History has its own grammar

The Russian for grammatical tense is the same word as the one for time. I find that overlap convenient when thinking about history.

So let’s try to consider that discipline in the terms of grammatical categories. All Indo-European languages have the three basic tenses, Past, Present and Future. Some, such as English, also have other tenses linking the three temporal planes.

So which tense applies to history? The answer isn’t at all obvious, and we can find many celebrated historians and philosophers of history who put forth different arguments.

Some, such as scholars influenced by positivism, have insisted that history is strictly unconnected events strewn about the past. Some, mostly idealist thinkers, have seen history as a continuum where the past clarifies the present and makes it possible to predict the future. Still others have insisted that history ends at present and offers no insights into the future whatsoever.

Let’s just say that the first, positivist, view reduces the study of history to the hobby of collecting relics of the past. History stops being a science and becomes a variously enjoyable pastime catering to one’s curiosity about ancient artefacts and hunger for retrospective gossip.

Our Past becomes very Indefinite indeed, in fact meaningless. Monty Python satirised that view by asking “What have the Romans ever done for us?” The implication is that Romans are ancient history, and their toing and froing have no bearing on our life today. A budding historian may well think that studying Rome is like watching a period TV drama: a painless but pointless way of idling away an hour or two.

Relying on Past Indefinite to make future more definite is a parlous business, although not so much so as Bertie Russell suggested. That the sun rose today, he said, doesn’t mean it will rise tomorrow. Thus the Future tense of history is so murky that we may as well assume it doesn’t exist at all.

Yet the past is the only reliable predictor of the future. It’s not a sure bet, but it does offer good odds. The study of history thus becomes an expedient for which there is no sensible substitute if we wish to prepare for things to come – and especially if we want to shape them to our liking.

That said, history only offers a speculative view of the future, which is its side benefit but not its purpose. It doesn’t turn Future Indefinite into Future Definite, even though some determinist historians may believe it does.

Confucius, while shunning determinist certainty, did encourage caution: “A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do you know that his future will not be equal to our present?”

Perhaps to clarify the grammar of history we have to leave the realm of philology for that of anthropology interlaced with philosophy. Unalloyed anthropology, which studies man as any other animal, won’t help us understand history. Essential to that understanding is the realisation that man is so much more than just an animal.

Unlike all other species, man thinks, analyses, synthesises and in general engages his cerebral faculties in unique ways. Man always thinks before acting, with the prior thought sometimes taking a lifetime, sometimes a split second and usually a span falling between the two extremes. But the thought is always present as a stimulus to action. If so, then history becomes a study not only of man’s acts but also of man’s thoughts.

A combination of thoughts and acts adds up to man’s experience, just as it sums up the experience of a single individual. If you, I or anyone we know were to write an autobiographical sketch, we’d be able to trace back our thoughts, decorticate our acts and find how the former preceded the latter.

That way we’d come close to understanding how we’ve developed over time, realising that everything in our life has been interconnected, although not always in an obvious way. As a corollary to that exercise, we’d have debunked the positivist view of history.

If historical facts are unconnected, they offer no idea of how our race has developed over time. Denying historical causality is tantamount to believing that human thought (and hence experience) is static, the same for all ages. A positivist thinker denies man what he grants himself: capacity for development.

Contrary to what Enlightenment philosophers thought, this doesn’t presuppose mankind’s evolution from irrationality to the ultimate rational, and hence moral, millennium. Neither does an individual always become cleverer and better as he matures. But he does become something, and becoming is a process, not a fait accompli.

Some thinkers believe that history is nothing but a compendium of dark facts we try to elucidate in the light of our present understanding. It’s the present that makes the past, in other words, and this view again devalues history to a trivial pursuit.

It’s true that some historians glorified the past, while others demonised it, with both proceeding from their own thoughts tainted by ideology. Rousseau, for example, believed in the primordial goodness of man subsequently perverted by civilisation, especially Christendom. Enlightenment philosophers, on the other hand, saw man’s past, especially but not only Christendom, in exclusively dark tones only to be lightened up by the arrival of Reason (always implicitly capitalised).

Whatever we may make of such opposite views, neither has anything to do with the study of history as a sum of man’s experience. History is neither Past Indefinite nor Present Indefinite nor Future Indefinite. It’s Present Perfect, something that started in the past but is still acting at present.

Just as a man is largely shaped by his individual experience, so has mankind become what it is by its collective experience. And ‘has become’ is Present Perfect, not any other tense.

Dispassionate analysis of facts meticulously collected is a study of human experience and hence a study of human nature. This makes history not only a fascinating science but an indispensable one, more so perhaps than such worthy disciplines as psychology and neurophysiology.

It’s a most unfortunate fallout of the Enlightenment that thought got to be associated strictly with science, meaning natural science. Neither philosophy nor history was regarded as a science at all. Both and their combination have got to be treated as pure speculation, a mental exercise akin to word puzzles.

Historiography, a mere recording of facts, is still seen as helpful in establishing the context in which real progress, that of science of technology, has occurred. The thought that history is a science of human nature, possibly the most important such science, is treated as sheer heresy or, typically, dismissed as so unsound as not to warrant serious discussion.

That’s a grammatical error. For history is Present Perfect, not Past Indefinite. It’s our experience, a record of our on-going attempts to make something worthwhile of our nature. It’s the past shaping the present, not the present shaping the past. If we don’t study history as it should be studied, we’ll never understand how we’ve become what we are.

That means we’ll stay as we are, which doesn’t bode well for our survival. The future becomes not only indefinite but frightening.