Post by Oleg SmirnovThe key issue is that in January-February 2014 the EU politicians
supported, and even instigated, violent anti-democratic action in
the Ukraine. It boldly contradicted the declared "western values".
But, as the temptation was very great, those "western values" were
shifted aside. One can recall the dominant tone of the Atlanticist
infospace at the time, like a hungry cat smelling fish. The wisdom that
a violence tends to produce then more violence was forgotten.
The mythology on "revolution of decency" etc invented and promoted
later, changes little. Today, it is highly necessary to honestly
recognize the fact that the European support for the violent coup
in Kiev was a big mistake and in contradiction with the proclaimed
values. It does not depend on whether one likes / dislikes Russia.
The Atlanticist-backed 2014 coup in Kiev was violent, unlawful and
anti-democratic, it raised destructive extremist forces that led to
destructive consequences. Today, the EU politicians have no way other
than to recognize their mistakes and misdeeds, and repent. Repentance is
the only way to sanity.
<Q>
“A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not, the Pierian spring”
The objectivity of historical research is a question which usually
causes more headache to others than historians themselves and the
discussion easily turns into fruitless speculation. More sensible is to
consider the objectivity of those practical methods which are used by
historians, when they turn the past into history. In the Western
civilization, this is done by the “historical method”. This method is no
omnipotent theory which can solve any problem in the past but it leaves
substantial space for historian’s individual imagination and
interpretation. In practice, the historical method stands for an
established tradition which is shared by academic historians and which
students of history embrace in the course of their tuition. This
tradition consists of such general principles as uncompromising honesty,
careful definition of concepts, meticulous source criticism, systematic
searching for material that can falsify or modify hypotheses, constant
awareness of the problem of representativeness, and explicit statements
about the level of probability in the conclusions [1]
[1]J. Simensen (1990: 278).
. The historical method does not automatically guarantee the objectivity
of the results; it only guarantees that the results should be reasonably
in relation to the sources used by the historian. We may consider the
historical method an agreement which sets the rules one must obey in
order to gain the public acceptance as a trustworthy historian.
By “academic historians” I simply refer to people who hold higher
academic degrees; who are affiliated more or less permanently to
established research institutions; and whose works are recognized as
reliable representations of the past by their colleagues and readers.
Their discipline is accordingly “academic history”. My use of the word
“academic” carries no pejorative connotation. I am aware that this
definition is far from comprehensive but we may regard academic history
as similar to bad taste – without venturing too deeply in any aesthetic
speculation, most of us can easily identify it once we encounter it in
the true life [2]
[2]B. Fay (2002: 1).
.
The greatest advantage of the historical method is that it helps us to
distinguish what history is not, more often than it helps us to tell
exactly what history is. There are historians who believe in earnest
that they are capable of reconstructing the past as it really was, if
they rely on primary sources only and obey strictly the principles of
the historical method. This is the original Rankean ideal which may turn
into a source fetishism. Their belief is, however, an illusion. Not only
because historians can never check everything from primary sources but
they have to trust earlier works written by their colleagues. This
enables errors to multiply and survive in the historical literature.
Another point is that primary sources themselves are dumb. They speak
only when they are forced to speak. The harder the pressure becomes, the
more probable the witness begins to speak according to the expectations
of his/her tormentor. By manipulating sources – consciously or
unconsciously – an historian can easily achieve biased or even false
results. Manipulation does not necessarily mean that the historian
invents sources when there exist no sources but he may simply ignore the
meaning of the source, misunderstand the original context, make
anachronistic judgements, or select such sources only which seem to
support the preconceived result. The danger of manipulation is evident
especially when the historian is examining a subject which now evokes
strong emotions, such as slavery, colonialism, racial discrimination, or
even more serious violations of human rights. The historian may have a
temptation to adjust the past to support the present political agenda,
for better or worse.
We may conclude that history always contains subjective elements. This
is no secret to academic historians, nor does it represent any
fundamental problem of credibility: “The historian is no God, looking at
the world from above and outside [3]
[3]R.G. Collingwood (1946: 108-9).
.” Historians sometimes err but it does not compromise their whole
discipline. Medical doctors, too, make sometimes false diagnoses which
can be fatal to their patients but a few think, therefore, that the
whole medical science is wrong.
Of course, there is much indisputably true in history. We know, for
example, that the international West Africa and Congo conference was
held in Berlin from 15 November 1884 to 26 February 1885. Anyone who
suggests different dates is simply wrong. Moreover, we can accept as a
fact that this conference accelerated the European colonial conquest of
Africa by dividing the continent among the colonial powers into spheres
of interest. A fact is something that happened in the past and left
traces in documents which can be used by historians to reconstruct the
past. If there are no documents, there are no facts but opinions. But
history is not a simple record of facts; history is an explanation of
the facts. When we start discussing about the impact of colonialism to
Africa, we have less facts than opinions. The answer depends much on
whose position we take and what we now consider significant in the past
– and present [4]
[4]See for example A.A. Boahen (1985).
.
