A not dissimilar philosophy is, it seems to me, to be found in the writings of Tolstoy and other pessimists and quietists, both religious and irreligious. For these, particularly the most conservative among them, life is a stream moving in a given direction, or perhaps a tideless ocean stirred by occasional breezes. The number of factors which cause it to be as it is, is very great, but we know only very few of them. To seek to alter things radically in terms of our knowledge is therefore unrealistic, often to the point of absurdity. We cannot resist the central currents, for they are much stronger than we, we can only tack, only trim to the winds and avoid collisions with the great fixed institutions of our world, its physical and biological laws, and the great human establishments with their roots deep in the past--the empires, the churches, the settled beliefs and habits of mankind. For if we resist these, our small craft will be sunk, and we shall lose our lives to no purpose. Wisdom lies in avoiding situations where we may capsize, in using the winds that blow as skilfully as we can, so that we may last at any rate our own time, preserve the heritage of the past, and not hurry towards a future which will come soon enough, and may be darker even than the gloomy present. On this view it is the human predicament--the disproportion between our vast designs and our feeble means--that is responsible for much of the suffering and injustice of the world. Without help, without divine grace, or one or other form of divine intervention, we shall not, in any case, succeed. Let us then be tolerant and charitable and understanding, and avoid the folly of accusation and counter-accusation which will expose us to the laughter or pity of later generations: Let us seek to discern what we can-- some dim outline of a pattern--in the shadows of the past, for even so much is surely difficult enough.
In one important sense, of course, the hard-boiled realists and the Christian pessimists are right. Censoriousness, recrimination, moral or emotional blindness to the ways of life and outlooks and complex predicaments of others, intellectual or ethical fanaticism, are vices in the writing of history as in life. No doubt Gibbon and Michelet, Macaulay and Carlyle, Taine and Trotsky (to mention only the eminent dead) do try the patience of those who do not accept their opinions. Nevertheless this corrective to dogmatic partiality, like its opposite, the doctrine of inevitable bias, by shifting responsibility on to human weakness and ignorance, and, identifying the human predicament itself as the ultimate central factor in human history, in the end leads us by a different road to the very same position as the doctrine that to know all is to forgive all; only for the latter it substitutes the formula that the less we know, the fewer reasons we can have for just condemnation; for knowledge can only lead to a dearer realization of how small a part men's wishes or even their unconscious desires play in the life of the universe, and thereby reveals, the absurdity of placing any serious responsibility upon the shoulders of individuals, or, for that matter, of classes, or states, or nations.2.14
Two separate strands of thought are involved in the modern plea for a greater effort at understanding, and the fashionable warnings against censoriousness, moralizing, and partisan history. There is, in the first place, the view that individuals and groups always, or at any rate more often than not, aim at what seems to them desirable; but owing to ignorance, or weakness, or the complexities of the world which mere human insight and skill cannot adequately understand or control, they feel and act in such a manner that the result is too often disastrous both for themselves and for others; caught in the common human predicament. Yet it is not men's purposes--only the human predicament itself--man's imperfection--that is largely to blame for this. There is, in the second place, the further thesis that in attempting to explain historical situations and to analyse them, to unwind their origins and trace their consequences, and, in the course of this, to fix the responsibility for this or that element in the situation, the historian, however detached, clear-headed, scrupulous, dispassionate he may be, however skilled at imagining himself in other men's shoes, is nevertheless faced with a network of facts so minute, connected by links so many and complex, that his ignorance must always far outweigh his knowledge; consequently his judgment, particularly his evaluative judgment, must always be founded on insufficient data; and if he succeeds in casting even a little light upon some small corner of the vast and intricate pattern of the past, he has done as well as any human being can ever hope to do. The difficulties of disentangling even a minute portion of the truth are so great, that he must, if he is an honest and serious practitioner, soon realize how far he is from being in a position to moralize; consequently to praise and blame, as historians and publicists do so easily and glibly, is presumptuous, foolish, irresponsible, unjust. This prima facie very humane and convincing thesis2.15 is, however, not one but two: It is one thing to say that man proposes, but the consequences are too often beyond his control or powers of prediction or prevention; that since human motives have so seldom had any decisive influence on the actual course of events, they should not play any great part in the accounts of the historian; and that since the historian's business is to discover and describe what occurred, and how and why, if he allows his moral opinions of men's characters and motives--those least effective of all historical factors--to colour his interpretations, he thereby exaggerates their importance for purely subjective or psychological reasons. For to treat what may be morally significant as eo ipso historically influential is to distort the facts.' That is one perfectly clear position. Quite distinct from it is the other thesis, namely, that