History Is Not a Mathematical Calculation

History is not a mathematical calculation by Wanjirun Joya.

Professor Clyde Wilson's observation

that history is not a mathematical calculation

or scientific experiment, but a vast drama of which

there is always more to be learned

has important methodological implications.

First, it implies that formal academic history credentials,

while valuable, are not a necessary pre-condition

for understanding history.

Second, it means that the methods

used to understand natural phenomena,

such as the study of physics or biology,

are not appropriate to historical inquiry.

For example, some people attempt

to understand the causes of the Civil War

by counting the total number of words

in secession declarations, then calculating

the percentage of words devoted to slavery.

The American Battlefield Trust has even drawn up pie charts

to illustrate the percentage of words

devoted to each topic, explaining that these charts

show how many words were devoted to the issues raised

in each state's declaration as a percentage of the whole.

They ignore the fact that the presence or prevalence

of a word in a document does not tell you

the significance of the document, nor what

explanatory value to attach to its claims.

The attempt to understand history by quantifying words

seeks in vain to lend an air of scientism

and empiricism to historical narratives.

Wilson recognizes that history is more

than just a litany of facts, which, although true,

may not by themselves yield much insight into the past.

It is not enough to itemize historical facts.

It is important also to understand the people

who participated in historical events, their reasons,

and their motivations.

Without that contextualization, it

would be easy to construct a misleading or even

false historical narrative based on a selection

of facts cherry-picked for that purpose.

Further, no list of facts can purport to be exhaustive,

so an explanation must be offered for deciding which facts

to include or exclude.

It cannot simply be a random selection.

Ludwig von Mises emphasized the importance

of understanding history by reference

to the motivations and actions of individual participants

in that history to understand why they acted as they did

and what they hoped to achieve.

In his book Theory in History,

Mises calls this methodology thymology,

which he defines as the knowledge of human valuations

and volitions.

Thymology is on the one hand an offshoot of introspection

and on the other a precipitate of historical experience.

It is what everybody learns from intercourse with his fellows.

It is what a man knows about the way in which people value

different conditions, about their wishes and desires,

and their plans to realize these wishes and desires.

It is the knowledge of the social environment

in which a man lives and acts, or with historians,

of a foreign milieu about which he has learned

by studying special sources.

If an epistemologist states that history

has to be based on such knowledge as thymology,

he simply expresses a truism.

One could, of course, argue that historical personalities

made the wrong choices or that they made unwise

or stupid choices.

But that is very different from arguing that,

since they turned out to be misguided,

this means they must have lied about their motivations.

Mises criticizes the tendency to conflate mistakes with lies

by assuming that anyone who turns out to have erred must

have been prompted only by purposeful deceit.

History is not merely a moral or judgmental exercise

of ascertaining who was right or wrong.

It is first and foremost an exercise

in trying to ascertain what happened and why.

For example, one would gain more insight

into the politics of Mississippi in 1860

by studying the life of Jefferson Davis

and the justifications he gave for his decisions

than by counting the number of times the word slavery

appears in the Mississippi secession declaration.

Some liberal academics have advanced a similar idea,

which they call lived experience.

The idea that someone who lives through an experience

has a different and potentially more valuable insight

into it than someone else just reading about it

and quantifying specific words.

But lived experience cannot be a substitute for reality

as some liberals have attempted to assert.

The challenge lies in understanding

the role themology plays in studying history.

The importance of this point may be illustrated

by a tribute to the Southern historian, Frank Ausley,

written by M.E. Bradford.

Bradford observes that Ausley followed a historical tradition

which eschewed the mindless worship of facts,

qua facts.

Ausley exemplifies histories informed by memories.

Memories derived as Bradford puts it,

from the hearts of individuals or particular communities

of men linked together as one person by struggle,

blood, and fortune.

This is not to say that a historian

from outside a community cannot acquire a satisfactory

understanding of that history.

The point is that the memories of how that history unfolded

add valuable insight and explanatory weight

to historical facts.

Memories serve as a valuable window

into understanding the truth about the past

and have played a valuable role in what Bradford calls

the recovery of Southern history.

Bradford explains, Ausley submitted

to the experience of his nation as it was available to him

in the sensibility and character of his fathers.

Presences living in dead, who surrounded him in boyhood.

By illustrating the similarity of vatic poet

and the traditional historian,

he lived into the world that produced him,

penetrated the shape and feel of an earlier time,

examined its dimensions, its active principle,

its taste and feel, and then reproduced

them all for his generation and those following.

In this context, the taste and feel for historical events

allows a historian to discern whether a narrative,

although it may well be constructed with correct facts,

is founded on erroneous assumptions or unexamined myths

that are unquestioningly perpetuated

by establishment historians.

Trying to fact check such history in the style

favored by the Groc is this true?

Brigade would show the facts to be correct,

and readers would therefore be none the wiser

as to the faulty premises of the historical narrative.

An example discussed by Ausley in his book Plain Folk

of the Old South is the assumption of the non-existence

of a large rural middle class in the Old South.

The assumption that there were only three important classes

in the South, planters, negro slaves, and poor whites.

Ausley does not a ver that the distinction between planters

and poor whites is factually incorrect.

But he shows, based on historical research,

that this assumption excludes an important class

of land-owning farmers who belonged

neither to the plantation economy nor to the destitute

and frequently degraded poor white class.

They, and not the poor whites,

comprise the bulk of the southern population

from the revolution to the civil war.

He explains that the plain folk of the Old South,

who were neither wealthy planters nor poor and helpless,

have been so long relegated either to obscurity

or to oblivion that their omission from historical discourse

becomes self-reinforcing.

Nobody writes about them because nobody writes about them.

It is as if they did not exist.

The causes of the war are then explained

as if everyone was either an aristocratic slave owner,

a slave obeying orders, or a poor white man forced against his will

to fight a rich man's war.

The narrative almost begs to be interpreted

through the Marxian class conflict lens, free black men,

of whom there were more in the south than in the north,

appear nowhere in this narrative.

The message to take from this critique

of historical methodology is that in the quest

to understand history, quantitative reports

derived by counting the percentage of words in a document

or mere itemization of facts cannot meaningfully override

the contribution made by historians with memories of the time

as recorded in books, newspapers, journals, diaries,

letters, stories, oral histories, and the like.

The accounts of the war written by those who participated in it

cannot be debunked by the quantitative and empirical methods

of establishment historians with their pretensions to scientism.

Further, it means that as wide a range of sources

as possible should be studied in trying

to understand history.

Not just peer-reviewed neo-Marxist tombs

published by credentialed historians

who have proved themselves acceptable to the gatekeepers

of the academy, but also that component of memory

recounted by Southern writers.

Only by a fuller and more comprehensive understanding

of history can we avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

As Wilson argues, history is the experience of human beings.

History is a story and a story is somebody's story.

It tells us about who people are.

History is not a political ideological slogan

like about slavery.

Ideological slogans are accusations and instruments

of conflict and domination.

Stories are instruments of understanding and peace.

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For more content like this, visit mises.org.

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