What is the Purpose of History? A Personal Reflection
If they exist, then the academic gods have always blessed me with above-average competence and good results in History, without which I truthfully don’t think I would have continued studying the subject.
I topped the level in Secondary 4 and despite being humbled in Junior College, managed to secure a hard-won A at the A Levels.
This then allowed me to make decent money tutoring JC students, most of whom took well to my guidance. In university, I don’t study History per se. My degree in War Studies is more generalist in nature. Yet I unavoidably find myself taking many modules which involve History and historical inquiry. Those modules have always been my highest-scoring ones – I don’t recall getting anything other than firsts – but admittedly many of those scores flatter me.
I was, kind of “happy”, but for the longest time, it was superficial rather than anything deep. Beneath the evanescent glamour and ego-inflation of academic success lay a deeper sense of disillusionment, confusion, and emptiness. It had dawned upon me that, for years, I have been doing History – whatever that means – without questioning the nature of my work or its purpose. What good are my abilities to argue well, to interrogate a source’s provenance, and to appreciate chronology if they are just for the approval of an examiner?
It was why I didn’t want to take History as a university degree. The process seemed too onerous and the rewards insufficient. After the A-Levels, I found it to involve too much memorisation and too little meaning. Intuitively, I understood that just because something is hard, and I am good at it, does not necessarily make it a worthy pursuit.
The first-order questions were left unanswered. What is History for, beyond its existence as a subject that allowed me to score well? What are historians for, beyond their roles of chronicling the events of old/dead men? Of course, it didn’t help that I live in a society with a dim view of History, both in general and as a subject.
It was only during my time at King’s College London that I gained a more profound understanding of the meaning of History, or at least a meaning that satisfied my ruminating self. The intellectual culture, free inquiry and history-loving nature of the UK and King’s certainly helped facilitate my thoughts on this, and is something I’ll forever treasure but that is a story for another time.
The remainder of this article will be dedicated to answering the questions which I have posed. In short, I have found History is purposeful because of 3 reasons: memory, strategy, and truth.
History as Memory
“Consider the herd grazing before you. These animals do not know what yesterday and today are but leap about, eat, rest, digest, and leap again; and so from morning to night and from day to day, only briefly concerned with their pleasure and displeasure, enthralled by the moment and for that reason neither melancholy nor bored.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.”
History is first about memory. What differentiates Man from animal is our ability to perceive and remember – our sentience. This is what makes us historical beings and animals ahistorical ones. We instinctively make sense of our existence both on the individual and collective levels through stories, first told orally and later through the written word. We seek answers to basic questions like who we are? Where do we come from? (Although after childhood many of us stop being curious.) This represents History’s origins in its most rudimentary form.
History as memory is about satisfying our visceral need for identity and contextualising our existence in the span of time. Here, history is less about great men, or great events; more about ordinary folk and the more quotidian aspects of life. If your father has ever told you about a story in his youth, this is it.
History as memory is also about establishing the connection between an individual to his family, and then by extension his society. That is why memory is not just about individual memory, but social memory. If you ever heard a taxi driver or military veteran begin a sentence with “back in my day…”, this is it. In short, History is not just top-down history, what we might have been used to learning. Bottom-up approaches that uncover the experience of the common man are important as well in facilitating memory.
Today, memory and history have been commoditised. In other words, being made in products that can be sold, often for entertainment purposes. This is pervasive in Hollywood. Everyone loves a good war film where freedom triumphs over tyranny and when Britain stood alone, defiant against the “odious apparatus of Nazi rule.” Increasingly, films have also portrayed the more human aspects of warfare, the senseless bloodshed, acts of stupidity, love, bravery, friendship, and humanity. We also see it in bookstores, (okay, maybe Kinokuniya in Singapore rather than Popular), where shelves are packed with memoirs, and histories with epic titles.
The commodification of history is a welcome development, insofar as it helps to communicate the past, which is often foreign and unfamiliar, in a manner that is more viscerally and easily understood. In turn, it facilitates social memory and the comprehension of one’s identity. The obvious danger, however, is that narratives can be manipulated, often for nefarious purposes that misrepresent or distort the memories. I will come to that later.
The other danger that is more relevant here, is the view that relegates history as an endeavour that exists purely for the purposes of entertainment. I dissent from this view. It confuses the ends for the means and is blind to our deep visceral need for stories to make sense of our existence, which I have alluded to.
