I’m so tired of biased sources.
I was three weeks deep into a presentation on the split between the now Roman Catholic Church and The Eastern Orthodox Church when my professor informed me that one of my primary sources was, in fact, an Orthodox apologist and therefore good for insight but not fact. Every Holiday visit to my grandparent’s house includes FOX news blaring in the background. Even news pieces from sources I generally agree with, even when we are seeing eye-to-eye on an issue, make me want to scream because their opinions are so obnoxiously obvious in their attempts to quash all possible opposition. I feel like I can’t make my mind up about anything if both sides are going to scream totally opposite positions and information at me about the same thing. Do I support Palestine? Is Planned Parenthood butchering babies? Do all lives matter? What about Hillary Clinton’s emails? God, I don’t know.
You’d think history wouldn’t fall prey to these same pitfalls- at least, you’d hope. One of the primary purposes from history is to learn our mistakes so as to not make them again. We have to look at the bad, in its full ugliness, even when we don’t want to- see how and why it happened and attempt to safeguard against it.
Well, that’s not very easy once you realize Historical texts suffer from the same pestilence of bias and cherry-picking. History has “emphasized the need for substantiating evidence, principally from archival and other primary sources” (Moran 107) which is all well and good except for that these archives and sources, in any event I can imagine, have a very fallible human behind them. One with certain loyalties, perspectives and opinions. And this person(s) may leave things out- things they find unimportant or distasteful. Or they may exaggerate that which they enjoy, their enthusiasm for their underlying motives shining through. In short, maybe nothing is subjective. Even going back to what would be seen as the most obvious and accurate source- someone who was there, something that recorded an event- is probably going to lie to you. As Whilhelm Dilthey said, “the world could never be known objectively and finally, but could only be interpreted; there was no such thing as a pure reason or absolute knowledge outside the human experience.” (Moran 108)
Obviously I’m a little rankled about this. It’s because I’m seeing it time and again in my classes to the point where it’s despairingly inevitable. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War has him going on an on about the inaccuracy of past histories in favor of bias, only for him to turn around and admit that he’s going to do the same:
“I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in speeches which i listened to myself…. so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.” (Thucydides 47, emphasis mine)
Well sure, you can tell me during the Atlantic slave trade Africans were enslaved to work on Southern plantations but don’t tell me they were workers because it’s the “same general sense”. And history may recognize that it “has to be interpreted actively by the historian in terms of the power relationships it embodies and the narratives it excludes” (Moran 111) but this “awareness” doesn’t do much when you come to the realization that the entire Jewish population of Jedwabne, Poland, can never be accounted for because after the war records were so obscured and the justice system was so disinclined to properly handle it (Gross, “The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland). How do we account for that? Can we learn from war, slavery and genocide if we let the winners decide how it goes down in history?
I wish I had a solution to this. Obviously the winners write history because the balance of power is in their favor. Sometimes the “losers” don’t even exist anymore to tell their side of the story. But hopefully someday, there won’t be any winners or losers- and we can all write our history together.
Sources:
Moran, Joe. “Texts in History.” Interdisciplinarity. New York: Routledge, 2010. 103-33. Print.
Gross, Jan T. “The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. “ New York Times Review of Books. https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/gross-neighbors.html (accessed 28 November 2015).
Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. Rex Warner. New York: Pengun Classics, 1972. Print.