by Theodore Douglas

Created on: July 02, 2009   Last Updated: July 04, 2009

If historians had held tight to the myth of objectivity since the beginning to time, could we ever have learned from the past? If history is really a study of the past, and, to be more explicit, an attempt to understand the present and future through the past, objectivity is neither possible nor desirable.

Look back at some early tales of mankind's exploits. Few would dare call them objective or even true. Think of the famous poet Homer. He was not trying to communicate objective truth for later generations. He was trying to get at something more important, a fundamental truth about the age he lived and the men who lived it. Beowulf, by the same virtue, does not tell a true story of a hero, but it does give readers an idea of what was heroic in that time period. The chroniclers of the Middle Ages were at times merely scribbling down gossip, yet what they left helps paint a broad landscape of the age.

History was once written with passion and with a specific point of view in mind. Thanks to the ability to record and mass-produce knowledge (think of the printing press, photograph, film, etc) more recent generations of scholars got it in their heads that they could use these materials to tell the story of what had happened in the past - without a point of view. This ignores the inherent problem of subjectivity.

To avoid one's personal politics means to, at best, write a chronicle; it does not produce history. Yet, even those who might leap upon the idea and ask "why not write down events in a simple, factual way" forget that merely to write down some moments to the exclusion of others is only possible with a subjective judgment as it what is important. The point is not to sit down at the computer terrified to type anything historically relevant for fear that it might not encompass all viewpoints or treat all sides with equal fairness. No one has even been completely objective, and no one will be.

The goal of the historian should be to recognize their biases and treat their subjects with respect, even when they do not agree with them. The objective historian would probably not have an easy time treating Nazism, or genocide more broadly, without some strong hints of subjectivity. It does not mean such subjects should not and are not discussed. Historians forget that they have an audience, the public, which has the ability to discriminate information and make its own judgments. The information historians pave the road to knowledge, but readers ultimately decide where to go, as they should, for historians of all people should understand the importance of free will.

If historians ever abandon the search for truth and their desire to communicate its relevance to future generations, history may well come to an end and the world will descend into the Orwellian nightmare of 1984 where the state (re)determined truth.

President Theodore Roosevelt was a respected historian. He took the concept of an active historian to heart. There is no reason, he observed, for historians to hide behind their pens - or keyboards - and write about the past yet pretend it, or they, can have no impact on the future. Ignoring the mistakes of the past, as history tells us, dooms us to repeat them. It is time historians, who supposedly know these lessons best of all, dropped their false cloak of objectivity and acted as historians and citizens once again.

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