Historical Evidence and Argument

4. Unraveling Gordian Knots

4 UNRAVELING GORDIAN KNOTS I doubt everyone until the last page. That’s how I made Lieutenant. I have the gravest doubts upon the subject. But I intend to crush them. This is no time for scepticism. There is too much scepticism in the age as it is. I An episode of a radio show began with the keeper of a “differential integrator ” regaling his audience with its wondrous powers. It could perform in sixteen minutes work that would take a team of twenty mathematicians ten years to accomplish. One of his audience innocently asked: “How do you know the answer’s right” unless “twenty mathematicians work ten years to do it over again?” Another added that he thought “it’s absurd for a bunch of great big highpowered scientists to build a gadget like this and then take its word for everything without question.” The custodian stammered and blustered that these doubts lacked a “proper scientific approach,” but later he tested the computer by asking it what 2 + 2 equaled. To his chagrin, he received a different answer each time and the plot drifted along other lines.1 “How do I know?” “How did my sources know?” are questions that every historian must ask himself frequently, so their own plots can thicken. 29 Any examination of historical thinking requires a chapter devoted to doubt simply because the vast majority of what was once generally believed is no longer generally believed. Sources continue to come under scrutiny, sometimes to be compromised, sometimes to be rejected outright. It is easy to imagine that we happen to be the lucky generation at the culmination of knowledge about the past. Whether this is so or not, only future generations can answer. In the meantime, the least we can do is to maintain a contextual modesty dictated by the cumulative experience of our predecessors. II Young Washington Irving needed a role model, and he found him in Christopher Columbus. The journal of Columbus’s first voyage had just been published for the first time, inspiring Irving to write a life of the navigator. He was determined not to denigrate his new hero—there was already too much of this: “[t]here is a certain meddlesome spirit, which, in the garb of learned research, goes prying about the traces of history, casting down its monuments, and marring and mutilating its fairest trophies. Care should be taken to vindicate great names from such pernicious erudition.”2 A few years later, William Gilmore Simms echoed Irving. Writing on the work of Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Simms lamented: It is not our purpose to disparage the learned ingenuity, the keen and vigilant judgment, the great industry, the vast erudition and sleepless research of this coldly inquisitive man;—yet, what a wreck he has made of the imposing structure of ancient history, as it comes to us from the hands of ancient art. Whether the simple fact, that what he gives us is more certainly true than what we had such perfect faith in before, is, or should be, sufficient to compensate us for that of which he despoils us, cannot well be a question with those who have a better faith in art, as the greatest of all historians, and as better deserving of our confidence than that worker who limits his faith entirely to his own discoveries. We prefer one Livy to a cloud of such witnesses as M. Niebuhr.3 By the standards of today’s even more skeptical school of early Roman history , Niebuhr was no demolitionist. For Simms, however, he personified the first post-Enlightenment generations of historians who insisted on checking and com30 ❖ Chapter 4 paring an increasing variety of sources with one another and with newer critical ways of regarding human behavior. For them, Romulus did not disappear in a thunderstorm, nor did C. Mucius Scaevola sacrifice his right hand for Rome’s survival. Bringing us up to date, some thirty years ago Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah argued that “[c]redence requires less faith than inflexible disbelief.”4 Although Cook and Borah treated doubt and disbelief as one and the same, their remarks distil well the unnatural sentiment that believing is more intellectually challenging than questioning. Given Borah and Cook’s own lack of skepticism, their arguments are not unexpected; certainly others have acted as they did, even if not boasting about it. III These examples remind us that, historically...