Teleology and Presentism
(on Edward Gibbon, the end(s) of history and the confusion of now)
Over the new year’s break I found myself doing that wonderful thing: reading a book I had not intended to, just because it was there, on somebody else’s shelf, while we were visiting.
It was a rather charming old Penguin copy of extracts from Edward Gibbon’s late eighteenth-century master work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I’ve read bits go Gibbon here and there over the years. Since the entire field of Byzantine studies arose after he had written his magnum opus it has had to fight hard over the decades to break free from Gibbon’s rather unfair characterisation - that it was the Roman Empire in its state of decline and fall. As Byzantinist, it is therefore handy to have the occasional quote ready to show how very down on our empire of study Gibbon was.
Nevertheless, I certainly haven’t read all of Decline and Fall and was, in any case, interested in the idea of a selection based mainly on how beautifully written the chosen chunks were, rather than what they were about. And what a selection they were!
I laughed out loud. I spluttered on my coffee in horror. I winced at (and secretly loved) prose purple enough to dress an Ann Summers window. It just isn’t done to write like that these days, thank goodness, and yet there is something glorious about it.
I learned a lot, including about Gibbon. In particular:
He had some pretty serious issues about women: the ‘German’ women were better than Roman women because they were hardworking, modest and not interested in getting all dolled up. But, they were only that way because they lived in squalid villages in the woods so what else were they supposed to do? And in any case, masculinity and masculine virtues (like being hard-working and not getting too dolled up) look better on men so women exhibiting them will only be ugly copies. It isn’t totally clear to me whether Gibbon’s worldview included ‘a woman doing okay at being a good person’, or what that would have looked like to him.
He adored Julian I (often known as the Apostate), and in this respect has something in common with many historians since who have thought that this short-lived and, in his lifetime, widely mocked emperor was the dog’s conkers. That is probably a subject for another time because there is something intriguing about the romanticism that surrounds poor old Julian. I don’t get it, but as a scholar, I want to understand….
He hated Christianity.
What stood out to me most, though, was a comment in the introduction, to the effect that, in comparison with Gibbon, various illustrious nineteenth-century British historians seemed parochial. This was a bold statement for an editor writing when those scholars were still the Grand Old Men of the field.
The essence of his criticism was that those historians had a completely different relationship to the present than Gibbon. Specifically, they saw their job as being to explain how the past had become the present. Even more precisely, the historians in question understood history as being the story of how all history had been leading up to the establishment of British parliamentary democracy and global empire. Of course, it now seems absurd, triumphalist and yes, parochial, to view world history as a prequel to Victorian Britain.
Still, it didn’t necessarily seem too absurd to publish in 1992, when Francis Fukuyama attempted more or less the same thing in The End of History and the Last Man. The Great Goal had changed to US-inspired liberal democracy and the global economic system, but the argument was the same: everything that has happened up to now has, in some sense been leading to This. Historical events were ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on whether they seemed to lead more or less directly to This.
Fukuyama rowed back on his own claims a few years later when it became clear that the whole world was not, in fact, just one short step away from adopting the American Dream. There turned out to be more history yet to come. And tt seems likely that there will be future scholars, too, who see the past in terms of how it arrived at some specific This.
The term for this kind of thinking is teleology (telos, meaning goal or fixed destination, and -ology from the Greek logos, meaning word and, by extension, talking about, hence ‘talking about [history] leading up to a fixed destination’), and the one destination it invariably leads to is bad historical analysis.
What makes Gibbon different? He certainly had a whole heap of his present in his history. And, in fact, what makes any of us different? We all carry our own present into studying the past: what we are interested in, how we react to reading about it, what questions we ask when we write, are all shaped by the present. And for many scholars, present issues are central to why they study what they do.
All of these different links between the present and history get lumped under another term - presentism. Presentism, like teleology, can be a real problem. The difference is that it doesn’t have to be. It might be possible to write good teleological history (I’m a historian - I know that almost anything is possible!!) but I’ve never seen it, whereas, tonnes of really amazing history is presentist in various ways, including Gibbon.
Teleology involves holding up the present as the fixed point, the lens through which everything is viewed and the standard against which the past is judged. It usually assumes that the present was inevitable, but more importantly, it assumes that we actually understand the present. This is its fatal weakness because, if history tells us anything it is that there is no fixed point, no clearly comprehended moment from which to look backwards.
We do not understand the present. Often, as a historian, I read the news and find myself fascinated by the way that the evidence for right now compares with the evidence for centuries ago. (Conversely, it is always useful to remember that whenever we talk about any historical situation, we pretty much always know more than anybody in that situation did about what was going on in the world at the time, and sometimes even in that situation.)
And that is why the editor was right in his blunt comparison between Gibbon and historians writing a few decades later. Gibbon’s work is not evergreen (though students finding reprint copies of it online and not realising it was written over two hundred years ago can make it feel a bit ectoplasmic). He did, however, meet the past on its own terms as much as any of us can. He was equipped with the knowledge and attitudes of his own time but he didn’t ask how the Roman past had created that present.
Gibbon was interested in how similarities between the Roman Empire and his now could help predict future dangers. (Unsurprisingly, he worried that eighteenth-century Europe was going to come apart at the seams because of too much Christianity and effeminacy.) He undoubtedly saw some of his own personal bugbears and enthusiasms in the sources he encountered, but fundamentally his evaluation of how the Roman Empire worked didn’t hinge on whether or not future events played out the way he predicted.
By contrast, if your history is designed to show how everything led to a situation that then changes rapidly or turns out not to have been how you imagined it in the first place, it is more difficult to salvage the history from the prophecy. Oh, and it ages fast.