There is something profoundly different in these two things: the activity of writing history and the activity of living within history. Sorting out the differences between the two sheds light on the more abstract issue of the difference between living in the mind and living in existence, which is a question as old as philosophy, what with Socrates having maintained that the demands of the two were quite different: mind requiring unrelenting criticism, even if it earns scorn from those not engaged in the pursuits of the mind, while life itself required obedience, even to the drinking of hemlock. Let’s bring the dispute up to date.
Writing history means becoming immersed in a period because the amount of information from the period doesn’t change even if the mound of information is so much that no one can fully grasp it and even if people bring new concepts to bear to help arrange the material. The Nineteenth Century is over even if no one can master all its details and concepts of psychoanalysis or modern sociology have to be projected back. What someone does who considers him or herself to be engaged with that century is to master rather than remember whatever is available of the literature and history and personalities and social forces of the period. An historian knows about the Wilmot Provisio and the Gadsden Purchase even if few people at the time knew about it, preoccupied as they were, or as some of them were, with western expansion or their gut reaction to slavery or what it was like to be part of or aware of the sexual Utopian communities that existed at the time as part of the landscape: whether to procreate or not, or whether polygamy was sensible. The historian knows about all of these things and many others as well, there being an inexhaustible pile of things to learn and to relate to one another. Ever since that very Nineteenth Century historian William MacCauley, we are prone to think about the intersection between the cultural content of society, ever shifting according to its own internal dynamics, alongside the political dynamics of the society, which concerns the political and military and maybe the intellectual elite, those last people possibly transmitting popular sentiment into the elite arena, or maybe not. So people are encased in the history of their period, not coming out of their silos, to use a Twenty First century term, and maybe two centuries from now, after extensive research, a historian will get a sense of what were the decisive events and prevailing sentiments of these, our own, times by knowing enough to make generalizations based on great familiarity with the material rather than because there is some principle of how to generalize. Peter Brown, who writes about a different period, late antiquity, knows more about it than anyone else so who would question his judgments about what really happened back then? We all rely on his authority rather than check up on his footnotes.
A historian friend of mine once told me that what he took away from a history book, aside from the point about the period that the author was trying to make, was some facts or three about the Court of Louis XIV or fixing a sense of how the French Revolution played itself out, week by week, month by month, making sure to get the sequence of events right. It is like the young woman I knew who was learning the history of World War II and took it as a great insight that the German’s attacked Russia after the Battle of Britain, because that explained why they abandoned what was going on at the Western Front. She may have been wrong in her interpretation in that Hitler turned East only after he had lost the Battle of Britain, but she was following the historian’s state of mind in setting events within a timeline, there being no end of details to fit in a timeline or one that is devoted to some aspect of the period, as, say, to quote a favorite one of mine, the kind of books written about the Second World War by those who had been established authors before it, like William Saroyan and James Gould Cozzens, with those who came to fame because of their books about the war, like Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller.
A question I would rise about this immersion in history is whether all facts are relevant to providing even a sense of the cultural atmosphere of the period. It may be important to know that the various beaches for the invasion of mainland Japan had already been named after singers and other entertainers, because that goes to whether those in the know were prepared for very significant casualties, a fate from which they were saved by the Atom Bomb, but is it important to know that the two A-Bombs dropped on Japan were “Fat Man” and “Little Boy”, except that, there again, serious moments are invested with the facts of popular culture, which may be a cultural tendency of the time, when subsequent namings, like the Gemini space program followed by the Apollo space program, drew their sobriquets from mythology. I can ponder why NASA did that. What did it say about NASA? So speculation in history is endless in that there are no end of associations to make between the various layers of social life.
