That Empathy has suddenly
become a hot topic of discussion with books like the recent The Age of Empathy
by Frans de Waal, Souvenir Press being seriously touted as a viable means of
understanding the past is a retrograde step.
Thankfully the use of
Empathy has never really had much of a stronghold on historians in the past
certainly before the 1970s. However, today it has started to get a hearing it
does not deserve.
That is not to say that
historians cannot have empathy the great historian G.E.M. de Ste Croix
according to Ann Talbot had a lifelong empathy with the oppressed.
Who the historian is
empathetic to does usually reveal their political bias as it should be. As E.H.
Carr once said “if, as Collingwood says, the historian must re-enact in thought
what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae, so the reader in his
turn must re-enact what goes on in the mind of the historian. Study the
historian before you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very
abstruse. It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when
recommended to read a work by that great scholar Jones of St. Jude's, goes
round to a friend at St. Jude's to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what
bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out
for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf, or your
historian is a dull dog”. [1]
The use of empathy has been
used in schools the 1980s in schools as a means of teaching children empathy for the study of history.[2]
The use of empathy in schools and now in wider academia and society as a semi-viable
means of historical study is a by-product of the dominance of postmodernist
theories in universities and society in general. The academic architects of
postmodernism and identity politics occupy well-paid positions in academia. As
a social layer, the theoreticians of postmodernism are some of the wealthiest
in society. Their political and philosophical views express their social
interests.
The use of empathy as a
method of historical inquiry also owes a lot to the growth of the new Social
History school of-of Historiography which appeared in the early 1970s.
According to some historians, it was perhaps the last major historiography of
the 20th century to try and explain a complex historical phenomenon. Before The 1970s, Social History had mostly been limited to a study of everyday life.
During the last thirty odd years, the subject has come to prominence because
some aspects of it have become the bête noir of some revisionist historians.
The most positive side of the new history is that it brought into the public
domain the lives of working people or the poor who had been mainly ignored by
historians. On the downside this, new history became divorced from any form of
economic or materialist explanation of history. The new social history is not
that different from its predecessor “old social history”. Described as a
“hodgepodge” of disciplines and unlike any other historiography. The English
historian G. M. Trevelyan saw it as the link between economic and political history;
he stated, "Without social history, economic history is barren and
political history unintelligible."
One of the avenues influential
in promoting empathy as a viable historical method of studying the past is the History
Today magazine which has a habit of opening up its pages to several historians
who have exhibited sympathetic viewpoints towards postmodernist theories. Its
recent issue is no exception. Four historians were given space on the issue of
empathy in History.
Helen Parr, Professor of
History at Keele University and author of Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper
(Allen Lane, 2018) began the assault with an article called “Empathy can help
us understand an uncomfortable culture. She writes “In November
1981, some paratroopers in recruit training gang-raped a 15-year-old girl in an
Aldershot barracks. The girl met one of the soldiers in a local pub, who took
her to his dormitory. There a group of drunken paratroopers tied her to a bed
with elasticated cord, and five or six of them raped her. They kicked her,
urinated on her and stole her underwear as a trophy. Two years later – after
some of the soldiers had fought in the Falklands – six men were convicted at
Winchester Crown Court of rape, indecent assault and common assault. Two of
them pleaded guilty. The longest sentence was five years. Empathy – identifying
with the paratroopers in that barrack room – can help us to understand this
uncomfortable culture and expose the recruits’ vulnerabilities: the unforgiving
harshness of some of their early lives, the intense codes of an elite club
where loyalty was prized above all and the ways training forged their
identities”[3].
To defend herself from
accusations of being sympathetic to these psychopaths she states “Understanding
this does not exonerate their crime nor suggest more sympathy with them than
with their victim”.
This is an unnecessary
approach. Given the long history of violence perpetrated by British soldiers
over a long period of history an examination of this history would give a much
deeper insight into why this crime took place. On this occasion, this historian
has to take sides. The first action is not to empathise but to oppose or to be
more precise to acquaint these fascist mined paratroopers heads with the pavement.
Perhaps the most extreme
example of this type of empathising has been directed towards a study of Nazi
Fascism. In an essay Some Reflections on
Empathy in History Source: Teaching
History, No. 55 (April 1989), pp. 13-18 John Cairns writes Sympathy or Empathy?
Sympathy is distinguishable from empathy, for in sympathy we are paralleling
ourself and someone else. For instance, when we sympathise with a bereaved
person, we are telling that individual about our feelings, and offering a
symbol of our regard. Whereas when we empathise, we are doing more than this:
we are trying to enter into the mind of another person and seeking to try out
what we consider to be his or her thought and motivations. It is possible, for
example, to empathise with Himmler, without having any sympathy for him. It
would be important for a student to see the contradictory aspects of Himmler in
order to gain something of his perspective on events. Consider how he sought
approval for visiting the sick and showing compassion for others. The same
person who consigned thousands to death by a signature, a clerk in a military
uniform, was thoroughly squeamish when witnessing an execution he had ordered.
Here was a sensitive man enslaved to Hitler's megalomaniac”.
