In Praise of Prejudice. Theodore Dalrymple

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       History Teaches Us Anything We Like

      THE SLIGHTEST ACQUAINTANCE with history should be more than sufficient to persuade anyone that custom, law, and the wisdom of ages have often been oppressive and worse than oppressive. There is nothing quite so easy to abuse as authority, and the inclination to do so is present, if not in all, then in most human hearts. That is precisely why we do not trust dictators even when—or especially if—they achieved power by rebellion against another established dictatorial order. If it hadn’t been for the photograph taken by the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda, Ernesto Guevara would have been recognized by now as the arrogant, adolescent, power-hungry egotist that he undoubtedly was.

      A certain historiography persuades us that the wisdom of the past is always an illusion, and that the history of authority is nothing but the history of its abuse. It is not difficult to construct such a history, of course, for there is a lamentable surfeit of evidence in its favor. In a recent book entitled Menace in Europe, for example, the talented American journalist Claire Berlinski tells us that war and genocide are not part of the history of Europe, but constitute the whole of its history. She arrives at this conclusion by looking at European history through the lens of the Holocaust and a list of wars that fills an entire page of print. (Was it not the great Gibbon himself who said, without his accustomed irony, that history was but the record of the follies and crimes of mankind?) Miss Berlinski’s is an example of what might be called the nothing-but school of historiography, by means of which a narrative is constricted from highly selected facts in order to verify a key to the understanding of everything. (Here is a baleful example of the operation of a preconceived idea.) A present discontent is read backwards, or traced by a golden thread, through the whole of history, and made to supply that history with an immanent meaning and teleology.

      The golden thread could just as easily be that of something positive as negative, of course. In his great history of England, Macaulay wrote:

      the history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, moral and intellectual improvement. And this is the way the history of medicine, for example, used to be written, principally by doctors in their retirement, as a form of ancestor-worship (no doubt in the hope that they, too, would become ancestors worthy of worship). In this version, the history of medicine was that of the smooth and triumphant ascent of knowledge and technique, to our current state of unprecedented enlightenment. But then the social historians gained control of the field, and the history of medicine became that of a self-perpetuating male elite whose main interest was in increasing its social status and income, since it is clear that for centuries it possessed no knowledge or skill that could have helped its patients, rather the reverse, and that distinguished it, in point of effectiveness, from the quacks against whom it relentlessly and ruthlessly struggled, but whom it occasionally co-opted.

      If the Whig interpretation of history is plausible or applicable anywhere, it is in the history of medicine. The fact of progress, as Macaulay called it, is scarcely deniable: no one, I think, would choose pre-anesthetic, pre-aseptic methods of surgery—to take but one obvious example—for himself. Moreover, the alternative historiography of medicine would have to account for that progress: how was it that an unscrupulous group of men, concerned mainly for their status and income, did, as a matter of fact, bring about such dramatic progress? Since the fact adduced by the social historians in advance of their historiography genuinely are facts, and not artifacts, and likewise the facts adduced by the Whig historians of medicine, the best way to resolve the discrepancy between the two schools is by reference to Ranke’s famous remark—often taken as absurdly naïve from the philosophical point of view—that history is what happened, which is to say all of what happened. But a map of the world that reproduced all the details of the world, in the same size and proportion as the world itself, would not be a map of the world, but a parallel model or reproduction of the world. Some selection is therefore always necessary which, unless it be entirely at random, thus rendering it theoretically incomprehensible and practically useless, itself requires an underlying principle, or at least broad outlook.

      The Whig historians of medicine choose their facts for one purpose—if not self-glorification, then at least self-congratulation—the social historians for another, namely denigration, or at least deflation. At the very time Macaulay was writing his history, Engels was writing his Condition of the Working Class in England. How were such very different views of the same object possible by men of intelligence, learning, and talent?

      Perhaps the answer can best be appreciated in our response to the tremendous current economic growth in India and China. Some see this only as progress: the emergence of hundreds of millions of people from poverty into the sunny uplands of consumption. Others see in it only a polluted environment and the destruction of ancient ways of life, in favor of a homogenized, inauthentic, superficial, universal lifestyle, with increasing disparities of wealth and poverty into the bargain.

      Facts alone (à la Gradgrind) cannot compel the framework into which they are fitted, though they may encourage the more intellectually honest of us to reconsider our framework. Inconvenient facts usually spur us to heroic efforts of rationalization to preserve our outlook, rather than to honest re-examination; in medical practice I have been struck by the capacity of even intellectually ungifted people to manufacture an infinitude of rationalizations almost instantaneously in defense of a course of action upon which they have already decided, in spite of the abundant evidence that it will be disastrous. When a doctor proposes an eminently sensible course of action to a patient, based upon the most compelling evidence, and the patient replies, “Yes, but. . . ,” the doctor might as well give up there and then, for however many rejoinders he may make to the patient’s irrational objections, he will never prevail by reaching the end of the infinite regress. Of course, such stubbornness is not at the root only of much human folly; it is at the root of much, perhaps most, human wisdom, too.