The progress of history

All historians worth their salt know that history is not a story of progress. For one thing, history has no clear endpoint (or, if it does, we have no way of knowing what it is). And even if we did know "where" history has been going and will continue to go, any careful study of the past reveals that the course of history does not move in a single direction. If, say, Hegel was right and "The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom," we can easily point to instances where there was a movement away from freedom, not towards it. Even Macaulay, the quintessential Whig historian, saw history as a "chequered narrative" of "disasters mingled with triumphs, and great national crimes and follies far more humiliating than any disaster." Put simply, there is no simple correlation between the passage of time and progress or improvement.

Leaving aside "history as it happened" for a bit, let's look at "history as it is written." In the historiography class I'm taking, we're currently presentations on important or interesting historians, examining their lives, historical thought, writings, and the like. After each presentation, the professor tells us whether that particular historian's work is still worth reading, whether they've been superseded. The vast majority of the time, it seems, scholarly history has a lifespan of about 50 years. New evidence emerges, new interpretations convince, new models explain more and older histories do little more than sit on bookshelves.

In the realm of historiography, then, there does seem to be steady progress towards a better understanding of the past. It's important to note that this progress is not founded simply on the accumulation of more written history; all those old history books that haven't been opened in decades are not major contributors to our improved knowledge of history. Instead, it seems as if the new is just better than the old.

You might be sensing my wariness regarding this conclusion. The biggest question is simple: how do we know that the history of the early 21st century is better than the history of, say, the late 19th? Our conclusions are based on our own judgments, and we've got plenty of reasons to believe we're doing a better job than our predecessors (otherwise, why are we doing this at all?). Still, since a great deal of history is written with the explicit purpose of improving upon the failings of earlier historians (be they evidentiary, interpretive, or ideological) and historians are intelligent and responsible (we have to assume so, at least), it's entirely reasonable to conclude that we know more about, say, the American Revolution, than George Bancroft or Charles Beard. This isn't to say that history written in 2004 is necessarily better than history written a century ago, just that, as a matter of fact, it is better.

We're faced with a contradiction. History is not a story of progress, yet written history seems to be getting better all the time. I'm not trying to be slippery here and conflate history as it happened and history and history as we record it; they're very different things. Rather, the contradiction arises from the writing of history itself being a historical act; if there's no steady progress in history, it seems to follow that no subset of history can be uniformly progressive either.

There are two ways of dealing with this.

First, we take the admonition that history is not a tale of progress as a general rule, not an iron-clad dictum without exceptions. Computers, after all, are getting faster and faster all the time. That's progress, isn't it? So even though human society as a whole isn't inexorably progressing, certain aspects of human existence do seem to be steadily improving. It could be argued that the writing of history is one such case. The production of written history is sufficiently cut off from "natural" human existence to be exempt from the "law of non-progress." Historians have more control over written history than, say doctors have over the spread of disease, so the history they produce builds and improves upon older historical writing.

Second, that history has steadily improved does not entail that it had to be that way. This was hinted at above. It's easy to imagine instances where future historians will almost necessarily write worse history than their predecessors. Suppose the Public Record Office burnt down, and all its documents were lost. Historians of the future would have a hell of a time writing books on British history as firmly grounded in evidence as those written today. Or suppose some poison is realized throughout the world's universities that makes all scholars stupid. There are countless scenarios in which the history books of the future will be crap compared to what's being written today.

In this view, which I find far more convincing than the first extrication, the progress in history has been contingent on the convergence of a number of factors; to name just a few: the availability of sources, an existing base of historical scholarship, and responsible, hard-working historians. Take away any of these and the historical knowledge we have today would be considerably less.

The story of written history has largely been a story of progress, but it didn't need to turn out that way.

Returning to "history as it happened," there's a strong parallel. In many respects, the past 100 years have seen considerable improvements in the lives of many (most?) people. To look at but one crude index: life expectancy at birth in the United States rose almost 30 years from 1900 to 2000. But it didn't have to be that way. It's possible to look at particular factors that led to longer lives for Americans. Take away those factors and Americans wouldn't have lived so long.

It turns out, then, that "history as it happened" and "history as it's recorded" resemble each other in this respect. The passage of time has seen progress in both, not due to any general philosophical rule, but because of particular historical factors. Progress is a contingent process, but it does happen.