our knowledge is never sufficient to justify us in fixing responsibility, if there is any, where it truly belongs. An omniscient being (if that is a tenable notion) could do so, but we are not omniscient, and our attributions are therefore absurdly presumptuous; to realize this and feel an appropriate degree of humility is the beginning of historical wisdom. It may well be that both these theses are true. And it may further be that they both spring from the same kind of pessimistic conviction of human weakness, blindness, and ineffectiveness both in thought and in action. Nevertheless, these melancholy views are two, not one: the first is an argument from ineffectiveness, the second from ignorance: and either might be true and the other false. Moreover, neither seems to accord with common belief, nor with the common practice of either ordinary men or of ordinary historians; each seems plausible and unplausible in its own way, and each deserves its own, defence or refutation. There is, however, at least one implication common to them: in both these doctrines individual responsibility is made to melt away. We may neither applaud nor condemn individuals or groups either because they cannot help themselves (and all knowledge is a growing understanding of precisely this), or conversely because we know too little to know either this or its opposite. But then--this surely follows--neither may we bring charges of moralism or bias against those historians who are prone to praise and blame, for we are all in the same boat together, and no one standard can be called objectively superior to any other. For what on this view, could `objective' mean? What standard can we use to measure its degrees? It is plain that there can exist no `super-standard' for the comparison of entire scales of value, which itself derives from no specific set of beliefs, no one specific culture. All such tests must be internal, like the laws of a state that apply, only to its own citizens. The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law or international morality: that it does not exist. More than this: that the very notion has no meaning, because ultimate standards are what we measure things by, and cannot by definition themselves be measured in terms of anything else.
This is indeed to be hoist by one's own petard. Because all standards are pronounced relative, to condemn bias or moralism in history or to defend them, turn out themselves to express attitudes which, in the absence of a super-standard, cannot be rationally defended or condemned. All attitudes turn out to be morally neutral; but even this cannot be said, for the contradictory of this proposition cannot be refuted. Hence nothing on this topic can be said at all. This is surely a reductio ad absurdum of the entire position. A fatal fallacy must be lurking somewhere in the argument of the anti-moralistic school.2.16
Let us consider the normal thoughts of ordinary men on this topic. In ordinary circumstances we do not feel that we are saying something peculiarly hazardous or questionable if we attempt to assess the value of Cromwell's statesmanship, or if we describe Pasteur as a benefactor of mankind or condemn Hitler's actions Nor do we feel that we are saying something strange if we maintain that, let us say, the late Mr. Belloc or Lord Macaulay do no seem to apply the same standards of objective truth, or apply them as impartially, as did, let us say, Ranke, or Bishop Creighton, or M. Elie Halévy. In saying this, what are we doing? Are we merely expressing our private approval or disapproval of Cromwell's or Pasteur's or Hitler's character, or activities? Are we merely saying that we agree with Ranke's conclusions or M. Halévy's general tone, that they are more to our taste, please us better (because of our own outlook and temperament) than the tone and conclusions of Macaulay or Mr. Belloc? Yet if there is an unmistakable tinge of reproach in our assessment of, say, Cromwell's policies or of Mr. Belloc's account of those policies, is that no more than an indication that we are not favourably disposed towards one or other of them, that our moral or intellectual ideals differ from what we take to be theirs, with no indication that we think that they could, and moreover should, have acted differently? And if we do imply that their behaviour might, or should, have been different, is that merely a symptom of our psychological inability to realize that they could not (for no one can) have acted differently, or of an ignorance too deep to entitle us to tell how they could, let alone should, have acted? With the further implication that it would be more civilized not to say such things, but to remember that we may all be equally, or almost equally, deluded, and remember, too, that moral responsibility is a pre-scientific fiction, that with the increase of knowledge and a more scrupulous and appropriate use of language such `value-charged' expressions, and the false notions of human freedom on which they rest, will, it is to be hoped, finally disappear from the vocabulary of enlightened men, at least in their public utterances? For this seems to me to follow directly from the doctrines outlined above. Determinism, whether benevolent or malevolent, no less than the view that our moral judgments are rendered absurd either because we know too much or be because we know too little, seems to point to this. It is a view that in its various forms has been held by many civilized and sensitive thinkers, particularly in the present day. Nevertheless it rests on beliefs about the world and about human beings which are too difficult to accept; which are unplausible because they render illegitimate certain basic distinctions which we all draw--distinctions which are inevitably reflected in our everyday use of words. If such beliefs were true, too much that we accept with out question would turn out to be sensationally false. Yet these paradoxes are urged upon us, although there is no strong factual evidence or logical argument to force us to embrace them.
