Morality and History

Novice students of history are often particularly tempted to inject a healthy dose of morality into their arguments. This is very understandable given the large number of horrific events in the past. Today as in the past, people can be extraordinarily cruel to each other, both as individuals and as groups, and it is absolutely true that history provides us with some important moral lessons. Statements about the particular cruelty, immorality, or injustice of an individual, a policy, a social structure or an economic state are not out of place in historical essays. But when students concentrate on moral questions as the focus of their essays, they inevitably neglect the much more pressing task of historical explanation. Your job is to put a given event, no matter how horrific, in its historical context -- to explain how it could have happened. Doing this often requires a degree of objectivity that might at first seem amoral to you. In the end, though, uncovering the dynamics of historical change and human interaction in given historical circumstances is a better way of getting at moral truth than simply stating the immorality of a given event. As an example, I will dissect a sentence from an actual undergraduate paper on the Holocaust.

"If the Germans had only been decent, caring human beings, 6 million people would still be alive."

Aside from the obvious quibble that the majority of them would have died of old age by now, the sentence is flawed and out of place in an historical essay. This sort of direct moral statement does absolutely nothing to explain how the Holocaust actually did happen. Good historical style avoids platitudes. A sentence like "Hitler's seizure of power initiated a reign of terror unmatched in the history of the world," sounds more like a sound bite from a mediocre television documentary than like good historical analysis. If you wish to make a moral statement in your paper, you must be much more subtle, and you must link your point directly and inseparably to an analysis of historical cause and effect.