Recent developments in the realm of Artificial Intelligence tend to make me a bit apprehensive, but this hardly means that I simply avoid such innovations. Of late, this has led me to play around a little with the ChatGPT Open AI system. The program often provides decent overviews of nearly any topic and can provide you with the necessary entrance points into a given world of knowledge should you desire to seek it. Recently, however, I asked the system if it would be able to find the website on which you are reading this very post – my blog. I then asked the AI to assume all the posts were written by the same person (which they are, in my case) in order to generate a comprehensive overview of the author’s views and then provide a series of critiques. ChatGPT actually did this with little delay or further modification, and I was impressed by the result.
The overview was slightly facile though, I think, not in total error; the critiques, however, I found to be a touch peculiar. The system provided, without my any hierarchical significance, six critiques: 1) Perceived Dogmatism; 2) Resistance to Modern Liberal Values; 3) Lack of Inclusivity or Adherence to Christian Values; 4) Conservatism and Resistance to Social Progress; 5) Idealization of the Past; and 6) Potential Authoritarian Implications. In my view, the first four critiques are perhaps valid if one were to presume something of a ‘progressive-liberal’ worldview – which I think that the AI model is disposed toward. The evident rejoinder to them would, therefore, be a questioning of the assumptions of ‘progressive-liberal’ (or-however-else-you-might-like-to-label-these) values – a task for another time. The sixth criticism I think is either misguided or even wrong, though the reasons that the AI model gave for it were rather vague to the point of not being serious. The fifth critique, however, captured far more of my attention. I do not at all take myself to be someone who idealizes the past in the sense the system accused me of – but I thought that, given that I have explicitly commented on historical thinking in my posts, perhaps I should clarify. Maybe ChatGPT has picked up on a way that I can be interpreted but which I take to be a misinterpretation, and such a situation ought to be considered an opportunity.
I am, curiously, quite interested in the ways that various Idealist philosophers – such as R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott – have attempted to theorize the nature of historical thinking and historical knowledge. In this sense, I would take myself as someone who does ‘idealize’ history, but this is a far different claim than what the AI intended. In this more philosophical sense, ‘idealizing’ history is literally to understand the idea of history, what sort of thinking it involves, and distinguishing it from other sorts of thinking like that of science, morality, poetry, or – of course – philosophy. In my view, history being idealized in this manner helps us to recognize the ways in which history is a distinct form of thought worth investigating in its own right, even if it is occasionally corrupted and coopted by other ways of thinking – particularly the moral and occasionally the poetical.
What the ChatGPT system intended by its claim, however, was that I – in some sense – create an idol of the past and think that we should return to some prior way of thinking and living. In other words, it is suggesting that I am opposed to innovation and anything ‘new,’ as if I am some kind of antiquarian. We might, therefore, refer to this sort of idealization of the past as a ‘moral’ claim in the sense that various historical concepts are seemingly being interpreted as having a practical injunction – history is somehow instructive for the ways in which we presently live. No doubt, this is a real sort of moralizing that people engage in; I think a light form of it exists in the (former and future) President Donald Trump’s sloganeering about ‘making American great again.’ I do not, however, believe that I promote or engage in such a form of thinking. Nevertheless, I think that this accusation brings up a variety of interesting thoughts worth staying with for just a few moments.
‘Morality’ is fundamentally a venture in thinking through the question: “What should I do?” This is, no doubt, a complex question, and it must be recognized as a question that is saturated with a kind of limited historical relativism. What I mean by this is that there cannot be, by definition, a moral ‘system’ that deals with every question a person might ask of it in any given circumstance. At some level, any abstract moral claim (which all moral claims fundamentally are) must be put into practice, and there are frequently multiple, competing ‘rules’ of morality that are coming together in a complex that we must prudently select and balance between. Despite that I am a staunch Catholic, I recognize that my Faith rarely provides any precise ‘instructions’ for my present circumstances; instead, it provides me with a disposition in which to engage my present circumstances and understand Reality – and its Author – so that I may be able to react well (a claim to which I may return in a future post). I bring all this up to point out that I presume that this is the same of any person who has ever lived; I do not know how it could be otherwise. In this sense, I recognize the complexity of the choices made by figures of the past – they were likely dealing with a panoply of competing interests, different social backgrounds informing their views, and a social milieu that is entirely foreign to my own. When engaging with them, to condemn seems to suggest that I have a profound understanding of their own positionality and subjective view – which may be possible, but it is hubristic to claim in a facile manner. Those people to whom I am closest – my wife, my family, and closest of friends – are frequently mysterious to me, and I therefore presume this to be even more probable for those living in times, places, and circumstances about which I know very little (at best). Now, this may all sound like a defense against criticizing the past, but it equally, therefore, becomes an attack on those who uncritically defend and aim to emulate it. Instead, this should inculcate in us a sense of agnosticism should we be presented with a supposed need to moralize, positively or negatively, about historical figures or epochs.
