The Pastness of the Past, or the Past in the Present?

Among my professional responsibilities is teaching a methods course for aspiring secondary history teachers.  I customarily use the opening weeks of each semester to engage my students with open-ended, abstract questions, including “What is history?” and “Why study history?” believing that unless my students can answer these questions for themselves, they cannot help others – especially their own students – answer them.  To that end, I assign particular theoretical pieces for my students to read, helping them formulate their own responses to these abstract questions.  In preparing this semester’s syllabus, I was surprised to discover that this month marks the 80^th anniversary of the publication of a piece that has had a great influenced my own thinking about these questions.

Charles Beard’s essay, “Written History as an Act of Faith” appeared in the American Historical Review in January 1934.  Granted, this was the published version of his Presidential Address to the American Historical Association from the year before, but it is highly unlikely that any of today’s practicing historians heard that original speech, and so I choose to mark the anniversary of the essay's publication (AHR, 39:2, pp. 219-231.)  Despite the milestone, it seems that the 80^th anniversary of the publication of “Written History as an Act of Faith” seems to have passed with little fanfare.  That is too bad given the essay’s importance, which rests not only in Beard’s observations about the nature of history for the professional historian, but also for the layperson.  Beard successfully demystifies history to some degree and in so doing makes the discipline accessible to more than trained academics.

Charles A. Beard
(Image from Wikipedia)

In his essay, Beard argues for, “History as past actually [which] includes, to be sure, all that has been done, said, felt, and thought by human beings on this planet since humanity began its long career.”  Beard deconstructs that totality of the past first as “record…the monuments, documents, and symbols which provide such knowledge as we have or can find respecting past actuality,” and then “history as thought…thought about past actuality instructed and delimited by history as record and knowledge.”

In understanding the relationship between record and thought, Beard argues for three broad conceptions of history.  “The first is that history as total actuality is chaos,” Beard writes, suggesting further that people may not be able to understand or interpret that chaos, either objectively or subjectively.  “The second is that history as actually is part of some order of nature and revolves in cycles eternally,” such as the season of the year, election cycles, or similar rotating occurrences.  “The third is that history as actually is moving in some direction away from the low level of primitive beginnings, on an upward gradient toward a more ideal order...”

Beard qualifies each of these constructions, writing:

“The hypothesis of chaos admits of no ordering at all; hence those who operate under it cannot write history, although they may comment on history [original emphasis].  The second admits of an ordering of events only by arbitrarily leaving out of account all contradictions in evidence.  The third admits of an ordering of events, also by leaving contradictions out of consideration.  The historian who writes history, therefore, consciously or unconsciously performs an act of faith, as to order and movement, for certainty as to order and movement is denied to him by knowledge of the actuality with which he is concerned.… His faith is at bottom a conviction that something true can be known about the movement of history and his conviction is a subjective decision, not purely objective discovery.”

For Beard, then, “any selection and arrangement of facts pertaining to any large area of history…is controlled inexorably by the frame of reference in the mind of the selector and arranger,” or as he had stated earlier in his essay, “any written history inevitably reflects the thought of the author in his time and cultural setting.”

Such an assertion has led critics to accuse Beard of being a relativist.  I think this is an unfair characterization.  To demonstrate this point for my students, I use the example of U.S. history textbooks.  One could chart the development of such tome though their treatment of blacks, Hispanics, women, or other historically marginalized groups within their pages.  Clearly such texts provide evidence of how written history is informed by its authors' cultural times and settings.  (Two worthwhile defenses against charges of Beard as a relativist that I encountered recently are Jack W. Meiland’s “The Historical Relativism of Charles A. Beard,” History and Theory, 12:4 [1974], pp. 405-413; and Ellen Nore’s “Charles A. Beard’s Act of Faith: Context and Content,” Journal of American History, 66:4 [March 1980], pp. 850-866.)