It is part of the same tendency to maintain that even if total freedom from moralizing is not to be looked for in this world (for all human beings inevitably live and think by their own varying moral or aesthetic or religious standards), yet in the writing of history an effort must be made to repress such tendencies. As historians it is our duty only to describe and explain, not to pronounce verdicts. The historian is, we are told, not a judge but a detective; he provides the evidence, and the reader, who has none of the professional responsibilities of the expert, can form what moral conclusions he likes. As a general warning against moralizing history this is, particularly in times of acute partisan emotion, timely enough. But it must not be interpreted literally. For it depends upon a false analogy with some among the more exact of the natural sciences In these last, objectivity has a specific meaning. It means that methods and criteria of a less or more precisely defined kind are being used with scrupulous care; and that evidence, arguments, conclusions are formulated in the special terminology invented or employed for the specific purpose of each science, and that there is no intrusion. (or almost none) of irrelevant considerations or concepts or categories, i.e. those specifically excluded by the canons of the science in question. I am not sure whether history can usefully be called a science at all, but certainly it is not a science in this sense. For it employs few, if any, concepts or categories peculiar to itself. Attempts to construct special sets of concepts and special techniques for history2.17 have proved sterile, for they either misdescribed--over-schematized--our experience, or they were felt not to provide answers to our questions. We can accuse historians of bias, or inaccuracy, or stupidity, or dishonesty, as we can accuse on another of these vices in our ordinary daily intercourse; and we can praise them for the corresponding virtues; and usually with the same degree of justice and reason. But just as our ordinary speech would become fantastically distorted by a conscious effort to eliminate from it some basic ingredient--say, everything remotely liable to convey value judgments, our normal, scarcely noticed, moral or psychological attitudes--and just as this is not regarded as indispensable for the preservation of what we should look upon as a normal modicum of objectivity, impartiality, and accuracy, so, for the same reason, no such radical remedy is needed for the preservation of a reasonable modicum of these qualities in the writing of history. There is a sense in which a physicist can, to a large degree, speak with different voices as a physicist and as a human being; although even there the line between the two vocabularies is anything but clear or absolute It is possible that this may in some measure be true of economists or psychologists; it grows progressively less true as we leave mathematical methods behind us, for example, in palaeography, or the history of science or that of the woollen trade; and it comes perilously near an absurdity when demanded of social or political historians, however skilled in the appropriate techniques, however professional, however rigorous. History is not identical with imaginative literature, but it is certainly not free from what, in a natural science, would be rightly condemned as unwarrantably subjective and even, in an empirical sense of the term, intuitive. Except on the assumption that history must deal with human beings purely. as material objects in space--must, in short, be behaviourist--its method can scarcely be assimilated to the standards of an exact natural science.2.18 The invocation to historians to suppress even that minimal degree of moral or psychological insight and evaluation which is necessarily involved in viewing human beings as creatures with purposes and motives (and not merely as causal factors in the procession of events) seems to me to spring from a confusion of the aims and methods of the humane studies with those of natural science. Purely descriptive, wholly depersonalized, history remains, what it has always been, a figment of abstract theory, a violently exaggerated reaction to the cant and vanity of earlier generations.