The Relevance of History

THE RELEVANCE OF HISTORY

Dr. D. ANJANEYULU

Before proceeding to discuss the relevance of history, it may not be far out of place to linger a little on the definition of this term “History” itself. It has been changing from age to age and from writer to writer, based on their prejudices and predilections.

“All history is a lie,” according to Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of England, himself not particularly known for veracity in his public life, nor for excessive scruples in his personal life. “History is bunk,” quipped Henry Ford I, the American motor magnate, who had no use for it.

“Many historians take pleasure in putting into the mouths of princes what they have neither said nor ought to have said,” observes Voltaire. But this man, a philosopher and historian of eminence, leaves us guessing on the point if the phrase “many historians” includes himself.

For Edward Gibbon, the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “History is little more than the register of the crimes, the follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

It is not without reason that these remarks are made – as boots of history were until recently too full of the succession of dynasties and depositions, the egregious blunders of eccentric rulers and mass murders, miscalled victories in war.

A philosophical view of history is taken by Carlyle, who felt: “History is the first distinct product of man’s spiritual nature, his earliest expression, of what can be called thought.”

Lord Macaulay, who practised the art of Historiography with a literary flair, next only to that of Gibbon, makes some useful observations: “History has its foreground and its background and it is principally in the management of its perspective that one artist differs from another. Some artists must be represented on a large scale, others diminished. .... He alone reads history aright, who observing how powerfully circumstances influence the feelings and opinions of men, how often vices pass into axims, learns to distinguish what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable.”

In the later half of the 19th century in England, the philosophy of Liberalism, as propounded by John Stuart Mill, began to influence not only the course of politics but the study and the writing of history. The principles of individual liberty, the belief, in progress, with the prospect of the greatest good of the greatest number, and the gradualness of inevitability, were much in evidence not only in the political and social life of a large section of the people but in the writing of history as well. The idea of freedom broadening from precedent to precedent began to be incorporated in the interpretation of significant events from the French Revolution and the Battle of Waterloo to the Congress of Berlin and the extension and consolidation of the British Empire.

But “facts” were still considered of the utmost importance in the writing of history and the task of their interpretation took only the back seat, as it was considered only right and proper. The “hard core of facts” was always kept distinct from “the surrounding pulp of interpretation.” This was so with the liberal historian, Lord Acton, and with his successor in the Cambridge History Project, Sir George Clark. This philosophy was eloquently expressed in the favourite dictum of the great Liberal journalist C. P. Scott (Founder-Editor of the Manchester Guardian): “Facts are sacred, opinion is free.”

The greatest revolution in the field of historical thinking, as in that of political action, however, was effected by the ideas of Karl Marx. It was he who said: “Philosophers through the ages have tried to understand the world; the problem is to change it”–or words to that effect.

Marx maintained that the basic factor in history is at all times the economic factor. The mode of production and distribution, the division and consumption of wealth, the relationship of employer to employee, the class-war between the rich and the poor determine, in the long run, every aspect of life–religious, moral, philosophic, literary, artistic, etc. Unlike the conventional historians, he did not divide human history, into ancient, medieval and modern periods, in a time scale, but into the hunting and pastoral stage, the agricultural and handicraft stage, the industrial and machine age. The great events, according to him, are not political, but economic.

There are no moral ideals, in the Marxian scheme of things, because in every case an ideal is a material need semantically disguised as a moral aspiration. Nor are there any heroes in the conventional sense. Thought is seen as the instrument of desire and in groups and nations, desires are always economic. Even Bismarck is quoted as saying that there is no morality between nations. Nor is there any room for truth as an objective concept in the materialistic interpretation of history, according to Marx, as understood by his authorised commentators.

The Marxist interpretation of history, though available in the basic writings of Marx, published in the 19th century, began to gain momentum only in the present century, and that too after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Almost the exact opposite of the Marxian view of History is the Spenglerian vision (that of the German philosopher, Oswald Spengler, who published his monumental work in two volumes, Decline of the West in the third decade of this century). He was a sworn opponent of the exaltation of the masses above the individual, the industrial proletariat of the cities above the aristocrats of culture, statesmanship and war. Everywhere in History, according to Spengler, the mass is the raw material; the form is determined by what he calls the will: the struggle is not between principles, but between men; not between truth, but between races, between repositories of blood. In the end it is individuals that determine history – Themistocles, Caesar, Richelieu, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck. And, had Spengler lived longer into the latter half of this century, he might have included others as well. Were he alive today he might have added: Gandhi and Nehru, Churchill and Degulle, Kemal Ataturk, Nasser and Sadat and Indira Gandhi, nearer home.

