The most distinctive cry of the professional academic historian, to be heard (with only minor regional variations) throughout the Western world, is “Yes, but it’s rather more complicated than that.” Historians as a species concern themselves with detail and specificity, to an almost obsessive degree; highlighting the unique features of every period and every culture that mark them out from every other period and culture, and regarding any attempt at generalisation across periods or cultures or even individual cases with, at best, hearty suspicion (while relying on any number of unspoken generalisations) because, of course, it is actually rather more complicated than that.
It’s for this reason that historians really need to pay attention to the wonderfully-titled ‘Fuck Nuance’ (Abstract: Seriously, fuck it) by sociologist Kieran Healy, delivered at a recent meeting of the American Sociological Association and helpfully made available online here. Healy begins by noting that nuance is typically used by sociologists as a term of praise, and almost always is mentioned because someone is asking for more of it.
As alleged virtues go, nuance is superficially attractive. Isn’t the mark of a good thinker the ability to see subtle differences in kind or gracefully shade the meaning terms? Shouldn’t we cultivate the ability to insinuate overtones of meaning in our concepts? Further, isn’t nuance especially appropriate to the difficult problems we study? I am sure that, like mine, your research problems are complex, rich, and multi-faceted…. I am sure that, like me, you are a sophisticated thinker. When sophisticated people like us face this rich and complex world, how can nuance not be the wisest approach?
As Healy notes, arguing against nuance in general is like arguing against the idea of yellow or the concept of ostriches; his target is rather the “Actually-Existing Nuance” of sociological discussion, the knee-jerk response to any new idea of calling for additional layers of complexity and qualification. “It is what you do when faced with a question that you do not yet have a compelling or interesting answer to. Thinking up compelling or interesting ideas is quite difficult, and so often it is easier to embrace complexity than cut through it.” He identifies three ‘nuance traps’: the nuance of the fine grain, offering an ever more detailed – and hence ever more merely empirical – description of the world, surreptitiously rejecting a theoretical or generalising approach; the nuance of the conceptual framework, whereby a theoretical system is expanded to take in ever more of the world, at the expense of being capable of refutation; and the nuance of the connoisseur, whereby nuance is presented as the expression of the speaker’s distinctive ability to grasp the complexity of the world. I don’t know enough about contemporary sociological practice to comment – but if we think about the discipline of history, at least two of these traps look, to me, not so much like accidental characteristics but like founding statements of the anti-theoretical historical mainstream.
Of course the world is complex, and part of our task as historians is to understand and interpret that – but it’s not our only task, or at least not the only thing the discipline as a whole should be doing, and that’s where ‘theory’ comes in. The job of theory is not to emphasise or exemplify this (real) complexity, but rather to try to make sense of it through strategic simplification, to grasp some essential aspect of its structure or workings by ignoring all the distracting surface detail. It’s the whole point of the spherical cow joke that my students persist in finding neither funny nor helpful: sometimes, assuming for the purposes of model-building that all cows are spherical and in a vacuum is actually an aid to understanding. In such contexts, nuance is an impediment, a distraction – an excuse to avoid the key issues of the discussion, while appearing to offer a higher, more sophisticated and realistic understanding.
One obvious response – not least for the persistent failure of the spherical cow joke – is that this is just the way things are: different disciplines roll differently. Sociologists are interested in generalisation, even if not as much as economists tend to be (cf Ian Morris’ excellent 2002 article ‘Hard Surfaces’* on the relationship between humanistic and social-scientific approaches within archaeology and ancient history), hence someone like Healy can have legitimate concerns about a tendency for his colleagues to lapse into excessive specificity and detail. History, on the other hand, is all about specificity and detail, and the particularity of the past; it does on occasion make use of the theories developed by other disciplines (though generally only when watered down to near-homeopathic levels), and people like me who argue for a greater role for generalising approaches should probably have realised back in university that, temperamentally, they’re not proper historians at all and should really switch to social science.
Now, obviously I don’t accept that. Of course there are disciplinary differences, but it is a spectrum rather than an absolute distinction – one simply needs to look back to the nineteenth century for inspiring examples of historically-informed theoretical analysis within the emerging fields of economics and social studies, and (though rather rarer) examples of theoretically-orientated historiography. History without any theoretical content or purpose is little more than the collection of nuggets of disconnected information without any wider meaning or significance; it’s the realm of the ‘historical artisan’ rather than the true historian, in the words of my favourite Wilhelm Roscher, or of the antiquarianism that Nietzsche discusses. I would equally argue that there are problems with social sciences that ignore historical difference and change, and certainly there’s a risk that the exclusion of complexity frequently implies the exclusion of any historical dimension – but there is an enormous difference between the exclusion of historical specificity for the purposes of developing a useful general theory or model, where the historical can and will be brought back in at a later stage, and the exclusion of history and change as a methodological principle. Better to develop a focused model that works for a specific context and then can be tested in others, than a fuzzy attempt at covering everything that doesn’t end up demonstrating anything – and certainly better than a theory that purports to be trans-historical and universal by including a grab-bag of random examples from all over the place without any proper context. That’s the sort of nuance and complexity that can offend social theorists and historians simultaneously!
I’ve been planning this post since I first read Healy’s piece – but was then faced with a derailment in the shape of a review of Tom Holland’s new book on the early Caesars, Dynasty, by Nick Cohen in the Observer. Cohen begins by noting the way that some twentieth-century writers have co-opted Roman emperors to support their own agendas – Robert Graves’ Claudius as a liberal surrounded by tyrannical monsters (like 1930s dictators), Gore Vidal using them to question the normativity of monogamous heterosexuality – and thus white-washed their crimes and vices.
