Historians/History

The Pastness of the Past

by Gordon S. Wood

Mr. Wood is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (Penguin paperback, 2009), from which the following article is excerpted.

In 1969 the distinguished English historian J. H. Plumb wrote a book titled The Death of the Past, which has recently been reissued in a new edition. By "the past," Plumb essentially meant memory or heritage, what he called the "created ideology"-the "mythical, religious, and political interpretations"-with which humans have sought to sanctify their societies, buttress their institutions, and invest their lives and their nations with a sense of destiny. Such memory, such imagined pasts, said Plumb, should never be identified with critical history. "True history," he wrote, was basically "destructive"; "for by its very nature it dissolves those simple, structural generalizations by which our forefathers interpreted the purpose of life in historical terms." Its role was to eliminate those simple generalizations and "to cleanse the story of mankind from those deceiving visions of a purposeful past." During the past generation historical scholarship apparently has fulfilled its destructive role only too well, and not just in America. As the historian Carl Schorske pointed out, "History, conceived as a continuous nourishing tradition," no longer had the same meaning for society, or at least not for that part of the society that read academic history.

Modern critical history writing in the Western world, says the French historian Pierre Nora, has broken the "ancient bond of identity" with what he calls "memory," which is what Plumb meant by the "past." This "critical history," says Nora, has destroyed what hitherto "we had experienced as self-evident-the equation of memory and history." History has now clearly become the enemy of memory. "History," says Nora, "is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it." But of course it cannot; memory, or what David Lowenthal has called "heritage," is necessary for any society. Heritage may be a worthless sham, its credos fallacious, even perverse; but, writes Lowenthal, "heritage, no less than history, is essential to knowing and acting." It fosters community, identity, and continuity, and in the end makes possible history itself. "By means of it we tell ourselves who we are, where we came from, and to what we belong." We thus tamper with our heritage, our memory, at our peril.

This confrontation between history and memory may be less direct and less serious than Plumb, Nora, or Lowenthal suggests. Many of the new cultural historians seem not to want to destroy memory as much as reshape it and make it useful to their particular cause, whatever it may be. Many of them have an instrumentalist view of history and see themselves essentially as cultural critics who wish to manipulate the past for the sake of the present. Rather than trying to understand the past on its own terms, these historians want the past to be immediately relevant and useful; they want to use history to empower people in the present, to help them develop self-identity, or to enable them to break free of that past.

In their well-intentioned but often crude efforts to make the past immediately usable, these scholars undermine the integrity and the pastness of the past. So we have some anthropologists claiming that the Iroquois confederation was an important influence on the framing of the Constitution in 1787. Although there is not a shred of historical evidence for this claim, the fact that it might raise the self-esteem of Native American students is sufficient justification for some scholars that it be taught. Even the distinguished sociologist Nathan Glazer suggests that the myth might be taught to elementary school students , though not to students in junior and senior high schools.

Perhaps we can agree with Glazer that truth is not the only criterion for judging what might be taught in the social sciences, but surely falsehood ought not to be allowed on any grounds. Maybe this sort of useful and presentist approach to the past is inherent in being American. As the perceptive English historian J. R. Pole says, "What one misses [in America] is that sense, inescapable in Europe, of the total, crumbled irrecoverability of the past, of its differentness, of the fact that it is dead."

Even many of those historians who concede the pastness of the past and investigate "the past as a foreign country" do so primarily as anthropologists or social critics, seeing in the strange ideas and behavior of past peoples either alternatives to or object lessons for a present they find oppressive and objectionable. "Their vision of the past turns them toward the future," wrote Nietzsche of such sham historians; they "hope that justice will yet come and happiness is behind the mountain they are climbing .... They do not know how unhistorical their thought and actions are in spite of all their history." So these sorts of unhistorical historians ransack the past for examples of harmonious well-knit communities that we today ought to emulate, or they seek out abuses of patriarchal power in the past that we in the present must avoid. Much of the work of these present-minded historians thus does violence to what ought to be the historian's central concern-the authenticity of the past-and commits what the great French historian Marc Bloch called "the most unpardonable of sins"-anachronism.

From THE PUROSE OF THE PAST by Gordon Wood. Published by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Gordon Wood, 2008.