Can we relate to people from the past?

The historian’s dilemma

What constitutes history would seem to be self-explanatory. If it happened in the past, it must be considered history. And last time I checked, time keeps moving, meaning everything is history. However, the distance we go back in time does change our view of history significantly. It would be hard to argue that studying what we did last week, and what people did in the Middle Ages is the same thing. But, then again, is it?

The British novelist, L. P. Hartley famously said, “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there” (in The Go-Between). That would certainly seem to be the case. If you study ancient civilizations, you come across practices and institutions that shock modern people. One encounters civilizations that were more violent, more arbitrary, and often rigidly hierarchical. It would appear that we have little in common with these people.

However, we do tend to see some history as extremely relevant and relatable. Indeed, virtually every American historian would agree that the American Civil War should be studied—not just by historians, but every American too. Can we relate to slave masters, or young soldiers rushing into battle with muskets to defend the institution of slavery? That’s a large part of what we try to do while studying history. In many ways, they seem to be characters from a long-lost time, one that is not recognizable to people living in 2022. And yet, the American Civil War ended only 157 years ago, less than two generations if you have some long-living ancestors.  

What we’re encountering is the question of whether there is such a thing as “human nature.” Does there exist some sort of essence to human beings that is present at all times of history—something that makes us similar throughout time regardless of changes in the material world. Historians and philosophers of the past certainly thought so. Indeed, much of history written in the 18th and 19th century could be classified as “liberal history” (or Whig history). These historians tended to be focused on progress, and how human nature has allowed humans to consistently progress towards higher morals, less coercion and violence, and more wealth. In this view of history, human nature has always been similar. We’ve always been (mostly) rational agents who just needed to apply our human ingenuity in order to innovate in the material world and in governance until making it to the “good times” we live in now. Such a view is intriguing but comes with its own set of problems.

Some of the best work that criticized this line of thinking came from the postmodernist. Though these philosophers/historians/literary and cultural critics have been lumped in with Marxist and other “radical” ideologies, their contribution is actually tamer and more reasonable, at least in my opinion, than I thought before reading some of them. Jean Francois Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as an “incredulity towards metanarratives” (in The Postmodern Condition). A metanarrative is simply an overarching narrative that explains history and essential human goals that are present throughout history. The metanarrative liberal or Whig historians often fell into was that human nature has always been motivated by progress, and all of history can be explained as a slow march toward those high goals (what the world looks like today).

In The Tropics of Discourse, Hayden White discusses postmodernism, and some of the various wings in the larger movement. According to White, various thinkers including Michel Foucault belong to the Eschatological wing. White argues that this wing “concentrates on the ways in which structures of consciousness actually conceal the reality of the world and, by that concealment, effectively isolate men within different, not to say mutually exclusive, universes of discourse, thought, and action.” This wing is ultimately, “dispersive, insamuch as it leads thought into the interior of a given mode of consciousness, where all its essential mystery, opaqueness, and particularity are celebrated as evidence of the irreducible variety of human nature” (258-259). These thinkers tended to argue that human nature is not real (or at least that there is a “irreducible variety” to it), and thus the topic of historical inquiry should often be disruptions, and variance, which reveals the variety of human nature in history, rather than any sort of linear progression towards the modern world.

Faced with these two approaches to history, historians are trapped in a dilemma. Recently, while reading Sexuality in Medieval Europe, I came across a section where the author discusses this dilemma and offers a solution. In discussing written language and its use in understanding Medieval sexuality, Ruth Karras (author) pointed out that “historians are rightly reluctant to accept explanations that are based on an idea of a universal human nature, because this would lead them to ignore the ways in which past cultures (or other contemporary cultures for that matter) are profoundly different from ours.” At the same time, an unwillingness to accept that there is such a thing as human nature, “places severe limits on our ability to interpret the evidence” (206). Indeed, if people of a different time have no commonalities with us, it would seem impossible to understand them (or relate to them) at all.

For Karras, the solution is a sort of middle ground. One should not be overzealous in reading into documents our own preconceived ideas, norms, and culture. At the same time, we must find ways to understand the past, even if the people were quite foreign to us. In the conclusion to her work, Karras argues that Medieval sexuality is important to study because of its peculiar and familiar nature. In many ways, Medieval sexuality is extremely foreign to modern people. At the same time, many of the norms and laws around sexuality (that are present today) were formed during this time period. Thus, studying Medieval sexuality would give one a unique perspective on a past foreign culture, while hinting at how modern norms around sexuality were formed.

Ultimately, I’m not confident that Karras solved the dilemma faced by historians. Her middle ground idea certainly gets her out of a stand still that would be caused by completely denying human nature’s existence. But the solution seems to still be faced with the same dilemma. Can we understand how the people in the past felt, and can we relate to their experiences? There are no easy answers, but each historian must decide how they will answer the question.