History and Hidden Ethics and Philosophy

Last updated on: July 1, 2024 at 10:53 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

History and Hidden Ethics and Philosophy 2024-07-01T22:53:02-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Beware hidden assumptions in histories. Too often one gets third rate philosophy the historian cannot defend as philosophy. Often this is justified because “this is just the way history works” forgetting that historians have adopted different background philosophical, ethical, or even theological assumptions at different times.

If one adopts a Platonist, a Marxist, or any other view of that (to the practitioner) “makes sense of history” or tells him or her how to do history, then their conclusions will only be persuasive to those that accept the philosophy. If this is the grounds for disagreeing with a work, then giving the critic more works done from that same perspective will miss the point!

Often the final response will be: “You are just rejecting history.”

No.

The critic or reader is simply rejecting a philosophy that the writer cannot even defend!

This is easy to forget for lay readers (like I am!) of history! There is no airtight compartment of philosophically neutral “history.”

When as a boy I wanted to defend the Union, the right side of the Civil War, I thought the proper thing to do was to read all the history I could. And so with the confidence of the person ignorant of the size of the task, I set out to read all our little public library held on the topic. There were authors who got it wrong and seemed too sympathetic to the rebellion, but I persisted.

History would tell me the truth. I learned a good many facts, but the irritating bad authors also got the fact right. They explained those facts differently or put them in a different moral context. If you began, as I did (and do!) believing that race based slavery is an intolerable evil, then any softening of that evil made the book bad.

I stick to that judgment, retaining little sympathy for the Lost Cause narrative, and the way the historians made their arguments. I could do this because I came to recognize their philosophy, ethics, and theology were bad. Often this philosophy, ethics, and theology were hidden. They would come to me as “just historians” telling the story of the times.

The facts marshaled, and nobody can use all the facts, within the framework used, with the assumptions of the text, shaped the entire narrative. This did not mean the facts themselves mere infinitely malleable: Lee did not win the battle of Gettysburg or his confrontations with General Grant. Reading Grant’s incisive memoirs made the same fact of this defeat mean something else. Not every book claiming to be history purports to draw conclusions or advance a thesis, but some did. These could advance answers to questions that were relatively simple: Was McClellan an effective battle field commander? or very complicated: “What was the relationship of Christianity to abolition movements? ”

There was no avoiding philosophy. As a reader grew older, he discovered that often the historian was working inside a philosophy of history or prior set of methodological constraints. This was fair enough, but meant that the history could only be persuasive (in regards to a thesis) if one accepted those assumptions or constraints. Often when one would ask questions about the assumptions, an investigator might remain impressed by the knowledge and research behind a text but find fourth or fifth rate philosophy.

Read early twentieth century histories of the Civil War and one can easily find a lazy scientism or scientific racism. Realize that our own era almost certainly has produced histories equally tainted with bad philosophy… particularly as many today gain an inadequate general education … ideology and advocacy replacing sound argument. How to know? The cherry picked facts are correct, the argument unsound and invalid.

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