History is a Science

I’m currently reading a book called “The Evolution of Civilizations” by Carroll Quigley, a very famous historian who was a consultant for many U.S. government institutions. I’m nowhere near finished yet, and will not be for a little while. I’m not in school so there’s no need for marathon reading, I want to digest every piece. This book is not so much a chronology of civilizations but a book on historical method. What I’ve read so far struck me as so pertinent and succinct that I decided I had to blog about it before I was finished.

Quigley begins with the idea that history can and should be a discipline which uses scientific method. He laments that too often sociological fields are ruled by prejudice and ideology and thus are not considered sciences. He writes this in 1961, however, it is still true today. No one looks at history as a science, yet somehow whatever the history books say become truth. The scientific method is very simple. You make observations. You make a hypothesis and you test the hypothesis. Why can’t historians use this method as well? Some historians, of course, do–but unfortunately, the ones who write most history books do not. We are bombarded by assumptions on all sides. Quigley stresses that all hypotheses stay hypotheses because they will constantly be under the scrutiny of our growing knowledge. If only historians kept this in mind rather than jumping to conclusions because of cultural assumptions.

Connected to this treatment of history as a science is the function of culture. Human culture is the cushion between people and their natural environment. It is obviously made up of interactions between people, their material objects, and their environment. The reason history can be so difficult to pin down is because the facts regarding culture are numerous, yet we can’t really run a controlled experiment. However, this very subjective nature of history and culture is exactly what makes it so influential. Economies and wars are based on these subjective cultural elements and that’s why it’s so important to study the various causes and effects, however complicated they may be.

I leave you with a quote, “The human brain alone, as a kind of central switchboard, has millions of neural connections…The way in which these are connected up, or even the fact that they come to be connected up at all, depends on what happens to the child, how he is trained, and how he grows…Indeed, we might assume that everyone, at birth…has the potentiality for being aggressive or submissive, selfish or generous, cowardly or brave, masculine or feminine…and so forth, and that which of these potential qualities becomes actual…depends, very largely, on the way in which each person is trained or on the experiences he encounters growing up. The fact that there are societies or tribes in which almost everyone is aggressive…and that there are other closely related tribes in which almost everyone is submissive…and the fact that infants, taken from one such tribe and reared in the other, grow up to have in full measure the typical characteristics of their adopted tribe would seem to indicate both that all such people are potentially about the same at conception and that their personalities are largely a consequence of the way in which they are reared. If this is so, it is clear that the way in which people are brought up is very important….Thus there appear in any society certain patterns of action, of belief, and of thought that are passed on from generation to generation…” (pp 50-51) 

Of course, when Quigley wrote this, many discoveries regarding the influence of human genes had not yet been made. However, even genes do not change the fact that human society is extraordinarily influential on the human personality. We definitely cannot forget this element as we collect facts and observations.