From all of this it may be concluded, accurately, I think, that the perfect history book is not the one that is out to make a point, like what were the real causes of the American Civil War, or how immigration impacted on the history of the nation, but a book which narrates the story of a moment or a period of history with enough exactness and flair so that one thinks one is part of that time, that one experiences its flavor and dynamics without knowing what are its deepest currents. So I am still impressed by Garrett Mattingly’s “The Armada” because it conveys how England felt threatened very much as it would again feel so by the Third Reich, and that only miracles could save it from total destruction, from having its way of life ended. And this happens without the author telling you his thesis, but just displaying it, just as Arther Schlesinger, Jr, for all his faults as a narrator in that he is given over too much to detailing policy, does capture the flavor of the New Deal in his three volumes on Roosevelt, precisely because the New Deal was a place for policy debates and alphabet agencies and large scale conflict between those who favored regulating big business and those who favored breaking it up. What comes across is history as it happened, not a proposition about that history. That is also the case with Thucydides who shows you that people consult their interests rather than exemplifying how that happened, that alternative being the way a sociologist would do it, the sociologist always treating history as a set of examples that confirm or deny a proposition..
Now go to the other end of things, what it means to be in history rather than observing it so well that the story takes on a life of its own, not just a matter of causation mongering. What is being in a period like? It means being impacted by one fact after another, sometimes to one’s surprise and sometimes not. I go to the corner and cars stop moving at a red light so I can cross the street. That is nice and predictable, and sometimes a car will not stop and that can lead to an accident. Should the lights go out, people will jump into the street and act as traffic cops because the system of traffic starting and stopping for pedestrians is so important that it has to be maintained no matter what. That is called “a function” by sociologists because it serves some larger purpose and constitutes social stability not for cultural purposes but simply so as to get on with life. Sometimes, though, I am met with a surprise, like by Pearl Harbor or the election of Trump, and so a person feels that they have been impacted by history and have to think how to respond, the result being by no means certain, in that what the function of one reaction or another would be is not clear. So the Republican Congress could have decided to try to discipline a candidate they were not crazy about but decided, instead, that they could get out of him what they wanted and so they put up with him rather than kept him on a short leash.
So new things are always coming up in history, whether that is hula hoops or the return of vinyl records or a new version of the outlier politician who the people for a while at least find charming, and the population is ever on the rebound, having to make up its mind about new events and people. It can be exhausting and so it is no wonder that people, or some people, prefer to cast new politicians in old wine-flasks, seeing a blowhard like Trump as just a populist, however much forewarned by Patricia Neal and Andy Griffith in “A Face in the Crowd” or even applying the same label of populist, such is the paucity of our contemporary political vocabulary (another historical fact) to that old New Leftist, Bernie Sanders. And that is true in less public life as well, people adjusting to the two men living across the way as a married couple entitled to the privacy and respect accorded to all married couples, or adjusting the remarks made in public about women because we have come into a time a bit more prudish than was the case thirty years ago. It may be functional for our own lives to so adjust ourselves but that doesn’t mean these behaviors are functional for society as a whole.
So history, real history, is unsettling. It requires constant readjustment and we don’t have a sufficient command of the facts to establish a sense of what is going on, always battered by new facts that emerge to force us to alter the perceptions formed just a moment before, while the discipline of history writing is satisfying because we can claim to learn more about a past period, feel ever more comfortable with it, make more sense of it as we become more immersed in it. Better to be in the Nineteenth Century than now, which is the opposite maxim from saying it is a blessing to live in what are doubtlessly important times. It is great to study the Second World War because I was there only for a few early years in my life, just as it is more fun to study the Westward Expansion rather than to have actually been in a conestoga wagon crossing the Great Plains. No wonder people become historians.
My modern perception, therefore, is that mind is not independent of facts but always altered by them, and yet there still has to be a way to be independent of history, to grab a purchase upon it. Writing history is only one way of doing that. It is also possible to posit a transcendental reason which explains everything however much people themselves may not always be rational but simply subject to having their behavior discussed in rational terms, which is what I, as a sociologist, claim to be the case. But I have to admit that my own formulation may be upset by history which can undermine me and my rational confidence in the intelligibility of the social world, a premise as old as Spinoza, that replaced by something new, just as Socrates’ view of the state as a total and encompassing entity had to be replaced within a generation or two by a sense of the cosmopolitan as the place of refuge for the intellect. Who knows what will come next?