Narrative Structure and Moral Accountability ...
A specialist in evolutionary philosophy, Richards said he had been concerned with the nature of moral judgment for some time. He explained that he was led to the specific topic of evolution and Nazism after reading several historians' accounts of the connection between evolutionary theory and Nazi war crimes.Richards is addressing some issues that are elemental in all our work as historians, it seems to me, though we may not reflect on them sufficiently in the work-a-day particularity of our subjects. Does narrative have an implicit structure of moral accountability? If so, how much latitude does the historian have in arraying the narrative? If we understand ourselves to be historical figures, what does that imply for holding earlier historical figures accountable? What might we be held accountable for that may not be on our self-conscious horizon and are we responsible, even if we don't see it?"In reading their accounts, they claimed to be offering an objective, value-free assessment of the history of Darwinism, yet seemed implicitly to be making moral judgments," Richards said."Their accounts made [Charles] Darwin and [Ernst] Haeckel complicit in the crimes of the Nazis, though both had been dead for decades before the rise of the Nazis."
Moral judgment in historical writing, Richards claimed, is unavoidable because of the deep grammar of narrative history.
Richards began his argument discussing how time is represented in narrative histories, emphasizing a particular concern of his, which he termed"time of narrative construction."
Citing Thucydides' The History of the Peloponnesian War, Richards argued that in constructing an explanation of the Spartan victory, Thucydides had the benefit of hindsight, which afforded him the opportunity to choose antecedent events"that would be epistemologically tinged with Athenian folly yet to come.
"The historian, by reason of his or her temporal horizon, arranges antecedent events to make their outcome, the central event of interest, something the reader can expect," Richards said."In the ideal case, it is something that would be regarded as inevitable given the antecedent events, all the while keeping his actors in the dark until the last minute."
Such a narration, according to Richards, has a different causal logic from events in nature. The historian's moral assessments, he argued, are based on the different causal logic of narrative history.
According to Richards, there are two primary ways that a historian assigns moral characterization to an actor in history."First, we do think that when we morally evaluate an action, we assume the individual could have chosen otherwise," he said."There will thus be a tension between the actors represented as regarding the future as open, as full of possibilities, and the historian's knowledge that the future is really closed."
Moral assessment is assigned, secondly, in the historian's construction of the sequence of events that explain a resulting consequence."The historian will also be making a moral evaluation of the actions of characters—implicitly at least—and will arrange that sequence in which the character's actions are placed so as either morally to indict the individual, or morally to exculpate the individual, or, what is more frequently the case, to locate the individual's action in a morally neutral ground," Richards explained.
Richards elaborated on his claim that historians must make moral judgments in their narrations by discussing the"moral structure of narrative grammar," noting that virtually every descriptive term employed by historians is normative. The historian, Richards claimed, must employ norms governing intentional behavior, in a moral context, in order to assign motives and intentions to individuals whose actions affect others.
Turning his attention to Haeckel, Richards evaluated popular history's moral assessment of the German biologist and champion of Darwinism. In particular, Richards focused on Haeckel's assumption of progress in evolution, which led him to postulate a correlation between race and advancement. Richards recanted Haeckel's infamous illustration of this theory, which proposed certain peoples to be superior to"lower species" of humans.* Haeckel's classification has led some historians to include him among the ranks of the proto-Nazis.
While Richards maintained that the moral judgments are unavoidable in narrative history, he did offer his audiences several principles to govern these moral judgments. First, he said, there is"the supreme principle of assessment," which should evaluate all actions with the same moral core. Other principles included understanding the intention and beliefs of the actor, and the actor's motive for acting.
Based on these principles, Richards concluded that it could only be"tendentious" and"dogmatic" to condemn Darwin for Nazism, although Richards confessed that he still has not made up his mind on Haeckel.
On another level, I wonder if Richards's intellectual history is not too isolated from social and political history. I can imagine that without Darwin there would be no Haeckel, but still believe that there would have been a National Socialism had there been no Darwin, Haeckel, Nietzsche, or Wagner. And, while the question of accountability may seem to weigh obviously with National Socialism, wouldn't it weigh just as obviously with Marxist Socialism and its train of dreamers? Do we hold Karl Marx not responsible for Soviet and Chinese horrors, as Richards holds Darwin not responsible for Nazism?
David McCullough puts some of these issues in an American context in his lecture"Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are." There's nothing explicitly wrong with McCullough's lecture and much that is right about it, but I find it less provocative than Robert Richards's lecture at Chicago. We, in the United States, were fortunate to be remote from the horrors of mid-twentieth century central Europe and the Soviet Union and China. We are fortunate to be remote from the horrors of much of Africa even into our own time. But how can our most popular contemporary American historian urge an historical consciousness on contemporary American college students without any mention of slavery? Maybe that's one reason McCullough is so popular.
* I suspect that Ahmed misuses the word"recanted" here and that he meant something like"recalled."