Greetings from the French Hill: Teaching History Is Unnatural

In what has becoming my favorite class, "Lessons of the Holocaust as an Educational Question", we reviewed today the question of, "What do we mean by lessons of the history?". The title refers to a historian that claims that the term, "History teaches us..." is extremely misleading and unnatural. It's unnatural because we're attempting to put ourselves in other the shoes of people we don't understand. It's misleading because history, itself, can't reach out from the grave, so to speak, and talk to us. It's the events of the past that teach the lessons that we take with us in the present and into the future. Events guide our interpretations and choices on we wants to view what happened in the past, and what lessons we can garner from them. According to this interpretation, there are no objective truths, in terms of lessons, that we can take from the past, or from history. We choose what to exume from the events of the past. Two people that experience the exact same events can choose to interpret them in two very different ways. The question then becomes, is one choice, is one interpretation, more valid than the other? Is one person interpreting an event with more knowledge than the other? ETC.

I'll leave you with a story, paraphrased, from the last two pages of Elie Wiesel's book, "Gates of the Forrest". Then, if I may, I'd like to ask your, the reader, opinion on the matter. Are there objective truths that can be learned from past events? Or, is choice subjective, with each interpretation being as valid as the other?

Elie Wiesel talks about a survivor who's in New York. It’s after Shabbat, there’s a Milave Malke. The Hasidim are dancing, but the survivor refuses to join the circle. All of the participants are survivors. The Rebbe asks him why he won’t dance. The answer is, “How can, after everything that’s happened, how can you believe? How can you expect me to praise the Lord and dance his praise?” The Rebbe asks him in response, “After everything that’s happened, how can you NOT believe? So, come and dance.”

Technorati Tags: , Holocaust, History, Lesson, Elie, Wiesel, New+York

2 Comments:

At 7:49 PM, Gert said...: "It's the events of the past that teach the lessons that we take with us in the present and into the future. Events guide our interpretations and choices on we wants to view what happened in the past, and what lessons we can garner from them. According to this interpretation, there are no objective truths, in terms of lessons, that we can take from the past, or from history. We choose what to exhume from the events of the past. Two people that experience the exact same events can choose to interpret them in two very different ways. The question then becomes, is one choice, is one interpretation, more valid than the other? Is one person interpreting an event with more knowledge than the other?"

Interesting you should bring this up, considering you consider me a "moral relativist".

I don't believe there are firm, provable objective truths. My background is in the Natural Sciences and any scientist worth his salt will accept that even "hard science" cannot ultimately prove a theory as absolute truth. Science can nonetheless build an impressive body of evidence supporting a hypothesis.

The Study of History (or the Social Sciences, more broadly) is more problematic when it comes to underpinning a given hypothesis by means of evidence, in large part because you can't rerun a given historical period of event in the laboratory.

Nonetheless, sound historiography can contribute a lot to making the interpretation of history more objective, without (generally speaking) arriving at the same level of objectivity that can be attained in the Natural Sciences. The Social Sciences remain also plagued by fabrications (e.g. "Protocols"), hoaxes and serious distortions, often for political gain.

So, no, not all choices regarding interpretation of history are equivalent but it can be difficult to make the "best" choice.
At 8:14 PM, Olah Chadasha said...: gert, first of all, as I wrote in the article, and once again you seemed to have failed to read, this is not MY opinion. I was writing about what we discussed on one of my classes as a theoretical question. That's number 1. You really, if you want to make statements about something someone else wrote, should actually READ what was written.
-OC