Why history can never be objective?

While I disagree with the exaggerations of the post-modernists who claim all history is fiction, I would agree that objectivity in history is beyond our grasp.

The simple reason for this, pointed out by the historian E. H. Carr long before the post-modernists began their brief sputter, is that all history is selection. Even as individuals living in our own times we select what we know and consider significant. An historian reaching back 10, 20, 100 or 1,000 years into the past makes their own selections, or worst has the selection made for them by the random losses of time.

As Toynbee pointed out many years ago we know far more about Hellenistic Egypt and nearly nothing about the Seleucids (which covered Syria, Turkey, and Iraq) simply because Egypt is a dry land excellent for preserving documents while the area of the Seleucid Empire is very much wetter. Yet the temptation to regard Egypt as the more significant simply because more can and is written about it remains.

A similar example from more modern times furthers the point. Do a quick Google of the number of books written about China's Cultural Revolution especially works by those now reflecting on their experiences of their youth. Now do a Google check on the famine deaths of the 1950s in China. Not much huh! Yet millions of peasants died during that time while the impact of the Cultural Revolution was very much less in terms of deaths. Why the difference in scholarly interest or material? Because the millions of deaths were peasants illiterate, far in the countryside, the survivors still mourning their dead in silence. The Cultural Revolution hit the middle classes, city folk, literate, articulate and now eager to reminisce. Objective historians can rock into Shanghai and interview dozens of former Red Guards without leaving their hotel. To venture into the countryside and start digging up a tragedy no one is interested in, while not impossible, would take very much more objectivity' and still only result in one or two more books to add to the scale. Where lies the objectivity?

The best that can be hoped for is a see-sawing around certain points, varying perspectives of losers and winners (another objective assessment there), the rich and poor (there is goes again) or perhaps even the articulate and the inarticulate. Objectivity is an aim well worth striving for and to say it is impossible is certainly not to say that some accounts are not vastly superior to others on just the grounds of 'approaching' objectivity under discussion.

Learn more about this author, Peabody Snickersbee.
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