Note: This article is a response to comments posted in the blog post “Is Texas trying to rewrite history?”
In a recent NakedLaw blog post, I wrote that the state of Texas was ignoring historical facts by downplaying the role of slavery as the primary cause of the American Civil War. That blog incited a rash of commentary, almost all of it taking me to task for ignoring the real cause of the war, which, according to most of the comment writers, was the battle to preserve states’ rights.
In response, I thought I might discuss the nature of historical facts and the processes that guide our acceptance or rejection of them.
The ideological battle to frame the Civil War has gone through a number of phases, with historians from opposing sides trading the upper hand in controlling the narrative. From the 1920’s to the 1940’s, revisionists argued that the war could’ve been avoided but for blundering politicians and rigid abolitionists who were unable to compromise over key issues tied to the rights of Southern states. Civil Rights-era historians, meanwhile, made slavery the cornerstone of the Southern cause, a narrative that has become dominant in both the American education system and popular culture.
Dominant but by no means universal: According to an August McClatchy-Marist poll, 53% of Americans say slavery led the nation into civil war, while 41% disagree.
But if both sides claim to represent a true interpretation of history, then which one is correct?
Historical vs. scientific fact
In science, a fact is “an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for most practical purposes accepted as ‘true.’’’ The scientific method is the process by which one makes observations and weighs evidence to try to determine facts. To claim that a scientific “fact” is actually false, you must find convincing and repeatable evidence to prove the contrary.
Thus, when the scientific process confirms in study after study that humans evolved from more primitive primates, that vaccines do not cause autism, and that climate change is real and caused by humans, then these observations should be accepted as fact unless it can be reliably proved otherwise.
A historian, on the other hand, uses evidence from the past to form a hypothesis or interpretation about the meaning and significance of historical events. But this process is less certain than the scientific method. Historical events only happen once, and historians can’t travel back in time to observe the past. Counterfactuals of historical events, or what “could have been,” are thus merely thought exercises. Historical facts may be well-argued and sensible interpretations, but the viewpoints they report are closer to opinions than to “facts” in the scientific sense of the word.
The result is that this process of historical interpretation is open-ended and fundamentally uncertain. Historians, like the rest of us, are individuals who view the world through a set of biases. Two academics can examine the same documents and draw entirely different conclusions.
So does this mean that all historical interpretations are equally valid and every school district should have the choice to teach whatever they want? In a word: no.
The Heavy Weight of Scholarly Consensus
Even if historians are confined to their subjective perspectives, we should give weight to their interpretations because they have spent a good portion of their lives synthesizing and analyzing the best available evidence on a topic. And when there is a consensus view among the experts on a specific topic, we should give that view even more weight.
As I wrote in my previous post on this subject, there is a long established scholarly consensus among credible historians that slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War. This may not constitute a scientific “fact,” but it’s probably as close as we can get in the field of history.
Epistemology
Perhaps the more relevant question is how individuals form ideologies and value systems that make them more open to or closed off from established knowledge, whether it is in the form of scientific facts or historical interpretations. Epistemology—the study of how we accept certain ideas as “truth”—describes a few approaches, including “aesthetic resonance, divine revelation, tribal affiliations, [and the] scientific method.”
In the end, our epistemological orientation sorts out the imperfect knowledge we accumulate over the course of our lives, helping us understand reality as best as we can. Deciphering how one’s epistemological understanding affects his or her views may open up room for more fruitful debate than our current thundering echo chambers of public discourse.
Maybe new evidence will come to light that conclusively proves (or at least proves better than existing evidence) that the Civil War was not primarily about slavery. If that happens, scholars will go through another stage of revisionism, as paradigms shift again.
But until that day, we are left with the current truth. Everything else is simply opinion.
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3 comments
AW
I think you were right in your first write up of the Civil War. Yes, it was a war between the states, but quite a lot of the ideology that led the Southern states into the war was premised on the idea that the white man is naturally superior to non-white peoples, and that it was the natural order that African's should be kept as slaves by the whites. Yes, many in the south disliked the economic inequality between the north and the south, however most of the southern economy was based on slave-labor. Quite a lot of people seem to want to pretend that the white supremacist ideology never existed in the US. We will run into that again if we do are not careful to speak the truth.
Jim
Dude, I don't want to call you an idiot, but you're one of the revisionists that you are writing about. The Civil War was about states rights even if the right to keep slaves was one of those rights. 2nd, 2 of the 3 examples you gave of evolution, autism, and climate change were bogus And wrong. More and more research is proving that Darwin's theory of evolution is incorrect and only an idiot these days believes in man-made climate change. Man can barely affect the local climate let alone change the global climate. The sun is the single biggest factor followed by volcanoes which spew more greenhouse gases in one eruption than all of man in the history of man. If you want people to take you seriously you have to do a better job of being objective and of leaving your politics at home. So
carl inWis
Looks like 'epistemology' is getting in the way of 'truth,' again. What happened to the fact that the South fired on Ft. Sumter because of the overly high tariffs on consumer goods? This hurt the un-industrialized South more than the North!
Despite the protestations of the politicians, one of the biggest reasons was tariffs.