Bunk: The Sequel

__"The Future of History" by Richard J. Evans, in Prospect (Oct. 1997), 4 Bedford Sq., London WC1B 3RA.__

"History is more or less bunk," Henry historians seem to agree. In their eyes, notes Ford once declared, and today’s postmodern Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, there is no single attainable truth about the past, "merely the histories which people construct to empower themselves in the present: black history, women’s history, gay history. Each is ‘true’ according to the perspective from which it is written." The claim of "objectivity," insist postmodernists such as Hayden White, is just a device to preserve the "dominance" of the history written by bourgeois white liberal males. Bunk, says Evans.

Certainly, most books in history published in Europe and the United States have been written by white males. But not all of these books have defended the interests of white males and the bourgeois universities that support them, and not a few have explored past oppression and exploitation. Moreover, Evans observes, many women "have written excellent history books about men, just as blacks have written about white slave owners." And if the postmodernists’ radical subjectivism is correct, only white males can understand white males of the past.

Applying postmodernist ideas to the postmodernists themselves makes obvious the "logical tangle" into which their theories lead, Evans says. "If all interpretations are equally valid, why should we believe a postmodernist interpretation rather than another one?" he asks.

Postmodernists may not realize it, he adds, but the arguments they make in the interests of "the politics of empowerment and liberation" can have perverse results when applied to the politics of oppression and violence. Can only Bosnian Serbs, for example, write a "true" history of the Bosnian Serbs? Is a Nazi perspective on the Holocaust just as valid as a non-Nazi one?

"If the only grounds we have for preferring one vision of the past to another are aesthetic, moral or political, as some postmodernists maintain, if the persuasiveness of a historical interpretation is simply a matter of the power of its advocates," writes Evans, "then it does not follow at all that history should necessarily be a democratic, a tolerant or a skeptical enterprise, or that it should in any way favor the politically or culturally disadvantaged."

Facts do matter, Evans insists. Historians are not free to give the evidence of the past just any meaning whatever. "History," he says, "is nothing if it is not true."