Issue Essay 2
"When we concern ourselves with the study of history, we become storytellers. Because we can never know the past directly but must construct it by interpreting evidence, exploring history is more of a creative enterprise than it is an objective pursuit. All historians are storytellers."
History is a study of the past. It is primarily, though not limited to, a study of human civilisation and progress over the centuries preceding ours. It involves analysis of evidence to gauge the changes that have occured with human evolvement and development.
The need for historical surveys and analyses is a moot one. Historians exist and operate to satisfy mainly two needs - one being sheer human interest and curiosity in the way our forefathers survived in their time, and the environment and atmosphere (both physical and intellectual) that existed in their time; the other being a need to identify how people have evolved to reach the socio-economic world that we exist in today.
History can be managed in only one inherently simple way - through the processes of analysis and reconstruction. Analysis is the process of collecting and collating data on previous existences through research and physical exploration of expected zones of past civilizations; reconstruction is the method of objectively analysing this collected information to recreate past existences and beliefs.
Clearly, there is no scope for "storytelling" here - all concrete historical conclusions can, and are, made only from facts. Where facts cannot satisfactorily explain situations, the concept of theories (or unproven but expected ideas) are used - the boundary between theory and fact is always clearly demarcated.
Theorizing is different from storytelling. Storytelling is a creative art; it is, to put it succintly, it is "a collection of bald-faced lies". Stories are inherently fallacies - they assume prior knowledge that the author is creating his or her own version of the truth, and is not trying to, as the cliched phrase goes, "change history to suit his own needs". History is a science; historians use tried and tested objective methods to reconstruct the past - at no level can it be considered unsubstantiated or arbitrary.
Let us assume that there are two people with a decision to make - they are given a number of facts. They are given a situation that must be explained with these facts; but sadly, the facts cannot *wholly* explain the situation. What is their decision? One of them, the carefree one, can take the easier path and fill the holes with creative and baseless verbiage. The other is, by definition, The Historian. He must use the facts, and only the facts, to explain the given situation. The parts that cannot be explained must be clearly indicated as being so; the historian must now fill these gaps by utilising only the best and choicest conclusions that can be made *from the given facts*. If certain issues cannot be explained competently, it must be accepted as being part of the price of objectiveness - the incapacity to completely explain something with a limited amount of information. Though the first person may generate literature more pleasing to the eye, it is a fact that the historian's version must be the more accurate, and thus far more relevant one.
Of course, like in all debates on issue, there is another side to the argument. The given division between the art of storytelling and the science of theorizing lies in the problem of how one can explain those parts that cannot be explained by extrapolating facts in historical analysis methods - the "gaps", as it were, in explanations of history.
Since the Industrial Revolution in Europe in the 1660s, when printed literature started becoming common; since the Media Revolution of this century, where real events, people and things have been recorded "live" on visual and audio equipment for posterity; and most importantly, since the birth of the ubiquitous and all-encompassing Internet of the world, the need for theorizing has almost been eliminated. There is so much literature present describing every event in history in minute detail from all possible perspectives, that there remain no "gaps" to be covered - historians have now been reduced to the roles of mere accountants, though ones of a different nature. They now can only assemble facts together and state them as they are; they cannot theorize, they cannot tell stories.
Given their reduced role with the burgeoning of the Information Revolution in today's times, there can be but one future for the given issue - its gradual movement into obscurity, where historians play no part greater than that of collection and reorganization of facts.