Modern academic historians can be as blind. They live in well-ordered, democratic societies and work in liberal institutions. When they are presented with the horrific ancient accounts of the early Caesars, they blench at the tales of murder and madness and wonder whether men who ruled a peaceful and prosperous empire were so different from, if not their vice-chancellors, then at least their presidents and prime ministers. They worry about sources, which are usually prejudiced, and always incomplete. When they read Seneca saying of Caligula that “nature has produced him to demonstrate how far unlimited vice can go when combined with absolute power”, academic caution stops them trusting him.
Yes, and?
Their unwillingness to believe that absolute power corrupts absolutely echoes the historians of late Victorian Britain. Britain’s imperialists abandoned the Enlightenment belief that we should admire the free, or rather partially free, republic and damn the empire. As Britain’s own empire encircled the globe, its servants saw the Romans as gentlemen in togas, who had brought the benefits of civilisation to benighted natives, as they were doing.
Right. Now, I will readily concede that my initial reaction on Twitter, that Cohen was denouncing academic ancient history, was clearly wrong – but I’m not convinced that this dismissive disparagement is any better. (As one colleague remarked, “Hey Roman historians: you’re all a bunch of naive, timorous, bourgeois types terrified of the truth! Says a man who’s never read any of your work.”) It’s certainly a neat trick to conflate academic scepticism about the reliability of sources – the bedrock of the discipline since Thucydides (“People are inclined to accept any old story about the past”) and certainly since its professionalisation in the nineteenth century – with the undeniably dubious tendency to idealise the Roman empire and/or project our own assumptions and values onto it (which is, of course, a theme which academic historians and classicists have studied extensively…).
Such an attitude, and the suggestion that taking “the accounts of the god-emperors’ cruelties seriously” is (a) a feature only of the book under review and (b) inseparable from believing such accounts to be true, seem to be crying out for the historian’s cry: Actually it’s an awful lot more complicated than that. Is this then an awful example of what happens if historians listen to the arguments of Healy and abandon their complexity? Is my visceral reaction to such nonsense a sign that I’m really a wishy-washy humanist who’s only flirting with the tough rhetoric of the social scientists, but when the chips are down I’m as wedded to nuance as the rest of them – and rightly so?
I don’t think so – and I don’t think anyone else would think so, as it’s just the fact that I was thinking about Healy’s article when I read this review that created any sort of connection in my mind. But the comparison is actually instructive. Healy, as I’ve summarised above, emphasises the need for clear theoretical argument in order to develop a general understanding of a given phenomenon. What Cohen praises – there’s no indication that Holland actually agrees with this or exhibits it in the book – is the complete absence of any sort of theory, or even argument; he just wants narrative and description, the more dramatic and lurid the better, bound together by emotive and under-examined concepts like ‘monstrosity’ and ‘depravity’, and the general category of the ‘military dictator’. Any attempt at asking general questions about the veracity of these accounts is not just dismissed but presented as a failing of morality or character on the part of the historian (one can only imagine what Cohen might make of Elsner & Masters, ed., Reflections of Nero, with the arguments of some contributors that getting at the reality of Nero is effectively impossible; the ultimate trahison des clercs, presumably…). At a guess, attempting to develop a more general conception of the nature of the imperial role or the development of the political system, such that it led to these abuses of power and to these lurid stories, would be equated with justifying the rule of such evil men and absolving them of any responsibility for their crimes.
Is it unfair of me to feel that this line of argument is rather familiar, from the run-up to the invasion of Iraq? Questioning the more extreme accounts of the horrific acts of a dictator is the same as excusing all his crimes and justifying his monstrous regime; expressing caution, let alone scepticism, about the evidence for, say, weapons of mass destruction can only be a sign of woolly thinking and self-deception, wishy-washy liberalism and a refusal to face up to the reality of the world, and/or fundamental moral corruption. Academics and their petty-fogging doubts introduce far too many shades of grey into a world that is black and white, good and evil, us and them. History is about personalities rather than systems (and it’s much easier to conceive of over-throwing a man and assuming that this changes everything than to think of transforming an entire system). If only someone – the Persians, maybe – had had the courage and humanitarianism to intervene to remove Nero, all would have been well.
Such an approach (and again I’ll stress that I’m not suggesting this is what Holland’s book does, before the internet descends on me in fury) is full of the precious detail and specificity of the past, conjuring up fabulous monsters rather than white-washing them and turning them into normal human beings – but it doesn’t tell us anything useful, and is scarcely worthy of the name ‘history’. Bollocks to Nero.
*In P. Cartledge, E. Cohen & L. Foxhall, eds., Money, Labour and Land (London, 2002)
To be honest, I’d rather read Suetonius than Tom Holland, and I mistrust Nick Cohen, seeing as he was a hagiographer of Blair and Bush and their misadventures in Iraq and elsewhere.
If Cohen is condemning dictators and accepting their depravity as a given, then he is doing it to justify, ex post facto the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Given Cohen’s record on, among other things, the “clash of civilisations”, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, the “War on Terror”, and so on, the parallel between Nero and Saddam Hussein is probably not remotely lost on him in this way; black-and-white, good-or-evil thinking infuses his thought, or at least his public statements of his thought. He takes “Fuck nuance” to its illogical extremes, as both you and Healy (rightly) reject.
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