When everything has been said in favour of attributing responsibility for character and action to natural and institutional causes; when everything possible has been done to correct blind or oversimple interpretations of conduct which fix too much responsibility on individuals and their free acts; when in fact there is strong evidence to show that it was difficult or impossible for men to do otherwise than they did, given their material environment or education or the influence upon them of various `social pressures'; when every relevant psychological and sociological consideration has been taken into account, every impersonal factor given due weight; after `hegemonist', nationalist, and other historical heresies have been exposed and refuted; after every effort has been made to induce history to aspire, so far as it can without open absurdity, after the pure, wertfrei condition of a science; after all these severities, we continue to praise and to blame. We blame others as we blame ourselves; and the more we know, the more, it maybe, are we disposed to blame. Certainly it will surprise us to be told that the better we understand our own actions--our own motives and the circumstances surrounding them--the freer from self-blame we shall inevitably feel. The contrary is surely often true. The more deeply we investigate the course of our own conduct, the more blame worthy our behaviour may seem to us to be, the more remorse we may be disposed to feel; and if this holds for ourselves, it is not reasonable to expect us necessarily, and in all cases, to withhold it from others Our situations may differ from theirs, but not always so widely as to make all comparisons unfair. We ourselves may be accused unjustly, and so become acutely sensitive to the dangers of unjustly blaming others. But because blame can be unjust and the temptation to utter it too strong, it does not follow that it is never just; and because judgments can be based on ignorance, can spring from violent, or perverse, or silly, or shallow, or unfair notions, it does not follow that the. opposites of these qualities do not exist at all; that we are mysteriously doomed to a degree of relativism and subjectivism in history, from which we are no less mysteriously free, or at any rate more free, in our normal daily thought and transactions with one another. Indeed, the major fallacy of this position must by now be too obvious to need pointing out. We are told that we are creatures of nature or environment, or of history, and that this colours our temperament, our judgments, our principles. Every judgment is relative, every evaluation subjective, made what and as it is by the interplay of the factors of its own time and place, individual or collective. But relative to what? Subjective in contrast with what? Made to conform as it does to some ephemeral pattern as opposed to what conceivable timeless independence of such distorting factors? Relative terms (especially pejoratives) need correlatives, or else they turn out to be without meaning themselves, mere gibes, propagandist phrases designed to throw discredit, and not to describe or analyse. We know what we mean by disparaging a judgment or a method as subjective or biased--we mean that proper methods of weighing evidence have been too far ignored; or that what are normally called facts have been overlooked or suppressed or perverted or that evidence normally accepted as sufficient to account for the acts of one individual or society is, for no good reason, ignored in some other case similar in all relevant respects; or that canons of interpretation are arbitrarily altered from case to case, that is, without consistency .or principle; or that we have reasons for thinking that the historian in question wished to establish certain conclusions for reasons other than those constituted by the evidence according to canons of valid inference accepted as normal in his day or in ours, and that this has blinded him to the criteria and methods normal in his field for verifying facts and proving conclusions; or all, or any, of these together; or other considerations like them. These are the kinds of ways in which superficiality is, in practice, distinguished from depth, bias from objectivity, perversion of facts from honesty, stupidity from perspicacity, passion and confusion from detachment and lucidity. And if we grasp these rules correctly, we are fully justified in denouncing breaches of them on the part of anyone; why should we not? But, it may be objected, what of the words such as those we have used so liberally above--'valid', `normal', `proper', `relevant', `perverted', `suppression of facts', 'interpretation'--what do they signify? Is the meaning and use of these crucial terms so very fixed and unambiguous? May not that which is thought relevant or convincing in one generation be regarded as irrelevant in the next? What are unquestioned facts to one historian may, often enough, seem merely a suspicious piece of theorizing to another. This is indeed so. Rules for the weighing of evidence do change. The accepted data of one age seem to its remote successors shot through with metaphysical presuppositions so queer as to be scarcely intelligible All objectivity, we shall again be told, is subjective, is what it is relatively to its own time and place; all veracity, reliability, all the insights and gifts of an intellectually fertile period are such only relatively to their own `climate of opinion'; nothing is eternal, everything flows. Yet frequently as this kind of thing has been said, and plausible as it may seem, it remains in this context mere rhetoric. We do distinguish facts, not indeed sharply from the valuations which enter into their very texture, but from interpretations of them; the borderline may not be distinct, but if I say that Stalin is dead and