The fog of historiography

The 11 September issue of World arrived in my post office box this afternoon. When I checked the mail this evening, I placed the magazine in my bookbag and continued to take care of my duties around campus. Eventually I found my way back to my apartment, finished several other reading assignments, and took a gander at the periodical.

I quickly found myself at the end of the issue, where Andree Seu has a column. I started reading the article. I tossed it to three friends and watched their faces as they read it in turn.

Seu writes in criticism of a Philadelphia Inquirer column by Christ Satullo (22 August). According to Seu, the offending article is a challenge to history itself.

And if you happened to be merely skimming the editorial over café au lait, you didn't notice that the fella just declared history dead. There is no truth. There is no history. There is only your truth. There is only your history.

If Mr. Satullo believes what he is saying he should retire his byline immediately and take a job house painting, because every week his column grapples with the stuff of history as if it were a meaningful line of employment.

A strong reaction, I thought, from Seu. I wanted to see for myself what this history-killer had to say. A quick search led me to an online copy of Satullo's column (it seems that registration is required for direct access). Seu quotes only part of Satullo's article; I shall quote more extensively. Here's the first section of the article, the section that drew Seu's attention:

John Kerry is not telling the complete truth about the incidents in Vietnam that earned him military medals.

Neither is the group calling itself the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which has produced television ads and a book claiming that Kerry exaggerated his actions to snare the medals.

No one is telling the precise, complete truth.

No one is because no one can. It is not possible.

Call it the Rashomon Effect. In the classic Japanese film, Rashomon, the story of a killing is retold by four eyewitnesses, including the victim. Each account varies widely; none is obviously the "whole truth."*

The Rashomon Effect: No one person, even an eyewitness, owns the truth to an event. The most any historian can do is piece together a passable mosaic from the fragments of fact that different people offer.

Memory is slippery. Any event passes through a subjective filter before lodging in an individual memory. The person standing here saw things that the person standing there could not. Each person undergoes emotions during and after an event that color memory.

A pile of research into eyewitness accounts of crimes in the last decade has confirmed what any police officer or reporter who interviews people after an event has long known:

Eyewitnesses are unreliable.

This is true five minutes after a fender bender at a city intersection.

So, how much more unreliable must be memories of events that occurred in the fog of war 35 years ago and are now being dredged up to influence an impassioned, momentous election?

I would call that a bit of an overstatement on Satullo's part. It is hardly a challenge to history, though. Satullo says nothing that threatens belief in the existence in objective historical truth; he is saying rather than individual reports are subjective and always fall short of the truth. To which I say, "duh."

Had Satullo's article ended there, though, I would have called it sophistry — not because the observation is incorrect but because it tells us nothing new about this particular controversy. The controversy concerns whose version of events is most accurate, and in particular whether Kerry has lied about his own perception of events.

But Satullo's column does not end there, a fact Seu seems not to have noticed. Here's what happens when Satullo starts talking about the evidence in the case and the authority of its various witnesses:

I don't doubt that John Kerry has over time gilded his memory of what he did in Vietnam. (His faulty "Christmas in Cambodia" memory is an example.) In doing that, he would be only human. I'd happily grant his critics the point that, being an ambitious young man in 1969, he might have been more avid than others to collect medals, knowing their value as political currency.

But in this showdown with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the weight of evidence is solidly with the senator. First off, Navy records support him, contradict them. Second, the men who were on Kerry's Swift boat during the combat incidents that earned him his Bronze Star and Silver Star concur with his accounts. Jim Rassmann says bullets were whizzing about when Kerry saved his life by pulling him out of the water. Other Kerry crew members say they have no doubt he saved their lives by running down and killing a Viet Cong wielding a rocket launcher. Eyewitness research also indicates that personal danger heightens perception and bolsters memory.

What is Seu's response to this observation on documentary evidence and the ability of different witnesses to tell the truth? It is a sarcastic straw man and an ad hominem fallacy in one breath:

It's Kerry's truth, OK? Leave him alone! Hey, you gonna criticize a man's truth? (I wonder if Mr. Satullo would have opted for a less subjectivistic and more absolutist view of history if it had been George W. Bush on the PCF-94.)

I find that characterization ridiculous. Satullo began by observing that memory is subjective, and went on to offer an opinion on whose memories are most likely to be accurate (corresponding to objective historical events). How is that "subjectivistic"?

Memo to my fellow evangelicals: You don't have to smell a postmodern plot everywhere.

* Seu spends two paragraphs on Satullo's reference to Rashomon, arguing that Satullo misconstrues the film. I have not addressed this aspect of Seu's criticism because I do not think it relevant. Contrary to what Seu writes, Satullo did not cite the film to "prove" his point, but merely to illustrate it.

| Posted by Wilson at 22:50 Central | TrackBack
| Report submitted to the Humanities Desk