History as Truth
The German historian Leopold von Ranke, known as the father of modern History, espoused that History is about finding out ‘what actually happened.’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen).
This is a problematic task. Memory is like playing a game of broken telephone. When we recall past events, what we are actually doing is retrieving a memory of a memory of the actual event. Memories and stories can thus be factually inaccurate due to the cognitive process of recalling. Additionally, inaccuracies could also be due to one of perspective. A worm-hole view of the battlefield is not the same as a bird’s eye view. Finally, as I have intimated, inaccuracies occur when people –or institutions–with vested interests actively manipulate the truth for their own gain. This includes historians – after all, history does not judge, historians do.
What I have just described represents the debate over ontology in History, that is, in simple terms, the debate over whether there can be an objective history that tells the “truth,” when reality is perceived through the subjective lens of all. I don’t think we can ever be fully objective, but that does not mean that we should not try. Nor does it mean that multiple contending perspectives are not valuable and we should aspire for one, single version of History. Even as the historian has a sacred fidelity to the truth, we should not make an art a science – ambiguity is to be welcomed and analysed. Just because a mountain looks different from different vantage points does not mean that the mountain does not exist.
That is also not to say that watered-down histories are not important. The historian Sir Michael Howard, whose works I admire, acknowledged the necessity of “nursery history” to break children in properly to the often terrible facts of the past. Topics like colonialism, slavery, and war crimes are tremendously difficult topics that have to be discussed in an age-appropriate way.
Yet, Howard’s most persuasive argument is really about the importance of societies – liberal democracies – to move from nursery history to critical history. History that uncovers disquieting truths about the past is painful, but a mark of a mature society – a society that is grown up. In democracies, historians thus have a public duty to speak truth to power, to uncover what really happened. Their role should be public-facing and not be confined in an academic cocoon fiddling with their footnotes; their writing has to be intelligible without compromising depth, and not be soaked with highfalutin jargon that is incomprehensible to the man on the street.
History for Strategy
The final purpose of History, arguably the one that excites me the most, is strategy. I thank the module on Grand Strategy as well as the Centre for Grand Strategy at King’s and its academics for socialising me to this purpose.
History is not only about memory or truth but can also be applied as an essential tool in making decisions at the highest level. The idea is that embedded within the annals of history are lessons which can be applied to the present day. This also means that we assume that there are in fact, continuities across time, in human nature and human interactions. This is what makes classical works like Thucydides and Machiavelli relevant.
There are, in my mind, pseudo-historians that take this too far using history almost as a scientific, predictive tool. For example, Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap is one that I am tremendously skeptical of. But that is an article for a different day. This example serves to illustrate the difficulties of using History for strategy.
The esteemed historian John Lewis Gaddis framed it well when he said using History for strategy is about balancing timefulness with timelessness.1 Put simply, it is about discerning between (1) the lessons that are applicable only in the context of the past; and (2) the lessons which are eternal and immutable. It is about having what Lee Kuan Yew will call a “sense of history”, something he has criticised Americans for lacking.
History equips the young with vicarious experience and wisdom. In the eyes of the ancient Greeks, that often means having a keen appreciation – or fear – of what could go wrong in the presence of hubris. In the eyes of historians today, like Niall Ferguson and Hal Brands, it is about how US grand strategy in the Cold War can inspire the response today against China.2 These are ultimately important because they concern the great affairs of the state, where small decisions have extraordinary consequences that make the difference between war and peace, between poverty and prosperity.
As RG Collingwood suggests, historians thus act as “trained woodsmen” who help policymakers navigate the treacherous forest of geopolitical competition. I find this use of History–Applied History–to be compelling. History here, is fundamentally about the art of interpretation, rather than the ability to memorise a set of facts. This serves as another important corrective that History is a useless subject in a world infatuated with science and technology.
Conclusion
I suppose it would be nicer if my journey were less circuitous, and if this was articulated to me from the very start when I was a school kid. Far from blaming my history teachers by implication, I would like to thank them and dedicate this post to them. It is fully thanks to them that my basics are strong, and of course, all mistakes I’ve made are wholly the fault of my own.
Nevertheless, I do believe the History curriculum in Singapore could do more to argue persuasively and unabashedly for its worth as a subject, which begins with a perspicuous understanding of its purpose.
I hope this piece proves useful in that regard.
The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age, p.1120.
See: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/kissinger-and-true-meaning-detente; and The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today by Hal Brands