General Franco still alive, my statement may be accurate or mistaken, but nobody in his senses could, as words are used, take me to be advancing a theory or an interpretation. But if I say that Stalin exterminated a great many peasant proprietors because in his infancy he had been swaddled by his nurse, and that this made him aggressive, while General Franco has not done so because he did not go through this kind of experience, no one but a very naive student of the social sciences would take me to be claiming to assert a fact, and that no matter how many times I begin my sentences with the words `It is a fact that'. And I shall not readily believe you if you tell me that for Thucydides (or even for some Sumerian scribe) no fundamental distinction existed between relatively `hard' facts and relatively `disputable' interpretations. The borderline has, no doubt, always been wide and vague; it may be a shifting frontier; it is affected by the level of generality of the propositions involved; but unless we know where, within certain limits, it lies, we fail to understand descriptive language altogether. The modes of thought of cultures remote from our own are comprehensible to us only to the degree to which we share some, at any rate, of their basic categories; and the distinction between fact and theory is among these. I may dispute whether a given historian is profound or shallow, objective and impartial in his judgments, or borne on the wings of some obsessive hypothesis or over-powering emotion: but what I mean by these contrasted terms will not be utterly different for those who disagree with me, else there would be no argument; and will not, if I can claim to decipher texts at all correctly, be so widely different in different cultures and times and places as to make all communication systematically misleading and delusive. `Objective', `true', `fair', are words of large content, their uses are many, their edges often blurred. Ambiguities and confusions are always possible and often dangerous. Nevertheless such terms do possess meanings, which may, indeed, be fluid, but stay within limits recognized by normal usage, and refer, to standards commonly accepted by those who work in relevant fields; and that not merely within one generation or society, but across large stretches of time and space. The mere claim that these crucial terms, these concepts or categories or standards, change in meaning or application, is to assume that such changes can to some degree be traced by methods which themselves are, pro tanto, not held liable to such traceable change; for if these change in their turn, then, ex hypothesi, they do so in a way scarcely discoverable by us.2.20 And if not discoverable, then not discountable, and therefore of no use as a stick with which to beat us for our alleged subjectiveness or relativity, our delusions of grandeur and permanence, of the absoluteness of our standards in a world of ceaseless change. Such charges resemble suggestions sometimes casually advanced, that life is a dream. We protest that `everything' cannot be a dream, for then, with nothing to contrast with dreams, the notion of a `dream' loses all specific reference. We may be told that we shall have an awakening: that is, have an experience in relation to which the recollection of our present lives will be some what as remembered dreams now are, when compared to our normal waking experience at present. That may be true; but as things are, we can have little or no empirical experience for or against this hypothesis. We are offered an analogy one term of which is hidden from our view; and if we are invited, on the strength of it, to discount the reality of our normal waking life, in terms of another form of experience which is literally not describable and not utterable in terms of our daily experience and normal language--an experience of whose criteria for discriminating between realities and dreams we cannot in principle have any inkling--we may reasonably reply that we do not understand what we are asked to do; that the proposal is quite literally meaningless. Indeed, we may advance the old, but nevertheless sound, platitude that one cannot cast doubt on everything at once, for then nothing is more dubious than anything else, and there are no standards of comparison and nothing is altered. So too, and for the same reason, we may reject as empty those general warnings which beg us to remember that all norms and criteria, factual, logical, ethical, political, aesthetic, are hopelessly infected by historical or social or some other kind of conditioning; that all are but temporary make-shifts, none are stable or reliable; for time and chance will bear them all away. But if all judgments are thus infected, there is nothing whereby we can discriminate between various degrees of infection, and if everything is relative, subjective, accidental, biased, nothing can be judged to be more so than anything else. If words like `subjective' and `relative', `prejudiced' and `biased', are. terms not of comparison and contrast--do not imply the possibility of their own opposites, of `objective' (or at least `less subjective') of `unbiased' (or at least `less biased'), what meaning have they for us? To use them in order to refer to everything whatever, to use them as absolute terms, and not as correlatives, is a rhetorical perversion of their normal sense, a kind of general memento mon, an invocation to all of us to remember how weak and ignorant and trivial we are, a stern and virtuous maxim, and merited perhaps, but not a serious doctrine concerned with the question of the attribution of responsibility in history, relevant to any particular group of moralists or statesmen or human beings.
