catapult magazine

grant and i have been having an e-discussion about music and history, and various related topics that we thought might be interesting to some cino readers, so we decided to post the conversation here. Of course everyone is welcome to join in.

Grant, “hiding hides itself.” An ancient Greek proverb. Like anything else, music is elusive. Found only after much searching and not a little stumbling in the darkness. I hope you find it and ask it a few questions. Make the moment count because when music slips away into hiding again, you won’t find it in the same place next time. Hiding hides itself.

Just a little encouragement to continue the pursuit. The search has been penetrating so far.

Ok, so I was watching yet another history of the early church on PBS and this question came charging at me once again.

Now I know why this question keeps coming up for me. It starts in this question of how to explain the historical phenomenon of a religious movement, particularly Christianity. I feel that when historians try to explain the rise of Christianity, they always do it the wrong way. They focus on the socio-economic conditions. Now, I love to hear about socio-economic conditions and they are very helpful in understanding a particular time and place, but I feel like the best evidence for the rise of Christianity is the experience of faith itself. When one experiences the power of Christian faith, it is not all that mysterious—given the socio-economic conditions—that people were convicted by Christianity. Unfortunately, for many historians, the faith itself is the one aspect that is not allowed into their historical method. How can you truly understand or know something through and through unless you experience the same feelings? And even if you’re only trying to get to the cause of something, as the science of history does, I would think the experience of faith would have to be one of the key pieces of evidence!

So, this is what I’m thinking now. History’s job is to present us with the socio-economic conditions, to gather the archeological evidence etc. and tell the bare-bones story. It is the job of the artist, then, to penetrate where history cannot or refuses to go. Using the socio-economic data of the scientist, the artist will go the rest of the way with IMAGINATION. Because imagination seems too subjective or unreliable for any reputable scientist, historians can be excused as long as they give the artists full authority over what they themselves are exceptionally good at.

What do you think?

I sort of agree with you grant. yes, the artist can do things the historian can’t do, but the lines aren’t as fixed as you draw them. A socio-economic historian is only one kind of historian, and there are oodles of kinds. There are gender historians, feminist historians, historians of religion, of science, environmental historians, historical geographers, law historians, military historians, economic historians, social historians, cultural historians, agricultural historians, art historians…there’s no end to kinds. The PBS documentary you watched represents the views of probably a handful of historians who have a particularly socio-economic interest and lack the religious conviction you see as essential for knowing what was REALLY going on.

I would argue that to get at what was REALLY going on during the rise of Christianity you need a multiplicity of sources. You can’t take anybody’s word for what happened because everyone has an agenda. You take as many kinds of stories as you can from as many different sources as you can, and then what you end up with is a collection of short stories that all narrate the facts in different ways.

Then we need the artist to come in and give us a Run Lola Run version of the PBS documentary that includes several different versions of the same event, so that the authority of the dominant discourse is destabilized, and so that the voices of the historically marginalized and oppressed can be heard.

Part of why I initiated this conversation with you Dan is that I am not really on the scene of contemporary history-making, so I am grateful for your willingness to shoot back responses to my thinkingses.

When I say, what REALLY happened, it certainly would seem like I’m saying there’s one real story. And, maybe that’s an assumption I will never be able to shake. The Book of Revelation seems to suggest that if God is the beginning and the end, then the final interpretation of the story is God’s. God has the last say and what’s written in His book of life is the only story that will matter in the end. It seems that what Augustine did to Rome by taking their stories and reinterpreting their history from a Christian perspective is what Paul did by pointing out God through the Greek’s “unknown god” and what Jesus did by reinterpreting the Danielic prophecies for Hellenic Jews. This is what Christian historians ought to do, perhaps, just as feminist historians do their thing and Marxists do theirs.

That would make sense and it would be nice if everyone would respect each other’s story. The Christian historian, for example, might fail to pay much attention to the geographical and environmental factors that contributed to Christianity’s rise. Similarly, an atheist probably can’t imagine what it feels like to have religious zeal, so she’ll miss that part of the story. The Christian will see God’s hand, the cynic will see political and economic opportunism, the feminist will see patriarchy, the Marxist will see class struggle, the environmental historian will see sewage and erosion, the liberal sees human agency and desire for freedom, the determinist pictures man at the mercy of nature, the conservative sees the good-old-days, the nationalist sees nations as agents, and for the neo-colonialist the empire explains everything. Well that was was fun, and i could go on for ever with that, but my point is that none of them have a monopoly on truth.

Add to that that truth is elastic, evolving, and context dependent. What was true 50 years ago may not seem so true today. For example, what historians were writing 50 years ago is now mostly treated as irrellevant and outdated. Put all those factors together and you’ve got some good reasons why the historian should cultivate humility. Great musicians dont lose currency the same way.

If we go with this idea that different traditions of history-makers have their own specialty or areas of expertise, then what do we use to judge the validity or excellence of their work? Is that question irrelevant now?

Following such a model for music, we would say Madonna is as good as Bob Dylan is as good as Puddle of Mudd is as good as U2 is as good as DC Talk. They just have their own area of specialty. Britney Spears is a business that makes money. U2 is socially conscious. Bob Dylan spoke for the 60’s generation. Somehow, this just doesn’t work. There are varying degrees of excellence no matter how diverse the areas of expertise. What should be the standard used for all the different types of histories that are out there?

