Why Historians Can't Give People What They Want

Hey, what's that, you say? Isn't history the top-selling nonfiction genre, and isn't it outselling most of the fiction genres as well? Well, yes, so they say. But it depends what you call history, doesn't it? What people really want from historians is what we can't give them. I offer, as Exhibit A, the following snippet from the excellent blog run by Nate Bierma at Books and Culture.

We crave sensible, scientific explanations for social phenomena. This Washington Post column contains two cause-and-effect scenarios that are farther off the beaten path. A recent paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that certain failing schools in Virginia boosted the sugar and calorie counts on their lunch menu during standardized testing periods. What's more, the gluttonous gambit seemed to work, bumping test scores up by 6 to 11 percent. Meanwhile, Wall Street seems prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder, a form of depression related to lack of sunlight during the winter months. A paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that stock bargains are most prevalent in fall and winter, when winter blues leave moody stockholders more likely to dump high-risk stocks at low prices. Prices rise and bargains are harder to find in the spring, when people cheer up, the paper says.

How neat, how tidy. Historians are not about that. The deeper we dig, the more untidy things are. And sometimes we find tidiness, or at the least hidden order, amongst seemign disorder. Our work seems random and pointless, and it often is; it is the journey of curiosity that is best understood as hyperlinking, going from one point to the other amidst a sea of information, and then turning to look back and see how we got this far, and whether the journey is worth duplicating, or if it explains anything else to anyone else. People aren't very interested in that. That is why Jared Diamond's books are considered history. They have a Theory of Everything, and that is what people think historians should be giving them; after all, isn't that what scientists do?

When people look to those sort of answers from historians, we should have the guts to tell them to go ask their questions of God instead of us. And quite frankly even His answers (cf. Job, Book of) are not as tidy as cafeteria surveys.