It may, at this stage, be salutary to be reminded once again of the occasions which stimulated respected thinkers to such views. If moved to indignation by the crudity and lack of scruple of those `ideological' schools of history which, ignoring all that we know about human beings, paint individuals or classes or societies as heroes and villains, wholly white or unimaginably black, other, more sensitive and honest historians or philosophers of history protest against this, and warn us about the dangers of moralizing, of applying dogmatic standards, we applaud, we subscribe to the protest, yet we must be on our guard lest we protest too much, and, on the plea of curbing excesses, use means which promote some of the diseases of which they purport to be the cure. To blame is always to fail in understanding, say the advocates of toleration; to speak of human responsibility, guilt, crime, wickedness, if only a way of saving oneself the effort, the long, patient, subtle, or tedious labour of unravelling the tangled skein of human affairs. It is always open to us, we shall be told, by a feat of imaginative sympathy to place ourselves in the circumstances of an individual or society; if only we take the trouble to `reconstruct' the conditions, the intellectual and social and religious `climate' of another time or place, we shall thereby obtain insight into, or at least a glimpse of, motives and attitudes in terms of which the act we are judging may seem no longer either gratuitous, stupid, wicked, nor, above all, unintelligible. These are proper sentiments. It follows that we must, if we are to judge fairly, have adequate evidence before us; possess sufficient imagination, sufficient sense of how institutions develop, how human beings act and think, to enable us to achieve understanding of times and places and characters and predicaments very unlike our own; not to let on selves be blinded by prejudice and passion; make every effort to construct cases for those whom we condemn--better cases, as Acton said, than they made or could have made for themselves; not look at the past solely through the eyes of the victors; nor lean over too far towards the vanquished, as if truth and justice were the monopoly of the martyrs and the minorities; and strive to remain fair even to the big battalions. All this cannot be gainsaid: it is true, just, relevant, but perhaps hardly startling. And we can add as a corollary: other times, other standards; nothing is absolute or unchanging; time and chance alter all things; and that too would be a set of truisms. Surely it is not necessary to dramatize these simple truths, which are by now, if anything, too familiar, in order to remember that the purposes, the ultimate ends of life pursued by men, are many, even within one culture and generation; that some of these come into conflict, and lead to clashes between societies, parties, individuals, and not least within individuals themselves; and furthermore that the ends of one age. and country differ widely from those of other times and other outlooks. And if we understand how conflicts between ends equally ultimate and sacred, but irreconcilable within the breast of even a single human being, or between different men or groups, can lead to tragic and unavoidable collisions, we shall not distort the moral facts by artificially ordering them in terms of some one absolute criterion; recognizing that (pace the moralists of the eighteenth century) not all good things are necessarily compatible with one another; and shall seek to comprehend the changing ideas of cultures, peoples, classes, and individual human beings, without asking which are right, which wrong, at any rate not in terms of some simple home-made dogma. We shall not condemn the Middle Ages simply because they fell short of the moral or intellectual standard of therévolté intelligentsia of Paris in the eighteenth century, or denounce these latter because in their turn they earned the disapprobation of moral bigots in England in the nineteenth or in America in the twentieth century. Or, if we do condemn societies or individuals, do so only after taking into account the social and material conditions, the aspirations, codes of value, degree of progress and reaction, measured in terms of their own situation and outlook; and judge them, . when we do (and why in the world should we not?), as we judge anyone or anything else: in terms, partly of what we like, approve, believe in, and think right ourselves, partly of the views of the societies and individuals in question, and of what we think about such views, and of how fair we, being what we are, think it natural or desirable to have awide variety of views; and of what we think of the importance of motives as against those of consequences, or of the value of consequences as against the quality of motives, and so on. We judge as we judge, we take the risks which this entails, we accept correction wherever this seems valid, we go too far, and under pressure we retract. We make hasty generalizations, we prove mistaken, and if we are honest, we withdraw. We seek to be understanding and just, or we seek to derive practical lessons, or to be amused, and we expose ourselves to praise and blame and criticism and correction and misunderstanding But in so far as we claim to understand the standards of others, whether members of our own societies or those of distant countries and ages, to grasp what we are told by spokesmen of many different traditions and attitudes, to understand why they think as they think and say what they say, then, so long as these claims are not absurdly false, the `relativism' and `subjectivism' of other civilizations do not preclude us from sharing common assumptions, sufficient for some communication with them, for some degree of understanding and being understood. This common ground is what is correctly called objective--that which enables us to identify other men and other