiar with the life and times of Grub Street.
Think Frayn, think Waugh, think Gissing… all the way, you could argue, back to Thackeray and Dickens. Or, to evoke a more modern TV example, The Thick of It.
I’m more than willing to believe that, to the dopey Trustafarian interns on the Observer’s features desk, Spinney does indeed look and feel like an intellectual titan.
And I’m more than willing to believe, also, that Spinney, a writer doubtless supremely aware of her own limit-ations, had no idea, when she first pitched it, that a modest proposal was about to be trundled towards the paper’s intellectual frontline as a flagship thesis.
Her proposal doubtless emerged after she’d spent the better part of a whole morning on Google, curious
to see if there was anything new to report from the few remaining souls still toiling at the History by Numbers coalface.
She then (again, I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet: we’ve all been there) packaged up her meagre findings by trying to evoke these isolated Inspectors Clouseaux as a community of thinkers working urgently at the cutting edge of human endeavour, a sort of virtual RAND corporation, a shadow
think tank on the verge of finessing their rubbish-in-rubbish-out algorithms in order, at long last, to compute the sum total of human destiny.
So here she comes, affecting to report hotfoot from the heart of a furious debate – always a gloriously inane journalistic wheeze when your only hope is the sort of miracle that might convert ditch-water into pink champagne: “most researchers accept…” “…while some researchers
agree…” “…others think…” “…historians show no signs of agreeing a truce…”
No! Really?
Spinney contrives here, hand in hand with her Observer paymaster, to make Sky’s dim-witted, race-to-the-bottom History Channel look like an intellectual powerhouse.
But then it’s transparently obvious she knows nothing about history, with or without its big H. And cares even less. Furthermore, she probably assumes that there are no downsides in play here – for instance, in terms of damage to her reputation, such as it is. Maybe, sadly, she’s absolutely right.
So, sit back, relax, nod sagely as she tells us, breathlessly, for instance, (my personal highlight moment) of the heroic efforts of “computer scientist Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado [who] crunched data on wars fought between 1823 and 2003…”
Bless.
* * * * * * *
THIS IS ALL A BIT rich, though, isn’t it? Scattergun insinuations of fecklessness? I should talk.
For instance, Exhibit A, in the run-up to the 2016 referendum, I began a sometime project, an amusing diversion so I thought, charting an alarming outbreak of History Abuse, perpetrated not just by the holier-than-thou purveyors of news and opinion, but by politicians, spin-doctors and the mavens of thought-leadership in big business too.
I began outlining how easy it had become to default to meaningless (yet superficially compelling) notions: the Lessons of History, the Dustbin of History, History Stuck on Repeat.
You know, the whole gimcrack apparatus you’d rig up if you were attempting, as a politician or in fact any sort of a polemicist, in the spirit of a summer season conjuror, to turn History into Prophesy.
I gave up in the end, utterly overwhelmed. Not emotionally overwhelmed. Not exactly. I’m not evoking some sort of narcissistic dark night of the soul. No. I was overwhelmed in the sense that there was so much material, appearing on an almost daily basis, that collecting it, tagging it, curating it… this felt… well it just seemed banal.
So this endeavour was destined to join, in my own particular Dustbin of History, a couple of other projects, Exhibits B and C, that have (or had) their roots way back in those far off days when I had a penchant for rambling in the foothills of the publishing industry: a picaresque field guide to the historical novel, from Scott to Mantel; and a compleat (yet, for all that, rather pithy) compendium of quotations, historians on the craft of history.
Somewhere, in the world of the word, mixed in with writers, critics, editors, readers, teachers, of no use to anyone at all really, there are the perennial wool-gatherers.
In other words: How very dare I?
* * * * *
SO, YES, ANYWAY, LAURA SPINNEY, History Whisperer, having run the numbers, how exactly will the world end?
Spinney: “It is not yet possible to say of course.”
Readers of the Observer in their most thoughtful mode: “Thank you.”
Oh la la! But if the Guardian and the Observer seem accident prone and chronically inept then at least they aren't the New York Times. Not yet at any rate...
On which note, we deem it fit to take your leave
