Historical Evidence and Argument

2. Traveling Hopefully

2 TRAVELING HOPEFULLY Pardon me asking this, Charlie, but does he have any . . . you know . . . evidence? Accept all the evidence, and explain it by mistakes, alliances, coups, counter-coups, alternative names, alternative sequences of kings, double dating, different intercalary months in rival jurisdictions, and so on. Most scholars have taken one or more of these approaches, and the possibilities are infinite. I When Srinavasa Ramanujan burst onto the world of mathematics in 1914, his work was recognized as brilliant, but also criticized as inchoate. He often provided solutions without step-by-step preliminaries. Nonetheless, his results survived testing so well that mathematicians came to accept that many solutions for which he provided no apparent basis would eventually prove to be valid.1 Students learn that in algebra and geometry answers can be less important than the steps which lead to the answer, and a right answer without the right process might earn a failing grade. In the study of history, the process is no less important since answers can seldom be checked independently, are merely probable rather than certain, and derive their degree of probability partly from the process itself. 5 II No one of us is without an ideology, however termed, whether or not conscious, whether or not declared, whether or not shared. As a word, and certainly as a notion, “ideology” has always been around, but recently has taken on more pervasive connotations. Here I treat ideology as a quasi-systematic ensemble of beliefs, attitudes, and aims that underpin the way we argue, the evidence we use and how we use it, and the ways we hope to influence others.2 In this sense a strongly-held ideology is an effective facilitator in all we do. Despite its historically sinister, if not odious, associations—we prefer to use it only to describe our adversaries’ points of view—in fact each of us marches through life equipped with a succession of usually not-well-defined ideologies. These might change over time, sometimes radically, but en gros they are what sustains us even through such changes. My own relevant ideology is that experience tends increasingly to make us more cautious, skeptical, even cynical, and that the more experience we are able to muster, the greater the degree to which this is likely to happen. But this is true only if we maintain open minds not suffocated by a set of beliefs proclaiming closure and embraced as a whole, but for which the tangible evidence is exiguous or even non-existent. All things considered, I cannot pretend to understand why similar minatory experiences affect people in different ways, especially since I argue that one cannot consult a large body of historical evidence without encountering problematic issues. In short, I cannot understand why all historians do not eventually transmute into some breed of skeptic. It might that some are posessed of a larger leaven of we-shall-overcome feelings than others, that they hold to lesser standards of proof or persuasion, or that they are unusually prone to give greater value to congenial material. III It is impossible from this distant perspective to sympathize with Acton’s confident outburst or those of his various contemporaries, or to know what these authors expected the practical consequences to be. Presumably historians were to be content with working and reworking available evidence about the past or look to more contemporary topics. What accounts for these hilariously wrong predictions ? A strikingly arrogant view of the world of course, but also opportunity, 6 ❖ Chapter 2 which can be converted into another word: evidence. Derived from Latin “evidere,” “to see clearly,” the word constantly belies its optimistic etymology. No evidence, no history; as a formulation this seems unexceptionable, yet much continues to be written about large-scale population movements and levels, the correlation of ancient and modern sites, the course of ancient empires, and much else on the basis of little or no credible evidence. The more evidence that became available, and the more critically it was examined, the less certain historians have had to become. Not that the use of evidence itself, even ‘good’ evidence, guarantees that sound historical investigation will ensue. While we cannot write good history from bad evidence, it is all too easy to write bad history from good evidence. A goal of scholarship is to present interpretations that are least vulnerable to overthrow because they combine the use of evidence and...