Spengler was an intellectual aristocrat who had no faith in democracy as a system of government. Will Durant, in his beautiful paraphrase of his ideas, wonders what he would have thought of a later situation in the U. S., Europe and elsewhere, in which democracy was not the rule of the people, much less of the best, but the rule of money, the rule of butchers and bakers and bankers, the sovereignty of politicians, the typical state-form of the empowered middle class.

To him, history might well be a drama noble in its aimlessness as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forests and the rest upon its face.

In the cryptic words of Will Durant, Spengler was nothing if not metaphysical and mystical, hating capitalism like a socialist and socialism like a capitalist!

Now to turn our attention from the understanding of history to its relevance. And relevance implies contemporary relevance, as well. Not merely the reading of it for entertainment as we do with fiction or for information and human interest as we do with some kinds of biography, but for certain insights – social or political, that might be of practical utility to us. For which, one might ask the natural question – Does history repeat itself? That brilliant historian and biographer of the 20’s and 30’s. Philip Guedalla, answered this question in his characteristically witty and epigramatic style: “We do not know if history repeats itself; but we do know that historians repeat one another.”

Arnold Toynbee, being a more serious-minded historian, would not allow himself to resort to such witticisms of doubtful validity. Nor would he unwittingly repeat other historians like Oswald Spengler. His answer, like that of his friend, Pandit Nehru, on some famous occasions, could be both “yes” and “no.”

Toynbee was no rigid determinist nor an unrelieved pessimist, like Spengler. Historical experience does not, in Toynbee’s view, repeat itself with a biological inevitability as in a determinist universe. But there is a recognisable pattern in the recurrence of historical phenomena. It may be loosely called a “rhythm”, but not the “Rta” of our Vedic ancestors, nor the “Rtu” with the regularity of the cycle of seasons.

There was something of the biological principle of inevitability in Spengler’s view of the decline and collapse of the West. In Toynbee’s scheme of things, which bears the impress of his innate humanism and studied optimism, man has the capacity for choice. Even Western civilisation, which was the only one to become worldwide, need not necessarily go the way of its predecessors, including the Graeco-Roman, provided it was willing to repent its sin of Hubris (or overweaning pride) which expressed itself in excessive nationalism, militarism and the tyranny of a dominant minority. This repentance could take the form of a qualified renunciation (rather like what Post-war Britain had done in relation to her erstwhile Empire, now transformed into the Commonwealth) and humility.

In this counsel of Penitence, Toynbee, the agnostic sage from the West, seems to come rather close to the “Change of Heart” theory of Gandhi, the man of God from the East, without professing to be a disciple of the Mahatma. But Toynbee, the philosopher-historian, has, to my mind, points of closer affinity with Nehru, the contemplative man of affairs.

Nehru’s claim to be regarded as a historian (a claim that is vigorously disputed not only by a few soi-disant philosophers of a pugnacious temperament) rests mainly on his Discovery of India, which, however, remains mainly a personal testament. The similarity between Nehru and Toynbee is in the range of interest and approach to the subject of civilisations. This too must be rather limited as Toynbee went to the roots and had a whole lifetime to pursue the subject. Nehru, let us remember, read history mainly for his pleasure and wrote it partly for the pleasure of his daughter.

If Nehru had some kind of theory, limited though it may be in its application, it is that of the continuity of Indian culture as depicted in some chapters of his Discovery. He also saw in it a synthesis of varied cultures, representing the principle of “Unity in Diversity.” He used his knowledge of the Panorama of India’s ancient history to see the living past from the dead. It was not given the circumstances of his hectic political life, possible for him to work out the theory in all its historical implications.

Both Nehru and Toynbee had thought deeply about the human predicament. They had solutions of their own for the problems of the day, as also the more basic issues. Nehru was never tired of invoking the “Spirit of Man,” which was, to him, unconquerable, despite all the adversities, while Toynbee the humanist places the accent on the “Freedom of Choice” and thus completes for us the harmony in duo.

