two quotations on historicizing

What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do? – The Atlantic:

But as a historian trying to comprehend feelings, [Rob] Boddice can’t stand those cute Inside Out characters. Because not only do we imagine other people to have the exact same set of emotions that we have, but we project this thought backwards through time. Love for us can’t be that different from what it meant to Heloise and Abelard writing letters to each other in the 12th century. The laborers who hauled stones to build the pyramids in Giza felt anger that is our anger. We perform this projection on any number of human experiences: losing a child, falling ill, being bored at work. We assume that emotions in the past are accessible because we assume that at their core, people in the past were just like us, with slight tweaks for their choice of hats and standards of personal hygiene.

Boddice starts with the opposite premise, that we are not the same — that the experience of being human in another era, with all of its component feelings and perceptions, even including something as elemental as pain, is so foreign to us as to live inside a kind of sealed vault. “There is nothing about my humanness that affords me insight into humanity,” Boddice has said.

Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love, at a moment when A. E. Housman as an old, in fact a dead, man (AEH) is meeting his 20-year-old self (Housman):

AEH There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don’t like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical with ours.

Housman But it is, isn’t it? We catch our breath at the places where the breath was always caught. The poet writes to his mistress how she’s killed his love — ‘fallen like a flower at the field’s edge where the plough touched it and passed on by’. He answers a friend’s letter — ‘so you won’t think your letter got forgotten like a lover’s apple forgotten in a good girl’s lap till she jumps up for her mother and spills it to the floor blushing crimson over her sorry face’. Two thousand years in the tick of a clock — oh, forgive me, I …

AEH No (need), we’re never too old to learn.

Gal Beckerman, the author of the Atlantic article on Boddice, treats his claims as revolutionary new ones. In fact, they were the reigning orthodoxy when I was in graduate school forty years ago. We were all reading Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, with its instantly famous opening sentence: “Always historicize!” We got busy historicizing the crap out of everything, and were duly scornful of the very idea that one should — or even, if one’s mind was properly formed, could — be moved by the works of ancient and medieval literature that we read, as though those people were “like us.” Such thoughts were deemed ahistorical.

(People who had read Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind — I knew quite a few — had further means of historicizing. That was a niche view, but interesting; maybe a topic for a future post.)

Only gradually did it occur to me to ask why, if the past is an utterly foreign country, we laugh at the places in Shakespeare that were obviously meant to be funny, and cry when the characters on stage were crying — even yes, even cry when reading something as ancient as the Iliad, for instance when Hector tells his beloved wife Andromache that what grieves him the most about this terrible war is the certainty that someday he, being dead, will be unable to rescue her from enslavement.

Absolute historicizing cannot survive the experience of reading. Lament that if you wish.

Boddice’s view that the past can teach me nothing about my humanity is of course ruled out for me by my Christianity, but it’s worth noting that it is equally ruled out by evolutionary accounts of human experience ands behavior.

One more thing. Beckerman writes,

The universalism that Boddice mistrusts is a relatively new concept in human history. It comes to us from the Enlightenment. The presumption that all people share a common nature was dreamed up by European intellectuals sitting in their salons.

This is nonsense on stilts. It is a character in a play by the Roman dramatist Terrence who says Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. The ancient Israelites believed that “man” (adam) was created in the image of God, and the apostle Paul says that “all” — which is to say, all human beings: he’s not talking about pigs and lice — “have sinned and fallen short off the glory of God.” Later, Christian theologians in particular, working from Genesis 10, would argue that the three sons of Noah populated different regions of the world: Shem in Asia, Ham in Africa, Japhet in Europe. These understandings of humanity — these modes of humanism — underline the emergence of the individual person as the subject of laws and the bearer of rights, as Larry Siedentop has patiently and thoroughly demonstrated.

(This is not, of course, to say that the concept of the human is always and everywhere precisely the same, and it is certainly not to say that claims of universal humanity led to the acknowledgment of universal equality. They did not. For much more on these fascinating matters, see Jonathan Z. Smith’s 1996 essay, “Nothing Human Is Alien to Me.”)

Moreover, if the passage of time so radically distinguishes us from other members of our species, does not space do the same? Maybe we have nothing in common with people from other cultures either. Slaveowners in the antebellum South told themselves that it was acceptable to separate slaves’ children from their parents because “they” — the children of Ham — don’t feel it as “we” — the children of Japhet — do. The mistrust of universalism always has a demonic side, and many of the Extremely Online, on the left and right alike, are making careers out of the rejection of universalism. We don’t need any more manufactured Otherness. There’s already plenty to go around.

By all means historicize, but strive also to know the limits of historicizing. You’re never too old to learn.