For as much as I appreciate “Written History as an Act of Faith,” I am embarrassed to admit that I did not encounter Beard’s essay until my first semester of graduate school, in the Fall of 2001.  Such an admission suggests that I had graduated from Loyola with a history major and had been teaching high school history devoid of this fundamental understanding of the nature of history.  I have a better understanding now, however; and while I cannot change the past, I can use it to better inform the present for my students and their students yet to come.

We Are All Like Pope Francis

The term Latino is a social construction, a pan-ethnic identity that puts under one umbrella several more specific identities. While, the idea of Latino exists outside the United States now, it is still an American creation, and as we have written before, it is a creation that even people of Latin American descent in the United States don’t really embrace. If you ask a “Latino” in the U.S. who has origins in Mexico, what ethnicity she is, the odds are that she will say, “Mexican.” This is not an opinion, but a finding that is backed up by large-scale national research. I would assume that if you asked someone born and raised in Mexico who currently lives there what their ethnicity was, the likelihood of saying, “Mexican,” would go up even higher. It is not true 100% of the time as we can always find exceptions, but most people in the U.S. who have roots in Latin American will use their country of origin as their ethnic identity; most people in their country, also probably think of themselves in terms of their nationality (i.e., Mexicans in Mexico, Guatemalans in Guatemala, etc.)

Latino represents something of a compromise. When Cubans or Puerto Ricans stand as separate groups, they have a more cohesive collective cultural identity, but they lose numbers and power. Banding together allows them to share slightly less, but wield more influence.  Compromises are often about politics and power.

Dr. Alvarez’s post about the new pope focuses on the issue of identity, showing that from a cultural perspective, it is not a real clear case that the new pope is Latino, if at all. His parents were European, Italians who immigrated to Argentina, and he never lived in a multicultural Latino community like the United States where a label of Latino makes more sense.

But with regards to power and influence, compromises are sometimes made and the newly named Pope Francis is a compromise all around. First, he is a Jesuit, an order which itself has a complicated history with the church leadership in Rome. On the one hand, they have been called the church’s “elite troops” because of their role as missionaries, their direct work with the poor, and their commitment to education. On the other, they have been subject to suppression from Rome for activities that are not in line with the doctrines of the church. As recently as seventies, Pope John Paul II struggled with the Jesuits who advocated a liberation theology that sought to give voice and power to the poor, with movements throughout Latin America. Jesuits spoke truth to power and corruption in Latin American governments and in some cases paid for it with their freedom and lives. The then Jorge Bergoglio was the leader of the Jesuits in Buenos Aires when several Jesuit priests were imprisoned for speaking out against the government. It is unclear whether Bergoglio could have done more to protect the priests of his order, but his moderation in dealing with their imprisonment is indicative of his style. Aside from being a moderate Jesuit, almost an oxymoron, he also has ties to Europe and Latin America. For a church that has already shifted to the global south, Latin American and Africa, for its member base, many saw it as an imperative that the new pope would represent this geographical area; again, we see a compromise. While Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in Argentina, his parents are Italian-born, allowing Rome to claim ties to his papacy just as Latin America does. Pope Francisco also splits the difference in terms of his theology. He is noted as being humble and committed to the poor, eschewing the extravagance of Rome, living in a small apartment, cooking for himself, and taking the bus; he does this while also holding the conservative line on issues such as gay marriage, the celibacy of priests, and abortion.

Father Michael Garanzini, the current Jesuit leader of the country’s largest Jesuit University, Loyola University Chicago, where both Dr. Alvarez and I attended for undergraduate studies, has noted Pope Francis’s history of moderation. He says that we probably should not expect great changes, but that his selection itself is in fact a great change that relates to many.

Because many people feel that they can claim a connection to Pope Francis, conservative and liberal, Europe and the Americas, and notably Latinos, why would we deny this sense of empowerment? So, perhaps we can decry his moderation as being too conservative, or we can say he is not us, that he is not authentically [insert identity here], but by opening the door to other groups, even a crack, perhaps a new light will shine through.