Positive Liberty

Historians can’t be trusted. I should know; I’m one of them. Of course, bloggers can’t be trusted either, and this puts me pretty much at the bottom of the barrel.

Bloggers take pride in their second-guessing; they doubt each others’ facts almost by instinct: If you can disprove a fact that others have generally accepted, then you win fame, fortune, inbound links, and many new readers. Historians get almost no reward for exposing the factual errors of their colleagues; on the contrary, we are more often quietly annoyed by those who do.

Historians must struggle–and it really is a struggle–to refute even the most idiotic claims about the past. We can chase them from the academy and into the backwaters of conspiracy theory, but it often takes an embarrassingly long time.

Bloggers: You face a different challenge. Rather than needing months and years to refute an error, you need exactly the opposite, speed. And speed brings sloppiness. Finding the truth often degrades into finding what makes the other bobbleheads nod more vigorously. It’s possible to surf randomly through dozens of blogrolls before you find a single blog that differs in even the slightest point of ideology from the one with which you started.

But bloggers don’t suffer fools so gladly. If a major blog makes an assertion, it will inevitably be fact-checked by at least ten different minor bloggers in the first five minutes after posting.

Three of the ten will pronounce the new fact to be false whatever happens.

Three more will pronounce it true against the most daunting odds.

Three others will fail to understand the fact in any sense at all, but come down on one side or the other just for the sake of form.

And one will digress thoughtfully.

The argument comes and goes in a matter of days or even hours. Then it is forgotten.

The problem for bloggers is that they use a rough, insufficiently tested model of information-gathering. The problem for historians is that they use a frankly outdated model of information-gathering.

A graduate student is sent to a foreign country to read documents that are not in his native language, from a century that is not his own. No one is fluent any longer in the customs and idioms of the time, but this individual–often as not, a scared 20-something who is still prone to embarrassing errors of chronology–must make sense of the entire story in a way that satisfies his committee.

Wait, I spoke too soon. “The entire story” is never, never apparent at first sight. It’s scattered in various document sets, located across an unfamiliar city and guarded by surly librarians wielding arcane registration forms. A significant portion of “the entire story” was never written down. In my own field, some of it was destroyed in 1789; certain bits of it perished in 1830 and 1848, and a very great deal disappeared in 1870-71. The rest of it is in a slow and constant state of decay, a little more perishing with every passing year.

And what remains is the stuff of history.

It’s fact-checked, after a fashion, by a committee, who has never seen the documents in question, and who must rely on this scared 20-something to tell them what he has found. If it sounds plausible, it becomes the truth, and our young historian appends three new letters to his name. If not, the now-former historian moves on to greener pastures.

Sometimes a clever set of non-facts manages to fool the committee entirely, and they then confer the doctorate upon an undeserving student. Happily for him, fact-checking in history happens about once in a generation–if that. A great many facts are never checked at all.

Whatever the case, they are the product of an afternoon’s exhausted work, by a scared 20-something, in a foreign city, in a language he does not understand, in an ocean of lost cultural signifiers. And they’re the best we’ve got.

Even the deft and decorated older historians make egregious errors. I’ve recently been working with a lesser work by one of the most important scholars in my field. I’ve never worked with the individual personally, but it suffices to say that any specialist would recognize his name and that he has written several indispensable books. But in this particular volume–and within the first twenty pages no less–I found the following mistakes:

–He misspelled the name of another historian, rather badly.

–He misplaced the building where the event supposedly took place, claiming that it was in one neighborhood, while all primary sources and contemporary maps place it on the other side of the city.

–He claimed that the event took place at the instigation of one individual who was present. He cites no evidence to support this claim. He also attributed to this individual another action without any evidence, and this act she explicitly disavowed in her autobiography.

–To top it all off, he cited a passage in the secondary literature that simply does not exist, complete with author, title, edition, and page number. Searching for that passage, I read the entire book in question; it does not appear anywhere within it.

And this individual is among the most respected in my field. What errors will one day be found in my own work? What errors have I already made?

When I think like this, I could easily open my dissertation folder, select all, and delete. I sometimes think I wouldn’t even miss it.

Could historians learn from bloggers? You bet. It’s possible to imagine history conducted along radically different lines, yet still doing the same work as today–or possibly better.

Imagine, for instance, a historians’ wiki, modeled on Wikipedia, that would include within it the full texts of major monographs in history. Each passage could be noted and commented by anyone who wished–or, if you want to keep the authority of the academy sufficiently strong, only let the advanced graduate students and higher do it.

But either way, we could all be asked to vote on the veracity of different assertions, to check off whether we personally had seen the evidence on which the claims were made, and to state as specifically as possible where the errors were to be found. No longer would a historian go into the archives, get something wrong, and let it stand for twenty to thirty years. In the wiki future, historians would be rewarded–this part is crucial–on the basis of their fact-checking, not merely on how many articles they manage to turn out in a given time.

Annotation would grow on annotation; digressions and duplications would no doubt be common. But a wiki-based approach to history would break the authority of the published text in precisely the way that bloggers have done so convincingly for current events.

It would be an enormous task, of course. But I suspect it would prevent a lot of errors from cropping up in history to begin with and would mercilessly prune out the ones that are already there.

Bloggers, you could improve your field by… Nah, don’t even get me started.

Update: Ralph E. Luker of Cliopatra replies as follows:

Read any entry in the area of your expertise in that original wiki. How many errors or misconceptions do you find? Do you want to spend time and energy correcting them? Only to have someone, maybe someone who knows less than you do, come along behind you to correct your corrections? In the process of correcting you, do they import mistakes of their own? That is what we historians do in slow motion. Kuznicki and McDaniel merely suggest that we might do it in real time.

I really have to disagree with this characterization, since what I’m suggesting here would differ from Wikipedia in one important respect: Only those with some historical expertise would be allowed to post. Yes, I’ve read some dodgy articles in Wikipedia, and these might be fun to recap in a future post. But to be fair, I have also read some really good things too–and far more than what one might have expected from a group of random strangers. My bet is that with the professional expertise and connections among academic historians, the project would produce results well beyond anything we have now in the way of both quality and timeliness.

Update II: For whatever reason, this post has for many days received an inordinate amount of spam. Comments have been closed, although I encourage you to contact me with legitimate discussion here: jason — at — positiveliberty … dot … com.

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