There Is no Need to Write or Teach History in an Intellectual Sewer

there is a kind of revision of history, widely practiced today, that arises not from the opportunities but from the needs- or the passions- of our time. Basically, all research means putting questions, and historical research means putting questions to the past, preferably without torture, and trying to find answers there. The questions we put are necessarily those suggested to us by our own times and preoccupations, and these differ from generation to generation and from group to group. It is inevitable and legitimate that this should be so. What is neither legitimate nor inevitable is that not only the questions we put to the past but also the answers we find there should be determined by our present concerns and needs. This can lead, particularly under authoritarian regimes, but also in free societies under pressures of various kinds, to the falsification of the past, in order to serve some present purposes.

Bernard Lewis, “In Defense of History,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 143, no. 4 (December 1999) pp. 585-586 (573-587)

Much of what purports to be history, at the present time in much of the world, is of this kind. We live in an age when immense energies and resources are devoted to the falsification of the past, and it is therefore all the more important, in those places where the past can be researched and discussed freely and objectively, to pursue this work to the limit of our abilities. It has been argued that complete objectivity is impossible, since scholars are human beings, with their own loyalties and biases. This is no doubt true, but does not affect the issue. To borrow an analogy, any surgeon will admit that complete asepsis is also impossible, but one does not, for that reason, perform surgery in a sewer. There is no need to write or teach history in an intellectual sewer either.

See also Nirvana Fallacy and Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”)

I was looking for this quote after losing my old commonplace book and nobody else seems to have excerpted it and placed it online. Bernard Lewis was an orientalist like me, although much more professionally successful and focused on the Islamic world rather than the Preislamic. You can learn some things about him in For Lust of Knowing by Robert Irwin.

You can find a sophisticated argument for a different approach to history in Guy Halsall’s essay “What’s history got to do with it? (1)” at https://600transformer.blogspot.com/2025/02/whats-history-got-to-do-with-it-1.html beginning “So, the past in itself does not teach single unequivocal ‘lessons’. Does ‘History’, i.e. the discipline of the study of the past taught in schools and universities?”

(scheduled 11 February 2025, updated 5 March 2025)