For the Sake of the Future

24 Historically Speaking July/August 2005 For the Sake of the Future Beverley Southgate 11 art is quite useless," proclaimed A Oscar Wilde defiantly.1 Historians have in tiiat respect often claimed artistic status for tiieir subject, proudly repudiating any possibility of tiieir own moral, social, or political utility. In die face of numerous pressures to apply their expertise about the past to particular projects, their own concern has supposedly remained the pursuit of historical truth for its own sake; for they have been aware that any perceived altruism on their part, any evidence of having worked to some extraneous agenda, would expose them to renewed charges of propagandise! and improper ideological involvement, of a trahison des clercs. Hence the periodic protestations of professional objectivity, impartiality, and detachment mat have served more recently to define both historians themselves and the very discipline of history. But I want here to propose an alternative vision or aspiration for historical study—a study whose very nature is facing major challenges and changes in our era of postmodernity . For as its nature adapts, so too can its purposes, and it may be die moment for historians to mark out a new role for themselves, or at least put a new emphasis on what they do. In the face of 21st-century prospects, it may be time to discard that "pair of white gloves" that Lord Acton accused Mandell Creighton of wearing as he delicately fingered the past, and time radier to get deliberately involved in a search for a betterfuture.2 With the repeated insistence by politicians on vocationally useful outcomes from education, humanists (including historians) may well feel inclined to revert to earlier ideals relating to their subjects, and align themselves with Socrates against the Sophists. Humans don't live by bread alone, and there is virtue in striving for (even if never actually acquiring) knowledge for its own sake. Such knowledge, as many— including John Henry Newman in his mid19th -century survey of university education —have reiterated through the ages, is its own reward; having no need of any extraneous justification, it is simply a good in itself.3 For the goal is a self-evident good—namely, truth. We are all engaged in a common enterprise , working in our various ways to that common goal. And to ask what one is to do with that, if ever reached, is the mark of a materialistic heretic. The search for truth is selfless: it requires renunciation of all external influences and pressures—and diat includes renunciation of the seeker's own very selfhood. As tiiat great Victorian moralist Samuel Smiles indicated, both "the man of science . . . [and] the man of letters, forgets himself in his pursuit."4 Where, as for the eugenicist Karl Pearson, science consists of "judgments independent of the individual mind," it is clear that "the scientific man has above all tilings to strive at self-elimination in his judgments." That approach, being "applicable to social as well as physical problems," applies not least to historians.5 As such, historians ought to be concerned widi die rational reconstruction of the past. So Omnia Veritas, insists Geoffrey Elton. Truth is what matters. And it is the search for truth to which historians should devote tiiemselves , never deviating from the central tenet that "the past must be studied for its own sake."6 Such reaffirmations become increasingly insistent, as it grows ever clearer that for all the protestations of idealistic truth-seeking historians, history has in fact not always been studied purely for its own sake. Impurities have always been liable to breach defences, most obviously along the narrow line supposedly demarcating history from politics. When academic history was largely pohtical history, attempts were made to draw a clear boundary between past and present—the former a legitimate concern of course, the latter forbidden territory. History was, after all, only past politics .7 That claim may for some time have carried conviction, but the cover was decisively blown in the 1930s—not only with the Nazi appropriation of Germany's past, but also with Herbert Butterfield's identification of die "Whig interpretation" of the past. The great advantage for historians in adopting the...