Who is the we that does the judging? And why should there be only one standard (for music or for history)?

I judge a history by asking a number of different kinds of questions:

-Does the story or argument make sense?
-Do people really behave the way they are described to behave?
-Are non-human elements in the story behaving in believable ways?
-Is it a good story? Well-written / well-told /well-sung (i wish)?
-Who benefits from this story and what were the motives of the author?
-Does the story square with what I know about the time period and subject in question?

I also listen to my gut. My gut tells me many good things which in then translate into arguments and questions. Isn’t that also the same way most people judge music? Non-musicians like me hear a song — I like it or I don’t like it, but I don’t know why. Then I try to put impute some logical reasons to what my gut told me. The more I know about something, the easier it is to translate my gut feelings into words.

I think it’s fine and good to look for a standard and then try to convince everyone to agree with it, but I think you’re bound to fail. People don’t behave very rationally nor do they make many judgements based on abstract principles.

Yes, I really like what you’re saying about the role of “the gut”. There definitely is a taste element in telling if something is a good history or not. And then there are those myths that keep coming up in different forms throughout the history of mankind. People just love the same types of stories, for some reason. I think we have to admit the role of others though in these judgments. When you publish a historical paper, it is deemed excellent by your peers who are doing their own research. If your research doesn’t gel enough with other people’s research on the topic, your paper might get discredited. My concern is that historical scientists become so removed from the experiences of faith that their agreement on excellence can be too limited and detached from the everyperson’s experiences (which is the stuff history is made out of). *

Hegel says that when we look with the spirit of Reason, we see only that which is reasonable. Since there is much about humankind that is irrational, what kind of looking shows us irrational humankind? Art seems to be able to capture this side of humanity very effectively. This is why you often see paradoxes and word play—a word with commonly understood meaning taking on a different meaning— in song lyrics, dense multivalent images in visual art, etc. Rather than just offering the one literal, historical meaning or point of a story, art opens up many more possibilities and those confusions definitely reflect the human experience.

incidentally, the idea that God is the final judge on the value of your work is what believers find so comforting. In fact, Bob Dylan said that the reason he messed with reporters so much in the sixties, telling them he came to New York on a boxcar train from Illinois and changing his birthdate etc., was because he believed they were not his judges, but God (Dylan calls God “The Commander” or “The General”) is his only judge. This belief also enabled Dylan to break out of the folk-hero prison people had put him in and to try his hand at rock’n’roll and then gospel music. Though God works through the judgments of others, people themselves are not the be-all and end-all of truth.

I agree that historians don’t have much control over what most people believe about the past. But I still disagree with your assertion that popular history just happens somehow without anyone doing anything. It’s true that popular perceptions of JFK’s assassination, for example, weren’t constructed primarily by academic historians. On the other hand I don’t think the event itself contained the eventual interpretation. The event as we know it today is the result of innumerable histories, urban legends, movies, images, and songs — along with how each of us experienced these words and images and sounds. It’s impossible to point out where all of our beliefs about this event come from, but behind each source is a human being (who wrote, sang, performed, created, etc). And one could say that behind each human being is God. So then God could be considered the author of history in the same way that God could be considered the author of the Bible. Does that work for you?

Also, I agree with the notion that peer review is not enough. It’s true that some historians, like many academics in other fields, have become unfamiliar with what it might be like to live a life outside the university. The best historical work, not surprisingly, often comes from people who know other disciplines and are in touch with what’s going on around them. Undergrads here at McGill, for example, are surprised to find that their prof for a course on gender relations in medieval Europe has a big poster of Xena hanging in her office. When I took a class with this particular prof, I illustrated my research paper on medieval transvestites with references from TV commercials and emails from members of my family, and still managed to get good grades. So while it’s true that some historians are dull and irrellevant, I think we may here be dealing with a straw man that you keep setting up and knocking down.

Yeah, I hate that straw guy. He always pisses me off! I do acknowledge that I’m not responding to real historians’ work, just certain ideas of history that seem inherent to an academic discipline born of scholasticism and modernism. I do wonder, though, if the kind of pop-culturizing that you mention with your Xena-loving prof represents a blurring of the lines between high and low culture that will eventually make academic history-making less and less relevant? Pop culture seems to be getting more and more relevant as time goes on and as new technologies develop. Oliver Stone’s depictions of historical events attest to the power of images and the strong influence of pop culture on how we remember and interpret past events. The internet changes the way information is distributed and is considered valid. The printed word seems to be slowly giving way to more of a focus on image and auditory communication (the continual rise in popularity and sheer potential of film documentaries, the expanding possibilities of podcasting etc.).

I’m excited by this mix that’s happening! Contemporary history-making is, for the most part, not the straw-man I’m trying to flay. But I’d rather see these changes open up onto a better way of thinking about truth and excellence than the ways of Modernism (a narrow rationalistic truth) or Postmodernism (truth? Why talk about truth?). The way I’m suggesting, of course, is spiritual discernment, which includes both reasoning and feeling, an act of the total person which acknowledges the religious character of all human activity. As things are, I don’t think contemporary academic history-making takes human religious experience fully into account. And I don’t think it can leave that up to the artists. If academic historians are going to claim their story is a truthful one, they have to take that common human experience into account, not by psychologizing it (bringing it into a rationalistic scheme), but accepting it as it is and making room for it in its own method.