Past, Present, and Conceptualizations

So some people wrote in their posts that they really enjoyed this reading and that it was fairly easy to understand. I am not in the same boat. I had a difficult time with this reading. There were some really complicated ideas that I just couldn’t wrap my head around. At times, it felt like I was having a conversation with a co-worker of mine who is a former deadhead and has taken a few too many hallucinogens in his life. Apparently, I am far too trapped within my mentalité to fully comprehend Fasolt’s ideas about the distinctions between the past and present, maannn… Sorry, that joke would probably be funnier if I said it out loud. Anyway, Hillary and I talked for about an hour about the reading, and it was really fun! We talked about some really interesting things and had some thought-provoking points.

Hillary started out by making the claim that this reading is a piece of history itself, and I totally agree with her. Fasolt writes about people and events in the past, but it is rarely cited or backed up by sources. As a piece of historical knowledge, it totally sucks. And Fasolt is making his argument about distinctions between past and present and the need to view history in alternative ways, but whenever he discusses history, he is all about distinctions between past and present. We got back to this idea when discussing Descartes, the concept of Cartesian doubt (from Wikipedia: “Cartesian doubt is a systematic process of being skeptical about or doubting the truth of one's beliefs”), and perspectives and conceptualizations of our world. These concepts deal specifically with the ideas of objectivity and subjectivity that Fasolt describes. We talked about how someone could be writing their autobiography with no evidence or sources other than their own memories, and the history would be completely subjective, but factually true. And a historian could make his or her best attempt at writing a completely objective history from only evidence and primary sources, but because of missing or forgotten pieces, the history would be factually false (see “triceratops never existed”: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20012471-501465.html). But then the ideas of Cartesian doubt, conceptualization, and perspective come into play. The completely subjective autobiographer could indeed write a book about his or her life and believe that it was indeed factually true, because they were present for the events presented in the book. But how are they or we to know that the way they perceived those events was actually the way that they occurred? Say you were at an Obama rally in 2008. He was there, you saw and heard him speak, there was a huge crowd holding signs, and then you wrote everything down right after you got home so you could subjectively document the experience. But maybe from where you were standing you did not see a significant portion of the crowd, and thus wrote down that there were 1,000 people there instead of 30,000. Also, as a normal, everyday citizen, you only got to hear Obama during the speech, but you did not get to hear what he said when the microphone was off. And maybe, just maybe, you are actually completely institutionally insane, and the rally never actually happened. You imagined the entire thing: rally, campaign, election and all. Didn’t you know? McCain actually won. Duh. (Sorry, it’s been a long week.)

The point of this though, is that whether history is written subjectively or objectively, there are always going to be issues with how it was written, and there is no way to tell if what we think of as history actually happened that way or not. But really, if history is to be a tool to guide us in the present, as “a means of orientation” (3) to help us to “seek a future better than the present, and definitely better than the past” (7), then does it really need to be precisely factually accurate for it to be useful? If history is viewed in this way, it seems to me to be more of a moral code than a chronology of past events. More “traditional” cultures have had these ideas in place for a long time; folklore, mythology, and fables, often transmitted orally through generations, generally serve as moral codes to guide individuals, families, and political and social institutions. If we have no way to truly know if “history” is factually accurate (other than by Ranke’s ideals, who I am slowing coming to believe is full of total BS), where is the separation between history and myth, between “traditional” and “modern” cultures, and (I kind of hate that I am saying this) between past and present.

Perhaps I am a bit closer to understanding what Fasolt is saying in this reading. Perhaps I am way off base. Hillary and I talked about a lot more really, really cool stuff, and I would love to write more about it, but this blog post is already extremely long. If you got to the bottom of this rant, congratulations.