Hiking in the Past

I want to challenge you to think.  I want you to ruminate on the word truth.

Complete the sentence "Truth is...."

I have a hard time completing this sentence too.  I want you to think.

This past weekend I got to write another paper for a history class.  This paper addressed the formation of the American Holocaust Museum, and the challenges it brought to academic historians like yours truly.  Part of me wants to just post the paper, but to be honest I don't think it would communicate effectively to you my internet audience.  So I will attempt to distill the core of my insights, and if you have questions I give you permission to ask away!

In my mind the goal of the historian is to engage past events and people while being aware of this engagement's ability to change the historian and her audience.  Fellow historians will argue for a different goals.  Some might say that objectivity in recording events is the goal and criticize my goal for attempting to teach my audience anything more than the facts.  I will respond to this criticism too.

Let's consider objectivity for a moment.  To be objective is to operate without personal feelings or opinions.  Objectivity is mode of operation by which the operators has no prejudice.  Most agree in saying that it is impossible to be perfectly objective.  If objectivity is the goal though the historian simply attempts to be as non-prejudicial as possible when he engages past events and people.  The most objective historians might say that the purpose of history is to record events or people "as they were."  If you read their work you will get very well researched accounts, and will come to many new facts.  You may in the end ask yourself why they wrote the history, and more importantly why you read it.  If the historian's goal is to simply present events and people "as they were" then the only benefit you as a reader gain is encyclopedic fact of that event or person.  In my opinion this sort of history only accomplishes half of the task given to historians.

Imagine you and some friends are planning to go backpacking some woods for over a week.  None of you have ever been to these woods.  You had the forethought to buy a map though, and a couple of you are proficient with a compass.  Your group has the skills to navigate the woods on its own.  Your group is autonomous in the woods, but let's say there is a local guide who is on the trail.  He and your group stop and trade trail stories.  He knows these trails like a post man knows his route.  This guide picks up on your group's interests and points out a few places in the trail he knows (not guesses but knows) you all would like.  He adds some directions and details on your map to these places and you all have a few more great stories to tell thanks to the destinations he led you to.

I see historians as the trails guides in the woods that is the past.  This is not to say they know all there is to know.  It would be better to say that historians stay in the past more often than most folks.  They are familiar with past events and people, and have a habit of telling other people about them.  Everyone is able to engage the past.  Historians are just the crazies that stay in the woods maybe a little too long for the average person.

Facts are accessible to anyone diligent enough to research for them.  It is truth that is difficult to get at.  Facts establish a context in which truth can take place.  To borrow from Hans-Georg Gadamer we all approach the world with a cocktail of prejudices.  This cocktail of prejudices according to Gadamer ought to be labeled our horizon.  When two people interact with one another there is a fusion of horizons.  In this fusion individuals can begin to see the world in different ways based off of what they pick up from other people.  This process is implicitly reflective.  Before, during, and after every human interaction each of us thinks and acts on the basis of our own horizons.  These horizons are informed by many different sources faith, school, family, friends, research, culture, and the like.  Truth is when two individuals work at fusing their horizons in a prudent fashion.  In other words truth occurs when two people, who are willing to change, interact truth can take place.

The historian's task is to present the past and dead in a way by which non-historians can interact with those past horizons.  There are many facts to the past, and there is even more truth.

Blessings!