Telling the Truth About History Essay Example for Free

Telling the Truth About History Essay The struggle to find truth in telling the stories of history has been a source of constant debate amongst historians and intellectuals. With the emergence of religious rejection during the seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment, the influence and undoubted supremacy of the heroic model of science provided historians with new ways for obtaining truth—absolute truths—through the dispassionate eyes of a â€Å"heroic† observer. Although this remains unchallenged for many generations, with the cultural changes and the democratization of education, the idea of an absolute truth—a universal story of national progress which neglects to encompass the diversity of America—is challenged by post-modernity. In all its pessimisms towards absolute truths and objective knowledge, post-modernism illustrates the importance of and sets the foundation for questioning historical accuracy and the idea of objectivity. Can there be truth when the words and language of the â€Å"objective† observer is unintentionally dripping in their own personal, social, and political agendas? Through the works of Foucault and Deerdas, who get at the heart of this very question, historians are encouraged to reject the Enlightenment project, and look deeper into historical evidence to interrogate the structure and organization of the text, its vocabulary, and hidden assumptions. Although, post-modernity—a critique of the Enlightenment ideals—creates the framework for the questioning of historical accuracy, it is very important to recognize its inability to formulate its own solutions to this historical dilemma. Fortunately, with the succeeding ideas of practical realists, there is a sense of hope and optimism for the future of history and the all-encompassing truths that it can uphold. How did post-modernity challenge the heroic model of science and enlightenment ideals? With the digression away from enlightenment ideals of objectivity, absolute truth, and progress, post-modernists set the tone for a new way of thinking—similar to the way Enlightenment philosophers challenged the absolutisms of the church. With the new social historians, the American story is challenged by the competing ethnic cultures that didn’t fit into the white-protestant American story, and penetrate below the surface to where the stories of women, slaves, and immigrants had been veiled for so long. The idealized American story – a fallacious story of unity and equality—had represented the founding fathers political, social, and religious agendas towards progress and modernity which produced justifications like â€Å"manifest destiny†. With this new idea of the influence of personal experiences and agendas, even Newton and Darwin are put on the stand, to find that even these so called â€Å"dispassionate† and completely â€Å"objective† observers had political, social, and religious agendas that greatly influenced their work. This opens the door for the post-modernists attack against the possibility of objective historical or scientific knowledge, reality, and in essence, truth. They deny our ability to represent objective knowledge in any true fashion because of the language barrier which serves, in a sense, as a funnel that reflects every personal, political, social, and religious agenda or experience. Post-modernists, like Foucalt and Deerdas, â€Å"made western man into a modern day Gulliver, tied down with ideological ropes and incapable of transcendence because he can never get beyond the veil of language to the reality ‘out there’†. (p. 208) With the conflict between the signifier and the signified, as expressed by Saussure, reality or truth can never be reached because in the process of representing an actual object- or the signified – there is a risk of distorting and obfuscating it (p. 214). Objects allow us to create stories—narratives— not necessarily accurate—about the object and its existence. These narratives are inescapable personal and rely upon the experiences and agendas of the individual creating it. Therefore, language is not a direct correspondence to reality. It represents differences, personal agendas, experiences, beliefs, and power relations and knowing this, according to post-modernists, eliminates the possibility of any kind of reality or truth for both science and history. The post-modern cynicism towards reality, truth and objective knowledge created a new way for writing history. The rejection of the old absolutisms created an opportunity for questioning and discourse of previously accepted historical knowledge. It created a space for the stories of marginalized groups who had until this time, been veiled by the universal, romanticized American story of progress toward modernity. A story of success and opportunity on the frontier was substituted by a story of struggle—of women’s rights, of slaves, and of the killings of Native Americans. Within the Enlightenment objectives for history there are limitations to the possibility of anything else but progress. When progress and modernity are the only ideals being stressed, there is little room to create a history beyond this. These ideals consumed the thoughts, beliefs, politics and social structures of man, and it was reflected in their work. History until this time was being tied down and restricted to the old absolutisms, to one universal story which supposedly encompassed all of nature. However, with social history and the door it opened for post-modernity, history could take on the task of telling a more encompassing story that could be discussed, criticized, and built upon. Although, post-modernists believe that there is no truth and that the possibility of reality is non-existent, they set the foundation for future historians to question the history books which they are learning from, to look deeper into the hidden agendas that are sometimes veiled, and to then write a history that, although cannot be completely objective and dispassionate, can embody some sort of truth and historicism for that time. This idea of taking a middle ground between the traditionalist philosophers of the Enlightenment and the pessimistic post-modernists is the main goal the authors of this book try to make. They recognize the need for questioning and interrogation but not to the extent that we end up a nihilistic view that there is no truth and nothing matters. The gap between past events, like records, and the way historians describe and interpret them is accepted by practical realists. This allows for the possibility of obtaining truth and a method for writing history. Some words, they explain, however socially constructed, reach out to the world and give a reasonably true description of its contents because of a relationship between the object and the observer (p. 250). With the practical realists emphasis on archival research, the use of our memories and curiosity, and discourse upon discourse the writing of history is now possible. However, without the post-modernists cynicism and interrogation of the Enlightenment project history may still be a discipline of absolutisms and â€Å"heroisms†.