I remember the beginning of Christ? – a multi-volume work by Nikolai Morozov. The author describes the work of the committee that aimed to reconstruct the circumstances of the victory of Bolsheviks in October 1917. Coming out of prison, Mr. Morozov was included in this committee as one of its supervisors. A year after the well-known October coup its survived participants were gathered to describe what was happening on the Day of the Second Congress of Soviets. Everybody said to each other: “You do not remember it, everything was absolutely different. You did not stand there, you did not sit there; these words were uttered by another guy…” Only a year after the remarkable event! If we ask those present tonight to describe what is happening at this conference we’ll get at least 100 stories, and I assure you that these won’t be absolutely identical stories.
My answer to the question “Can history be unbiased?” is flatly negative – above all, because all stories are written by human beings who are subjects by definition. I am writing a subjective book and I am reading my subjective book.
What is truth? Today we actually try to answer the main question addressed to Jesus by Pilate. That question remained unanswered. If Lord is not sure he knows the answer we can hardly be more self-assured, even though some humorists say historians are more powerful than God himself, since God is unable to change the past.
One of my favorite historians Mark Blok says that real history must smack of “human nature”, where by “human nature” he means subjectivity and this is hardly reprehensible.
Heated debate has been raging on whether history is an academic science. In western universities, Anglo-Saxon ones in the first place, there is a College of Arts and Sciences. History is considered an art rather than a science and this is by no means new. As we remember, Clio belonged to the art muses.
There is such a variety of history as cliometrics – mathematical methods making our knowledge more objective and I wholeheartedly support the use of such methods in historical studies. But there is a problem of source statistical data. There is a saying in English-speaking countries: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Because the source statistical materials we possess do not always reflect objective reality, the analysis of this data cannot always reflect real facts. Nobody would claim that information provided by State Statistics Committee is absolutely reliable because this data is based on the statements of businesses. Nobody would claim that the statements of each business reflect the real estate of things. Even if you look at the data on GNP, different figures are given by the World Bank and WMF. That is, even objective mathematical knowledge relative to the history of human beings is hardly possible, though this would be a closer approximation to objectivity than history based on someone’s recollections.
The next problem with objectivity is so-called “black swans.” This is the name of the recently published book by Nassim Taleb. A bestseller of 2009, this book triggered a discussion of “black swans.” These are fortuities that defy accounting, analysis or forecasting. Taleb, a Lebanese by birth, a star of Wall Street and a very wealthy man, starts his book with the description of what was thought to be “objective knowledge.” Prior to the 17th and 18th centuries everybody had been confident that all swans were white, but when Australia was discovered it turned out that there were also black swans.
In Taleb’s native land of Lebanon Christian believers had peacefully co-existed with Moslems for a thousand years and then one day in 1974 they suddenly began killing each other. Why? Someone might explain this by the schemes of Israeli intelligence agency; others may see the reason in spontaneous skirmishes at the bazaar. Yet such explanations would be insufficient. We do not know the truth and will never be able to explain why only five religions (according to Weber) out of the multitude of various beliefs became global; incidentally all five were born in Asia. We cannot even imagine the abundance of factors that influenced such an outcome. The human mind is simply unable to absorb all these factors; secondly, an overwhelming majority of such factors, both big and small, are not reflected in any historical sources.
Professor Lev Belousov discusses school textbooks with their different interpretations. As the executive director of the Russkiy Mir Foundation, I devote much of my time to studying the problems of the Russian language, where the situation is even more tangled. Seventy textbooks available all give different versions of Russian, even though the language is a more objective substance compared to history. To the best of my knowledge history in school is first of all about the nurturing of civic consciousness. This is the answer to the question: “Why my country is the best nation on the planet.”
In our country it’s different. Russian authors of history textbooks try to ask serious questions and declare their political affiliation. In this sense we are a unique nation. I remember a textbook on civic studies, used by one of my sons. It read, “Wars can be just and unjust. A just war is the one waged against Hitler and unjust wars are those waged by our country in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Youths should not serve in the Russian Army plagued by harassment of subordinates, since Russia is in need of a professional army.” This is just the authors’ stance which can be shared or not. But it’s obvious that a 13-year-old teenager should not be exposed to this kind of subjective assessments.
Is it necessary to seek objectivity in a historical discourse? Of course, it is. Looking for truth and answering the question “what is truth?” is the meaning of human life. Regardless of whether a person is engaged in history or not, everyone tries to find an answer. The critique of historical sources is of paramount importance, to be sure. Archival documents are to be wider used, though documents are most often biased as well, since they were written by people for certain objectives and we do not always know their motives. Ever approaching the truth, we’ll not be able to fully comprehend it.
This is the answer I give to the question “Can history be objective?” – “Objectivity is about our efforts to comprehend the truth.” For that matter, history is a wonderful profession, perhaps the most exciting on our planet.
Vyacheslav A. Nikonov,
Doctor of History,
Dean of the School of Public Administration, Moscow State University,
State Duma Deputy
