Sox Diary: (Or: Historicism is Dumb)

I am a historian. Which is why I think I am pretty well qualified to proclaim that history is largely irrelevant when it comes to this Red Sox-Yankees showdown. Everyone invokes ghosts and curses and especially the past, as if the past determines the future. If being a historian gives me any particular insight here, however, it is that history is most misused when people try to use it to predict the future, either short- or long-term. That is not to say that history does not tell us anything of course – trends matter, the past and present and future are inextricably bound, and I do think historians can have important things to say about the present using our perspective and insight and acumen. But it is to say that most people who talk about the Red Sox and their oft-tortured past misuse history as something that is somehow inevitable or predetermined, that history is a force independent of the variables that weigh upon it. This is, of course, nonsense.

I raise this today because, not surprisingly, in the quest to fill column inches for the insatiable Red Sox Nation, the hackneyed questions about the past came up today in the Globe and elsewhere. It happens every time the Sox make it this far. Bob Ryan or Dan Shaughnessy, or, today’s culprit, Bob Hohler, goes in and surveys the players who almost universally respond the same way: “History has nothing to do with if we win or lose. We were not here in (1986, 1978, etc.).” And so forth. Usually the reporter then paints the Sox players as cliché-spewing jocks. But the reality is that the question, the conceit, is the cliché. And when asked a clichéd, indeed stupid, question, athletes are inevitably going to respond with less-than-unique responses. The only serious alternative answer would be something along the lines of “Yes, Bob, we are burdened with a historic yoke here and we are likely to lose, probably in self-immolating fashion.” And what athlete would ever say something so foolish and self-defeating?

Again – history is not predetermined and there is no such thing as historical inevitability except in the narrowest sense – at a point things become inevitable only because they happen, but at some point most all historical events are avoidable, or more significantly, could play out in vastly different ways. To pretend otherwise is not to think historically, but rather in ways best categorized as historicist. Historicism believes that events are preordained. Historicism believes that history involves the inevitable. Historicism believes in the Curse of the Bambino. Historicism believes that 1918 determines 2004. Historicism is intellectually sloppy. Historicism is dumb.