History always reflects the values of individual historians and their
cultural environment. When these values change, the history changes,
too, though the facts remain unchanged. However, we are not living in an
unidimensional world where everybody shares the same values. There is,
for example, no homogeneous “Western civilization” and an equally
homogenous system of “Western values”. In reality, the Western
civilization consists of many cultures which are located or have their
roots in Europe. These cultures share a number of close similarities
indeed but they also have remarkable differences because of the various
historical experiences. Only an ignorant fool can claim that, say, the
Irishmen, the Catalans, and the Czechs are identical, because they all
belong to something we are used to label as Western civilization (not to
mention that the Wolof, the Lunda, and the Xhosa should be identical
simply because they live in Africa). It is, of course, possible, and
often necessary, to form a generalization by grouping the similarities
(such as Western or African civilization) but we should always remember
that a generalization represents nothing but an abstract idea which is
achieved at the expense of details.
Similarly, the Western value system has developed considerably over time
and is constantly changing. It consists of many codes of values which
are full of contradictions, to begin with conservatism, liberalism,
feminism, environmentalism, marxism, or anarchism. Another aspect is
that many of the values which are conventionally labelled as Western may
have less to do with the Western civilization but with the economic
modernization. They just appear Western, because the economic
modernization first took place on a large scale in Western Europe [5]
[5]J. Hippler (1998). For an English translation of this article,…
.
The above discussion concerns the community of Western academic
historians, too. There is no universal Western “orthodoxy” of African
history to vet all contributions of historical research for strict
adherence to the established “model”. In reality, the Western historians
of Africa constitute a very heterogeneous group of people who often
disagree with each other and who represent various levels of scholarship
from excellent to poor. It is only the commitment to the general
principles of the historical method, not to a certain model, which
unites the individual members of this community.
The simultaneous existence of different values and cultural experiences
explains why two historians, both applying honestly the historical
method on the same sources, can achieve different results. Sometimes it
is possible to evaluate that one result is more trustworthy than the
other by checking how reliable and representative the sources are or
whether the result is perhaps ideologically biased. More often we have
no other choice than to accept that there are many ways to interpret the
past. Yet the different interpretations are not mutually exclusive. The
question is not always either/or but rather both-and. One way to reach
higher objectivity is to compare the different interpretations, instead
of declaring one interpretation right and all deviations wrong.
The historical method is not a purely Western invention. Similar
principles have surfaced in other civilizations, too. The great Moroccan
scholar Ibn Khaldûn (1332-1406), for example, was thinking of the
problems of source criticism in the introduction to his universal
history long before any European scholar paid attention to the same
issue [6]
[6]See The Mudaqqimah. An introduction to history, translated from…
. Ibn Khaldûn was, however, exceptional in his own cultural environment.
Though his universal history was widely quoted by later Arab scholars,
his theoretical considerations did not cause any change in the tradition
of Islamic historiography [7]
[7]S.R. Merlet (1989).
. The fact is that the practical methods of modern historical research
were developed to the fullest in Western Europe and more specifically in
the early nineteenth-century Germany [8]
[8]M. Rodinson (1987: 94-95).
. The explanation is not the absolute superiority of Western
civilization – least the German culture – but the specific historical
situation in Europe. The historical method developed simultaneously with
the economic modernization which eventually led to the worldwide
domination of European powers. Consequently Europeans began to realize
their difference, and superiority, in relation to other civilizations.
The historical method was needed to explain to the Europeans, why
Western civilization had transformed itself from being just one among
many civilizations of the world into its dominating centre.
Because of its origins, the historical method is strongly Western. Many
of the key concepts, principles of periodization, and the ways in which
the significance of the past are estimated by historians worldwide are
still based on the Western tradition. This situation is further
maintained by the fact that Western scholars dominate the discussion of
world history in all fields. Regardless how excellent research is
carried out by Chinese historians, the most authoritative international
experts of Chinese history are Westerners. Similarly, all authoritative
journals of African history are published outside Africa and their
contents are mostly written by Western scholars. If Chinese or African
historians want to gain publicity outside their respective cultural
environments, they must not only write in a Western language – nowadays
tantamount to English – but also according to the Western tradition.
Otherwise they are not taken seriously [9]
[9]I. Wallerstein (1997).
. This problem does not concern only those scholars who live outside the
Western world but also those who live on its fringes. I dare to say that
there are many excellent works on Africa written by Finnish scholars,
which are neglected by their Western colleagues simply because these
works were published in a wrong place.
The domination of the Western tradition evokes naturally the question,
whether there is any alternative. By an “alternative” I do not simply
mean a different or radical view to the past. The idea that the
monumental history which focuses on wars, politics, and important men is
obsolete and that we should rather focus on the marginal groups, or
“history from below”, is also very Western itself and reflects the
current ideological tendencies in the Western world, but it is not
necessarily welcomed by historians outside the Western world. By an
alternative I mean such a way to study and represent the past which is
based on completely different values and practises from the existing
Western tradition. The fundamental question is, whether it is at all
possible to study the past in an alternative way, however, without
giving up the principle of reliability as it is manifested in the
historical method? Or is the historical method simply as inviolable as
the law of gravitation? Another serious question is what is actually
proposed as a replacement of the Western tradition – and how different
is this replacement?
Baron
