History Is Not a Mathematical Calculation

Professor Clyde Wilson’s observation that “history is not a mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of which there is always more to be learned” has important methodological implications. First, it implies that formal academic history credentials, while valuable, are not a necessary precondition for understanding history. Second, it means that the methods used to understand natural phenomena—such as the study of physics or biology—are not appropriate to historical inquiry. For example, some people attempt to understand the causes of the Civil War by counting the total number of words in secession declarations then calculating the percentage of words devoted to “slavery.”

The American Battlefield Trust has even drawn up pie-charts to illustrate the percentage of words devoted to each topic, explaining that, “These charts show how many words were devoted to the issues raised in each state’s Declaration as a percentage of the whole.” They ignore the fact that the presence or prevalence of a word in a document does not tell you the significance of the document nor what explanatory value to attach to its claims. The attempt to understand history by quantifying words seeks in vain to lend an air of “scientism” and empiricism to historical narratives.

Wilson recognizes that history is more than just a litany of facts which, although true, may not by themselves yield much insight into the past. It is not enough to itemize historical facts—it is important also to understand the people who participated in historical events, their reasons and their motivations. Without that contextualization, it would be easy to construct a misleading or even false historical narrative based on a selection of facts cherry-picked for that purpose. Further, no list of facts can purport to be exhaustive, so an explanation must be offered for deciding which facts to include or exclude—it cannot simply be a random selection.

Ludwig von Mises emphasized the importance of understanding history by reference to the motivations and actions of individual participants in that history, to understand why they acted as they did and what they hoped to achieve. In his book Theory and History, Mises calls this methodology “thymology,” which he defines as “the knowledge of human valuations and volitions.”

Thymology is on the one hand an offshoot of introspection and on the other a precipitate of historical experience. It is what everybody learns from intercourse with his fellows. It is what a man knows about the way in which people value different conditions, about their wishes and desires and their plans to realize these wishes and desires. It is the knowledge of the social environment in which a man lives and acts or, with historians, of a foreign milieu about which he has learned by studying special sources. If an epistemologist states that history has to be based on such knowledge as thymology, he simply expresses a truism.

One could, of course, argue that historical personalities made the wrong choices, or that they made unwise or stupid choices. But that is very different from arguing that since they turned out to be misguided this means they must have “lied” about their motivations. Mises criticizes the tendency to conflate mistakes with lies, by assuming that anyone who turns out to have erred must have been “prompted only by purposeful deceit.”

History is not merely a moral or judgmental exercise of ascertaining who was right or wrong, it is first and foremost an exercise in trying to ascertain what happened and why. For example, one would gain more insight into the politics of Mississippi in 1860 by studying the life of Jefferson Davis and the justifications he gave for his decisions than by counting the number of times the word “slavery” appears in the Mississippi secession declaration. Some liberal academics have advanced a similar idea which they call “lived experience”—the idea that someone who lives through an experience has a different and potentially more valuable insight into it than someone else just reading about it and quantifying specific words. But “lived experience” cannot be a substitute for reality, as some liberals have attempted to assert. The challenge lies in understanding the role thymology plays in studying history.

The importance of this point may be illustrated by a tribute to the Southern historian Frank Owsley, written by M.E. Bradford. Bradford observes that Owsley followed a historical tradition which “eschewed the mindless worship of facts qua facts.” Owsley exemplifies “histories informed by memories,” memories derived, as Bradford puts it, from “the hearts of individuals or particular communities of men linked together as one person by struggle, blood, and fortune.” This is not to say that a historian from outside a community cannot acquire a satisfactory understanding of that history. The point is that the memories of how that history unfolded add valuable insight and explanatory weight to historical facts. Memories serve as a valuable window into understanding the truth about the past, and have played a valuable role in what Bradford calls “the recovery of Southern history.” Bradford explains:

Owsley submitted to the experience of his nation as it was available to him in the sensibility and character of his fathers – presences, living and dead, who surrounded him in boyhood. By illustrating the similarity of vatic poet and the traditional historian, he lived into the world that produced him: penetrated the shape and feel of an earlier time, examined its dimensions, its active principle, its “taste and feel”, and then reproduced them all for his generation and those following.

In this context, the “taste and feel” for historical events allows a historian to discern whether a narrative, although it may well be constructed with correct facts, is founded on erroneous assumptions, or “unexamined myths,” that are unquestioningly perpetuated by establishment historians. Trying to fact-check such history, in the style favored by the “Grok, is this true?” brigade, would show the facts to be correct, and readers would, therefore, be none the wiser as to the faulty premises of the historical narrative. An example discussed by Owsley in his book Plain Folk of the Old South is the assumption of “the nonexistence of a large rural middle class in the old South…[the assumption] that there were only three important classes in the South – planters, Negro slaves, and poor whites.” Owsley does not aver that the distinction between planters and poor whites is factually incorrect. But he shows, based on historical research, that this assumption excludes an important class of “landowning farmers who belonged neither to the plantation economy nor to the destitute and frequently degraded poor-white class. They, and not the poor whites, comprised the bulk of the Southern population from the Revolution to the Civil War.” He explains that “the plain folk of the Old South” who were neither wealthy planters nor poor and helpless “have been so long relegated either to obscurity or to oblivion” that their omission from historical discourse becomes self-reinforcing—nobody writes about them because nobody writes about them. It is as if they did not exist. The causes of the war are then explained as if everyone was either an aristocratic slaveowner, a slave obeying orders, or a poor white man forced against his will to fight a rich man’s war. The narrative almost begs to be interpreted through the Marxian class conflict lens. Free black men—of whom there were more in the South than in the North—appear nowhere in this narrative.

The message to take from this critique of historical methodology is that in the quest to understand history, quantitative reports derived by counting the percentage of words in a document, or mere itemization of facts, cannot meaningfully override the contribution made by historians with memories of the time, as recorded in books, newspapers, journals, diaries, letters, stories, oral histories, and the like. The accounts of the war written by those who participated in it cannot be “debunked” by the quantitative and empirical methods of establishment historians with their pretensions to scientism. Further, it means that as wide a range of sources as possible should be studied in trying to understand history—not just peer-reviewed Neo-Marxist tomes published by credentialed historians who have proved themselves acceptable to the gatekeepers of the academy, but also that “component of memory” recounted by Southern writers. Only by a fuller and more comprehensive understanding of history can we avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. As Wilson argues,

History is the experience of human beings. History is a story and a story is somebody’s story. It tells us about who people are. History is not a political ideological slogan like “about slavery.” Ideological slogans are accusations and instruments of conflict and domination. Stories are instruments of understanding and peace.