What can historians hope to achieve?

What do we mean when we ask what were “the causes of” a historical episode? Any answer must surely involve claiming that without that cause, the episode wouldn’t have happened in the way it did. And yet we’re never going to be able to verify that claim: we can’t do the experiment in which everything else is the same except for our suggested cause, and see whether its absence, or appearance in a different form, changes the outcome.

Counterfactuals can never be more than an interesting parlour game because trying to imagine a single change in what happens in the world raises new questions. What would have happened if Argentina didn’t invade the Falklands? That might seem to be a relatively identifiable decision that might have gone the other way. But further thought reveals muddier waters: if the Argentine government had acted differently, would that be because it had received different signals from the British about a likely response to an invasion? And what in Britain would therefore have been different to have made that possible? The point of a counterfactual is not to work backwards to analyse what might have caused the invented event, but the question remains as to whether different factors that might have led to the fictional decision should be part of the fictional world in which we are trying to examine the consequences? My point is simply that cause and effect are part of a tangled network of interactions.  

 

Am I being too literal in trying to apply scientific method to historical causality? After all, there are plenty of fields of human activity - such as politics, social work or therapy - in which professionals make judgements about causality in complex situations and act on them. If we raise taxes on this, it’ll promote that; if we encourage a person to do this, it’ll help them with that; if my client thinks like this about her past, it’ll help her with her life today. 

 

But history is different, because both the “if” and the “then” parts of those theories are already unchangeable. While other professionals can pull a thread in the sweater and see where it leads, the historian is only able to observe the sweater under a glass case, to look but not to touch.

 

So where does that leave the search for causation in history? Was Nazism an aberration that caused the Second World War, or was it the product of currents in German history over many previous decades? Was the war the inevitable consequence of the settlement at the end of the First World War or was it caused by the same factors that led to the first war? Arguments can be constructed on both sides, just as skilled debaters or barristers can make a convincing case on either side of any argument. 

 

Perhaps it’s not surprising that historical causation is impossible to pin down. After all, we’re comfortable with that being the case in much more accessible situations. Why will I go to work on Monday morning? Is it because I always do? Is it because I need to finish off some work? Is it because I want to get paid? Is it because having a job gives me a status in society that I enjoy? Is it because I’m hoping to get promoted? Is it because I know I’ll be able to have a cup of coffee when I get to the office? If historians en masse were asked to ascribe a cause in this situation - where they could have access to all the information they wanted -, I’m not sure they’d come up with anything more convincing than novelists. Because judges of the outcome of such a competition to explain causes - readers of the historians’ output - would, I believe, be swayed most by the plausibility of the narrative: how well it flowed, whether motives felt real, whether there were sufficient corroborative details; in short, whether the reader was persuaded by a picture of human nature that they recognised from their own experience. And that’s where novelists might have the edge. 

In the end, accounts of why something happened, whether in history or ordinary life, are essentially nuanced claims attached to a description of how it happened. And whilst a definitive causal claim in history, if convincing, is seen as ‘bold’, ‘provocative’ or ‘radical’, to detractors, it’s (sometimes patronisingly) dismissed as a colourful expression of the writer’s personality, or worse, an interesting example of the biases commonly seen in the culture at the time of writing. As a business, history needs these colourful outliers, both to attract the interest of a wider public - to present ‘provocative’ TV series for instance - and to provide material for more cautious historians to dissect and integrate with the mainstream. The outliers are the creatives and the rest are the housekeepers. The creatives aren’t necessarily superior and the housekeepers can be judicious summarisers as well as cautious nitpickers. And the process of moving forward through the proposal of a new paradigm followed by its absorption into the mainstream is unavoidable, and not unique to history. 

In psychology, for instance, a new experimental paradigm creates excitement because it seems to offer powerful insights through an elegant and apparently definitive technique (for example, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, or the extensive work of Kahneman and Tversky on cognitive biases). But over time, and in proportion to the success of the original work, other researchers try to replicate or falsify the experiments. A negative result is noteworthy because it challenges the new orthodoxy: either the original results were wrong or they depended on a hitherto overlooked factor which throws doubt on the conclusions drawn from them. Progress has still been made, in that the issues have been explored and experiments conducted. But the more work that’s done, the less clearcut the original conclusions appear. 

 

Are the ‘sub-genres’ of history - social, feminist, cultural, emotional etc. – the equivalent of new experimental paradigms, each staking its own claim to the truth through new methodology, just as new experimental techniques in psychology claim to have found a way to codify and study new areas of our thought or emotions? To make such a claim, the history sub-genres would have to be saying that they were not just defining an interesting new source of material or new subject matter, but that they are able to explain why things happened in a way that wasn’t formerly possible. So, to explain the suffragettes, for instance, do we need social or feminist history, because the insights they provide would otherwise be unavailable? When innovative work is influential, as in psychology, it will attract those who want to challenge its claims, or, more flatteringly, to imitate its techniques with other material.

The very passage of time, in both history and the sciences, gives later contributors a sense that they are qualified to take a superior attitude to the great figures of their discipline, simply because more has happened since those figures were at work. Today we can see great work in context, and, in that sense, ‘know better’. So no student today would hesitate to criticise Freud, Piaget, Macaulay or Gibbon. But how much progress has really been made? Whilst psychology has one foot in the hard sciences - physiology, neurology and biochemistry - and therefore can, in principle, hope to anchor its more abstract claims on them, history remains a humanity, also committed to speaking truth but not as sure how to measure it. Because, to return to where I started, beyond simply collecting data, how can history take the machine apart to see how it works? Is it a question of constructing well-argued cases or seeking a plausible consensus? However well you do that, in a few years time, someone will surely dismiss your conclusions as having done nothing more than to illustrate the prevailing culture of your times, or, if you’re important, to reflect some overlooked truths about your own background or personality. Maybe it’s time for history to embrace its humanity - and strive for art rather than science, to aim unashamedly to produce rigorously well-informed and well-expressed opinions about the past rather than having ambitions beyond that, which will inevitably lead to disappointment.

There’s an elegant graphic I saw on Twitter in which a pattern of dots moves round the screen in a repeating cycle. When the dots are joined up in different ways, it shows, one after another, that they can be seen as the corners of perfectly rotating triangles, squares, cubes or a star. At the top, the caption reads: “The same facts are compatible with any number of different theories.”