For a list of the current Friends of the Scottish Review, click here
Today’s banner:
Dornoch by night
by Islay McLeod
Walter Humes’ fine piece on ‘Rewriting History’ about the distorted ‘evidence’ of the Hillsborough tragedy (20 September) makes two excellent points: the first about the deception that results from institutional narcissism and the second about how historical documents should be treated.
All corporations are collective bodies, and like individual, human bodies, their absolute priority is self-preservation. Forget whatever their stated purpose is. All churches (and synagogues and mosques) wish to grow and prosper, but, above all, to live. Their motto should be: ‘if you cannot thrive, at least survive’. Scandal is a threat to survival. The remedy is to hush things up. PR is not as effective as silencing the whistleblowers or burning the documents, although burning the whistleblowers, if it could be carried out secretly, might be a better option.
Universities, however dedicated they appear to be to education, are similarly inclined. In California, a university ‘development’ officer (ie a professional beggar) once told me how terrified he was when a very old lady who was going to give a million dollars or more to his university phoned him and said that a recent student riot and faculty troubles meant that she was thinking of cutting that legacy from her will. What did he do? He jumped in his car right away. He then boasted to me about how he managed to talk her out of it. Universities fear bad publicity just as much as churches do.
As for history being re-written, it always is (or should be). Documents, when they do exist, exist to be questioned. Historians never should approach an ‘official’ document naively. Lying, after all, is what humans do. Historians, more than ever, should accept what Freud thought would save us all: self-consciousness. Historians now have technical weapons to question documents, but they also know how to question one another. Academic book reviews sniff-out fakers.
There is also the history of history, that is, historiography. When I wrote about a relatively brief 13th-century incident (the children’s crusade of 1212), I read everything that had been written about it
from the so-called original sources (some highly valued ‘contemporary’ chroniclers dating from the 1250s; eye-witnesses? think again). I also read all the chroniclers and professional historians from the 14th to the 20th centuries.
This is the obvious point: interpretations varied over time, from the biased and moralistic to the professionally analytical. Historians, naturally, disagreed. Some were clearly imprisoned by the mind-set of their time and place. Awareness of that allowed me – though similarly imprisoned – to ponder how to make sense of things, to arrive at my own interpretations, which, I knew,
would be subjected to the scrutiny of my peers. That is how the historical profession functions. Like the Hillsborough inquiry, open, public scrutiny will lift the lid, let the cat out of the bag, and expose the dirty washing.
Gary Dickson is formerly a reader in history and is an honorary fellow at the school of history, classics and archaeology, University of Edinburgh
