10 ways to understand History

HOW CAN WE ORGANIZE HISTORICAL FACTS AND JUDGMENTS

Image source pixabay

Coordinates of Historical Experience and
A taxonomy of the varieties of human experience

What structure should we impose on the welter of fact and judgment that press in on us from all sides? We must recognize at the outset of this taxonomic exercise that the way we organize our thoughts is an inevitable subjective intrusion into the objective realm of recorded facts and judgments. We do not want to "reify" our various systems or organizational tricks. That is, we do not want to confuse methods or theories with the historical record they help coordinate or clarify. We do not want to confuse the package for the goods within. They are different, but each is vital.

There can be as many ways to organize fact and judgment as there are searchers and finders. We're back to that crowd of Bashkirs and bankers, co-eds and cowhands we met earlier, but shapely elegance in the way facts and judgments are organized approaches the universal qualities of objectivity. Keats was not just being cute when he wrote of "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" [ID]. Humans can often make do with clarity and coherence even in the absence of absolute certitude.

All this talk about "realms of discourse", "coordinates", and "taxonomies" would be terribly scholastic except that, if we want to understand something, we need tools, edged tools, to cut our way through the many superficial but entangling obstacles that await us. Truth and significance are difficult enough, in and of themselves, but add the arts of deception and the diseases of distortion and error, and everyone is well advised to have some degree of conscious system for understanding the world.

I would like to suggest some ways to organize the complex details of history. I hope you have your own, or soon construct your own. Until you do, you will either not search or, if you search, you will make no findings. Or, just as bad, if you don't have your own way of organizing facts and judgments, others will impose theirs on you.

Is it true that it is better to be wrong than to be confused? I'm not sure, but I think it is better to make your own mistakes, in the knowledge of what you are trying to do, than to mimic others' mistakes, in ignorance of their purposes.

Yet here I am, suggesting my system to you. Please, use it if you wish, then toss it out when you come up with your own.

Image source flicker

What follows is a loose variation on the Cartesian graph with two standard coordinates "x" and "y", displayed on a flat, two-dimensional surface, such as a blackboard or computer console. This Cartesian graph employs also a third coordinate "z" which stretches between the viewer and that flat surface, not just a third coordinate but a third dimension out from the flat surface where coordinates "x" and "y" are displayed =

Vertical axis "x" is a. TAXONOMY of varieties of historical experience, displayed from top to bottom on a screen or page or blackboard, upright before our eyes. Here's an example of a TAXONOMY OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE. As you see on that webpage, I like to stack four categories of historical experience, from top to bottom = Mentalities, political institutions, social structures, and economies
Horizontal axis "y". CHRONOLOGY, time, duration & sequence, best displayed left to right, from early moments to later. NB! The demands of internet formatting force STUDENTS' ANNOTATED CHRONOLOGY AND SYSTEMATIC BIBLIOGRAPHY [SAC [ID]] to display the y-axis from top to bottom of the screen.
Lateral axis "z". GEOGRAPHY, place, topography, environment, & population. Imagine that the lateral axis extends between the eye of the beholder (you) and the flat, two-dimensional display of x-axis and y-axis. GEOGRAPHY is like a table between your eyes and the upright flat display of TAXONOMY and CHRONOLOGY. Some historical experiences are close to us and others are far away, just as some are recent and others long ago. (Just as someone said that the music of Anton Bruckner is not as bad as it sounds, so also must it be said that the preceding statement is not quite as silly as it sounds.These three coordinates may be called the coordinates of a three-dimensional pseudo Cartesian system for organizing thinking about historical experience.Systems like this one laid out here are only devices. I've said that they are "tools", but there is a sense in which they are also cupboards for arranging and storing what we want to know. Those valuables arranged and stored in whatever system are what we cherish first of all, not the cupboards. The historical narratives -- the stories -- are what are important and, as best we can tell, true. Perhaps we need add only this = We historians, you and I, must persuade our audience of the coherence and importance of our story, and we must always be accountable in a public sense to prove the truth of our story by citing credible sources.