civilizations as human and civilized at all; When this breaks down we do cease to understand, and, ex hypothesi, we misjudge; but since by the same hypothesis we cannot be sure how far communication has broken down, how far we are being deluded by historical mirages, we cannot always take steps to avert this or discount its consequences. We seek to understand by putting together as much as we can out of the fragments of the past, make out the best, : most plausible cases for persons and ages remote or unsympathetic to us or for some reason inaccessible to us; we do our utmost to extend the frontiers of knowledge and imagination; as to what happens beyond all possible frontiers, we cannot tell and consequently cannot care; for it is nothing to us. What we can discern we seek to describe as accurately and fully as possible; as for the darkness which surrounds the field of our vision, it is opaque to us, concerning it our judgments are neither subjective nor objective; what is beyond the horizon of vision cannot disturb us in what we are able to see or seek to know; what we can never know cannot make us doubt or reject that which we do. Some of our judgments are, no doubt, relative and subjective, but others are not; for if none were so, if objectivity were in principle inconceivable, the terms, subjective and objective, no longer contrasted, would mean nothing; for all correlatives stand and fall together. So much for the secular argument that we must not judge, lest--all standards being relative--we be judged, with the equally fallacious corollary that no individual in history can rightly be pronounced. innocent or guilty, for the values in terms of which he is so described are subjective, spring from self-interest or class interest or a passing phase of a culture or from some other such cause; and the verdict has therefore no `objective' status and no real authority.
And what of, the other argument--the tout comprendre maxim? It appeals to the world order. If the world follows a fixed design and every element in it is determined by every other, then to understand a fact, a person, a civilization, is to grasp its relationship to the cosmic design, in which it plays a unique part; and to grasp its meaning is to grasp, as we have shown before, its value, its justification, too. To understand the cosmic symphony wholly is to understand the necessity for every note of it; to protest, condemn, complain is merely to show that one has not understood. In its metaphysical form this theory claims to perceive the `real' design, so that the outer disorder is but a distorted reflection of the universal order--at once the ground and the purpose of all there is--'within' or `beyond' or `beneath'. This is thephilosophia perennis' of Platonists and Aristotelians, Scholastics and Hegelians, Eastern philosophers and contemporary metaphysicians who distinguish between the harmonious reality which is invisible and the visible chaos of appearances. To understand, to justify, to explain, are identical processes. The empirical versions of this view take the form of belief in some kind of universal sociological causation. Some are optimistic like the theories of Turgot and Comte, emergent evolutionists, scientific utopians, and other convinced believers in the inevitable increase in the quality and variety of human happiness. Alternatively, as in Schopenhauer's version, they may be pessimistic, and hold out the prospect of perpetual' suffering which all human efforts to prevent it will only serve to increase. Or they may take a neutral attitude and seek only to establish that there exists an inexorable sequence of cause and effect; that everything, both mental and physical, is subject to discoverable laws; that to understand them is. not necessarily to approve, but at least makes it pointless to blame men for not having done better; for there was no other alternative which such men could--causally could--have chosen; so that their historical alibi is unbreakable. We can still, of course, complain in a purely aesthetic fashion. We can complain of ugliness, although we know we cannot alter it; and in the same way we can complain of stupidity, cruelty, cowardice, injustice, and feel anger or shame or despair, while remembering that we can not put an end to their objects; and in the process of convincing ourselves that we cannot change behaviour, we shall duly cease to speak of cruelty or injustice, but merely of painful or annoying events; and to escape from them we should re-educate ourselves (and assuming, inconsistently enough, like many a Greek sage and eighteenth-century radical, that we are free in matters of education, although rigidly conditioned in almost every other respect) to adjust ourselves into conformity with the universe; and distinguishing what is relatively permanent from what is transient, seek so to form our tastes and views and activities as to fit in with the pattern of things. For if we are unhappy because we cannot have something we want, we must seek happiness by teaching ourselves to want only what we cannot any how avoid. That is the lesson of the Stoics, as it is, less obviously, that of some modern sociologists. Determinism is held to be `demonstrated' by scientific observation; responsibility is a delusion; praise and blame are subjective attitudes put to flight by the advance of knowledge. To explain is to justify; one cannot complain of what cannot be otherwise; and natural `morality--the life of reason-- is the morality and the life whose values are identified with the actual march of events, whether it be metaphysically deduced from some intuitive insight into the nature of reality and its ultimate purpose, or established by scientific methods. But does any ordinary human being, does any practising historian, begin to believe one word of this strange tale?