The question yet remains: How is modern civilization (Eastern as well as Western, as of now) to be saved? And how far do Toynbee and Nehru agree on the way out of the crisis faced by it?

“In politics, establish a constitutional co-operative system of world government,” suggested Toynbee. Nehru too had often thought on similar lines, though as a practising politician, he had perforce to be more pragmatic and less idealistic than the historian in his study or philosopher in his garret.

“In economics,” prescribed Toynbee, “find working compromises between free enterprise and socialism.” This was exactly what Nehru sought to achieve in his blend of Western democratic ideas with the imperatives of socialism, as reflected in a planned economy

“In the life of the spirit,” added Toynbee, “put the secular superstructure back onto religious foundations.” Secularism has been one of the cardinal principles of Indian polity, as conceived by Nehru. (It makes the State equidistant to all religious denominations and does not prevent the reinforcement of spiritual foundations.)

It could, therefore, be seen that the philosophy of history has found in Prof. Toynbee a deep exponent and in Pandit Nehru a dynamic exemplar.

This instance apart, what could be the relevance of history to us as intellectuals, no less than as ordinary members of contemporary society? We may ask ourselves again: Does history repeat itself? “Never, or hardly ever” – seems to answer H. G. Wells – with his pioneering flair for exercise in Futurism. The well-known social historian of England, G. M. Trevelyan, among the most readable of the practitioners of his art, was ready to confess that “of the future, the historian can see no more than the others. He can only point, like a showman, to the things of the past, with their manifold and mysterious message.”

But then what is that message? According to one view; which I find has been well-argued, it is that history repeats itself with a difference. In the onward march of events, the repetition of history is compared to the movement of a snow-ball, while it rolls downhill, gathering more and more snow all along the way. It gets more alike as well as more different in the process of repetition.

In whatever way you might choose to look at possible repetitions of historical experience, easily recognisable or difficult to recognise, knowledge of and training in history could give us the perspective that we cannot otherwise get.

Discussing the theory of causation, vital to an intelligent understanding of history, Prof. E. H. Carr, in his G. M. Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge (in 1961) stresses the contemporary element implicit in any study of history. The historian of the past necessarily writes only for the present as he lives in the present. “The dual and reciprocal function of history,” according to him, “is to promote our understanding of the past in the light of the present and of the present in the light of the past.” Anything which, like Antony’s infatuation with Cleopatra’s nose, fails to contribute to this dual purpose is from the point of view of the historian dead and barren.” To which he adds, “Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question ‘Why?’ the historian also asks the question ‘Whither’?”

Prof. Carr lays as much store by the dynamics of interpretation as by the statics of fact for his ethic of historiography. He repeatedly underlines the reciprocity between present and past, since the historian is part of the present and the facts belong to the past. The historian and the facts of history are equally necessary to one another. “The historian without his facts is rootless and futile,” observes Prof. Carr, “and the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless.” His answer to the question “What is history?” is that it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the past and the present.

Dialogue, however, implies a certain integrity that has to be preserved at all cost, without being tampered with. The identity of the past, as a fact, no less than as a process, is retained, for the emergence of an all-round picture. The past has only to be interpreted; not disintegrated out of all recognition or intellectually liquidated. For then, we are likely to lose all sense of history. We might have passed into the hands of contemporary politics, without knowing it.

Interpretation of the facts can never be equated with the twisting of facts to suit the convenience of the writer, to cater to the requirements of regional prejudice or parochial sentiment. This could operate both in terms of time and space.

At the temporal level, there is a tendency, both at the Centre and in the States, to re-write history, not so much to correct the past (by eliminating misreadings) as to glorify it to satisfy our own psychological needs of wish-fulfilment, to make our past look more ancient than it is known to have been, through available historical evidence. Sentimentalists have an engaging way of invoking the gods of astronomy and the god men of astrology. The attempts to ante-date the period of Ramayana on the basis of Rama’s horoscope and the period of Mahabharata on that of Krishna’s can hardly belong to the field of historical research. Literary evidence and that of legend and folklore have to be corroborated by archaeological, epigraphical, numismatic and other kinds of scientific evidence to be accepted as reliable by properly trained students of history and chronology.