I believe, additionally, that a problem of historical analysis is that it frequently clears away the chaff to leave only the wheat for those who then ingest the resultant history. Here, there are a number of issues. What even separates the ‘wheat’ from the ‘chaff’ must itself be decided in some manner, and this itself may have a moralizing element. Moreover, to perceive the past in this manner where the complex, multifaceted, confused stumbling of historical personages becomes clear, direct, and (sometimes) purposeful redirections of the trajectory of civilization often presents things in a manner that is simply not how the people in question would have understood it. This, however, becomes interpreted as ‘the way things really were’ and our own age’s stupidities, sinfulness, and suffering begins to seem profoundly and uniquely errant or misguided; the tidiness of history as found in historical texts (which we might conjecture is not identical with the tumultuousness of that which has been lost to the mists of time) makes us feel that our contemporary affairs are messy and disorganized in some novel manner. Of course, there are many who perform careful historical analyses (or buy into a foppish ‘Whig history’ of progress) and therefore do not idolize the past, but I am merely noting that there is a tendency for this cleansing process of history to present real problems in how we think about our own civilizational health.
This problem must be fundamentally answered by both a more profound sense of our own moral predicaments and a more nuanced historical understanding. In the latter case, it is helpful for people to recognize the vicissitudes of history – especially if they are prone to recourse to those ‘better, bygone times.’ To take a facile example, I like to point out to (perhaps overly) Traditional Catholics that much of St. Thomas Aquinas’s work was itself innovative in certain ways and many Christians of his own time were hesitant to take his theories on board so fully; this hardly dispenses with St. Thomas’s importance for the current Church, but it also allows a greater sense of sympathy for those today who may say make some quasi-heretical claims in an effort to deal with the challenges presently afflicting the Church. Conversely, I think a greater sense of morality can come from understanding how complicated our own moral beliefs truly are. We tend to hold a number of generalized conceptions about the human good, or – if we are lucky – we have a kind of narrative provided to us by a given traditio, in which we can situate ourselves and try to determine our proper trajectories. What is an inevitability in this, however, is a level of casuistry in applying those principles or rules to situations they never could have known. Moreover, we must tread lightly with a recognition of how foppish we may one day look to those of an unknown future looking back upon us – though this never provides us with any more of an instruction of what we should do.
Given the different complexities present in both historical and moral thinking, we may then ask: How should we understanding the relationship between these two manners of thinking? I believe that, in brief, we should aim for a ‘conversational’ attitude; both history and morality may have a voice, and they may find an interlocutor in one another – but neither voice can simply be substituted for or assimilated to the other. Those of strong moral conviction should be open to the complexities of morality revealed by a strong historical understanding, but this should also make us aware of a need to take morality seriously. Indeed, the great moral figures of history to whom we may look frequently held staunchly to their positions, even in light of a soft relativistic recognition about all human affairs. In this sense, the historian should not consider himself an expert in what is moral but should rather recognize that he is well versed in understanding how other people (typically of a quite foreign context) understood themselves; conversely, the moralist should hold his tongue in quick condemnation of the ‘historical other’ while nonetheless thinking through his own moment. In both cases, it is inevitable that the historian will draw on the moral notions of his time to think through historical personages, and the moralist will be drawing on at least a bygone figure or two to help form his own moral outlook. Nevertheless, in both cases, they will recognize that these are not ultimate arbiter’s in their respective concerns, and these considerations may even distract from their proper purview and goals to be achieved adequately. The American historian today will have to put much of his own views aside to adequately think through the decisions of a Roman Senator in 109 B.C., and a contemporary Viennese politician will recognize that his admiration for Abraham Lincoln will only go so far in informing his present decisions. The title of David Lowenthal’s 1985 classic is informative: The Past is a Foreign Country; the foreigner, geographical or temporal, may shed a kind of light on our lives (and vice versa) that helps us break out of our unreflective habits and sins, but we must remember that it is our own lives that must be lived and we can not merely become someone else, whether they live 3000 miles away or 3000 years ago.
Hoping for Clarity 