Philosophy of History

There is a philosophy of history, in that there is not only ‘doing’ history, that is writing about what happened in history from the perspective of the writer’s own time, but there is also thinking about how history is done and how, in fact, history comes to be made. I am not a historian (although I have read a fair bit of history over the years) nor (really) a philosopher, but whoever let such strictures stop them?

What is perhaps most interesting to consider, initially, are the conditions for history being made. Why has history, as was once prophesied, not come to an end? I once heard that wherever there is conflict, there is drama; perhaps the same is true of history. That does not mean, of course, that all history is military history, but conflict, both civil and violent, constitute the stuff from which history is made. There are often winners and losers: at the present time, we could think of African Americans as being on the losing side of history. As history is often (not always) written by winners, the losers are, on the whole, silenced.

Nevertheless, there are some things which are unthinkable at the time certain events take place. It was, for example, unthinkable for a King to be put on trial for treason in the Seventeenth Century, until, of course, it happened. But until the late 1640s, it was just not on the road map. Of course, kings had been assassinated before that, but a judicial process was, more or less, unimaginable, until someone tried it. One of the interests of history is, perhaps, to explore why this might have been the case.

The project of the philosophy of history might, therefore, be the exploration of what ideas were available to people. Where did the idea of regicide come from? It did not, it seems, come from one individual, despite attempts to park the blame on Oliver Cromwell. Even the most radical of pre-war radicals shied away from such an idea. What gave it, as it were, legs?

We can easily land up in a bit of a quagmire, here. Humans exist in both a physical world, and environment made up of physical objects, and a world made up, if you will, of mental objects, such as the idea of regicide. These two interact: the production of a radio, for example, is a meeting of both physical components and ideas about how electromagnetic waves travel and can be modulated to transmit information. Both the physical and mental worlds are required.

In some cases, therefore, ideas cannot come about until the environment, both mental and physical, are ready. For example, Adolf Hitler would probably not made it as a demagogue politician without the medium of film and radio. Skilful propaganda on this relatively new technology had the effect of promoting Hitler’s image far beyond the dreams of Nineteenth-Century politicians. The problem seems to be being repeated on our own new media, ‘social’ ones.

Even the genius can only work with the materials to hand. Pythagoras could not have come up with general relativity because the mathematical tools and the ideas of physics were not available to him, even if he was more able than Einstein. Einstein had the mathematics and physics (and, incidentally, the time to think about them) available. It took a genius to come up with the idea so decisively, perhaps, but quite possibly it would have happened anyway, in time.

Lonergan argues that history can be seen as a process of progress, decline and renaissance, or restoration. Progress happens, roughly, when good ideas are implemented, decline when bad ideas are to the fore, and renaissance comes around when people change from the latter to the former. It should be noted that Lonergan was thinking about this in the late 1930s, however, when there were a lot of bad ideas around.

Nevertheless, Lonergan might have the core of an idea of how history progresses here. The problem, surely, is how we tell the difference between a good idea and a bad one. For many people, for example, the idea of the UK leaving the European Union seemed like a good idea. For many others it was a bad one. The choice was made by a more or less democratic process, but there are issues around truth and honesty in the campaigning and how much the voters actually understood about the issues. The electorate was, perhaps, not in the best place to make that decision.

I think it is Richard Feynman who observes that if someone wants to know how long the Emperor’s nose is, the best thing to do is go and measure it. Simply asking a lot of people how long they think the Emperor’s nose is and averaging the results will get you an answer, and it may be an interesting answer from some points of view, but it does not give you an answer that has anything to do with the length of the Emperor’s actual nose. You need an expert, someone who has measured the object.

Experts are not really popular people these days. As I recall the US journalist P. J. O’Rourke once conducted an experiment trying to decide whether intelligence or stupidity was better; he decided that intelligence was best because it was more intelligent (I think he compared daytime television with attending some evening classes). The point is that an expert is an expert because they know things about a relevant area of knowledge. Non-experts, such as politicians, have an obligation to listen to them, rather than have their policies dictated by opinion polls conducted among swing voters. After all, politicians are supposed, upon election, to represent and govern us all, not just their minority of supporters.

There is, of course, a lot more to the philosophy of history than I have touched on here. History is, however, important, if only for understanding how we managed to get here, and which possibilities have been opened up or closed down along the way.