This nonsense is even more
dangerous postmodernist rubbish than Parrs. Cairn’s psychological approach has
its roots in the Frankfurt school of anti-Marxism. Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm
and Wilhelm Reich et al. “The theoreticians of the Frankfurt School expressed
the outlook of sections of the German petty bourgeoisie. Moreover, the main
representatives of the Frankfurt School showed no interest in, let alone active
political support for, Trotsky’s struggle against the Stalinist regime in the
Soviet Union. This is a political fact that is, without question, of great
importance in understanding the evolution of the Frankfurt School. However, it
would be wrong to neglect consideration of its theoretical-philosophical roots.
An examination of the theoretical influences that found expression in the
Frankfurt School is necessary, not only to understand this intellectual
tendency and its many offshoots but also to identify its essential difference
from the Marxism of Bolshevism and the October Revolution”.[4]
In her article entitled The
concept that history is something distant is a dangerous one Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five: The
Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (Doubleday, 2019) make this
point “A certain level of emotional
detachment is necessary when examining any historical subject. No historian
wants to be accused of failing to apply a critical eye and making hasty,
inappropriate judgements. However, it is also possible that complete dispassion
can prevent us from recognising the subtler human issues at play. In most
cases,it is the smaller human stories that influence, the larger trends: the
personal frustrations and private sufferings, often of people who have been
written out of the record, that bring down governments, or initiate sweeping
social and political change”.
While using the empathetic
method for the historical study is fine for retrieving figures from history
that have been forgotten such as the victims of Jack the Ripper when a more
complex subject matter comes up such as the Russian revolution or the Holocaust
the use of empathy is next to useless.
Why because as the great
Karl Marx would say “In the social production of their life, men enter into
definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will,
relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of
their material productive forces. The total of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which
rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions
the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their
social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their
development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with
the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for
the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at
work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these
relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.
With the change of the economic foundation, the entire immense superstructure
is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the
economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision
of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or
philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this
conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on
what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of
transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness
must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the productive social forces and the relations of
production".
Using the method of
historical materialism, it is possible to be empathetic but also have a
connection with the past that reveals the real voices. Not in a subjective but
an objective way. The study of the past becomes scientifically grounded. Does
this stop the historian feeling empathy towards their subject as Miri Rubin,
Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at the Queen Mary University of
London writes “It is natural that we should feel empathy with some in the past
and abhor the actions of others? I have not lost sympathy for those
interrogated by the Inquisition on suspicion of heresy, as in Languedoc or
Bavaria in the 1300s, nor has my disgust diminished at the actions of
magistrates and judges in the witchcraft trials in Bamberg or Salem in The 1600s. It is a good thing that we feel for the tortured, the abused, the
marginalised; victims who can be found both among the elite and the poor. Such
empathy, after all, inspired the new histories of women, African-Americans,
colonised people, working people, the sick and the disabled since the mid-20th
century, leading to lasting changes in history and its possibilities.
The problem with these new
histories based on the empathy method is that far from giving us a more
scientific understanding of the past it is leading the study of history into a
blind alley of gender studies, race studies and ever more obscure
specialisation.
The third article in History
Today by Patricia Fara, Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge has an air of
irrationality and hostility to reason about it she writes “Hiding something
unpleasant from view is less effective than exploring its implications. How
tempting it is to adopt a stance of intellectual and moral superiority towards
the past. However, although human beings have accumulated vast numbers of
facts, there is no guarantee that we have become more clever or more virtuous”.
People have treated the world and its inhabitants badly – they still do. However,
the route to improvement lies through exposure and discussion, not concealment
and denial.
While exposure and
discussion are necessary, they cannot by themselves explain complex historical
phenomena. If something is being hidden in all these articles, it is the
mention of class or being more precise social forces. As EH Carr wrote 'The
historian undertakes a twofold operation: to analyse the past in the light of
the present and the future which is growing out of it and to cast the beam of
the past over the issues which dominate current and future.' It is, he said,
the function of the historian not only to analyse what he or she finds
significant in the past, but also 'to isolate and illuminate the fundamental
changes at work in the society in which we live', which will entail a view 'of
the processes by which the problems set to the present generation by these
changes can be resolved'. People are a product of history, their judgements and
actions conditioned by the past and the historian should work to make them
aware of this, but also to make them aware of the issues and problems of their
own time; to break the chain that binds them to the past and present, and so
enable them to influence the future”.[5]
To conclude whether the historian
is empathetic towards his or her subject is entirely up to them. A historian
should be passionate towards the study of history and write from the heart as
well as the head, but this must be tempered with an understanding that history
should be studied as a science and not the emotions of the historian. When a
historian finishes a book, it should not have tear stains on it.
[2]
See Empathy and History - Ann Low-Beer Source: Teaching History, No. 55 (April
1989), pp. 8-12
[3] https://www.historytoday.com/archive/head-head/empathy-aid-or-hindrance-historians
[4] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/19/leip-m19.html
[5] E
H Carr, The New Society, op cit, chapter 1.
