I study History of Science in college. The first perspective professors gave me was to historicize science: the way science was done, discovered and distributed must be embedded in a complex network of peoples, objects, intellectual frameworks, socio-political agendas, and more (really, as many factors as you can think of). One of the first things I learned to not take for granted is the idea of a linear progression of science and technology, as if they only progress towards one predestined direction, as if they can never be lost.
Recently I started contemplating the other way: the science of history. The same way I have learned to parse the professionalization of sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries, I can use to probe the professionalization of history-making.
Daniel Lord Smail did this in the first chapters of On Deep History and the Brain.1 He asks in the book: what have historians done with the origin? Where do we go from there?
For a very long time in the Judeo-Christian tradition, people practiced sacred history. History’s origin was Eden. But with the discovery of the Ice Age, previous mass extinctions and earth’s much deeper past by scientists like Louis Agassiz, Georges Cuvier and Charles Lyell, the thousands of years of sacred history now appeared embarrassingly short and incomplete. This has often been referred to by historians as “the time revolution” of the 19th century.
Of course, cultural exchanges with other civilizations in the prior centuries had already revealed to the Judeo-Christian scholars of their dating’s shortness. For example, in 1658, the Jesuit Father Martini discovered the Chinese annals had recorded events that took place more than six hundred years before the Deluge.2 Similar discoveries were made when encountering Indian, Aztec, Sumerian, Chaldean and Egyptian civilizations. Their reconciliation? The blanket accusation that these non-Mosaic chronologies were either fabricated or “written in the spirit of envy.”3
The thing is, as we entered into the twentieth century and came to terms with the deep time, the sacred didn’t leave history: “Instead, the sacred was deftly translated into a secular key: the Garden of Eden became the irrigated fields of Mesopotamia, and the creation of man was reconfigured as the rise of civilization.”4
In Smail’s account, it seems like history as a field started encountering many existential challenges since the time revolution. These challenges didn’t simply come from other chronologies, but also from paleontology, geology, ethnology and natural history. Having (reluctantly) decoupled from Genesis’ sacred chronology, historians now grappled with earth’s unfathomably deep history in their own professional life of writing human’s history, and the question was, where should we suitably place the beginning of history?
Maybe start with the invention of writing.
Historians adopted this reasoning towards the end of the 19th century. Giambattista Vico and Leopold von Ranke, two men commonly called "the fathers of modern history,” embraced and advocated for this idea. For them, writing made the past knowable.5 Especially as history became professionalized, along with many other disciplines, in the late nineteenth century, the written record became the foundations of historical epistemology. The experts of history should specialize in reading into documents the meanings of the authors and offering correct textual interpretations.6
In Introduction to the Study of History, first published in 1898, Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos emphasized that “[t]he historian works with documents. Documents are the traces which have been left by the thoughts and actions of men of former times. […] For there is no substitute for documents: no documents, no history.”7
The science of history was being consciously incubated. Note: Vico and Ranke, two vigorous proponents of this scientific history, were equally hard believers of sacred history.
Or let’s start with the beginning of a historical consciousness?
In this framework, a society enters into history when it starts consciously crafting its own histories and transmit its thoughts down through archives. Like what Nietzsche declared: “the beast lives unhistorically.”8 A society without the sophistication of a historical self-awareness does not deserve to be written into the History. With this logic, some found the beginning of history to be with the Greeks, because they had Herodotus.9
How to demonstrate this self-awareness, however, is a much more complex question upon further thinking. What constitutes an archive or a document? Must there be an author, and must it have been written down in a language on a material form? Smail poignantly argues:
[W]e do not deny historicity to the Incans or to the people of Great Zimbabwe because they never recorded history in writing. Neither do we deny historicity to the vast majority of premodern Europeans who have never kept records, let alone histories. Peasant societies have rarely generated written chronicles, and not all of them have been mindful to preserve other forms of written record. Do these societies become historical only when a historian or archivist living in a city fifty miles away happens to take notice of them? As another example, is early medieval Europe considered historical because a very few members of its population were literate clergymen? Or was it a world that was 99 percent historyless and 1 percent historical? Does the percentage of historians and archivists have to achieve a certain density for a society to become historical, or is one historian enough?10
Who deserves historicity?
Another haunting question: is history essential for the constitution of society? If a people did not preserve their own histories, if a people cannot be proven to have a self-conscious historical awareness, do they count as a civilized society?
Even for societies with self-conscious archives, can you really write good histories with them?
Smail referred to an influential lectures series by E. H. Carr at Cambridge University in 1961. Carr said: “Everyone knows today that human beings do not always, or perhaps even habitually, act from motives of which they are fully conscious or which they are willing to avow.”11 It would be, as Smail called, “an exercise in self-deception” to write a history based only on what the sources say.12
Smail imagines a different approach to history: one that incorporates biology, physiology and the like, and demands much more scientific literacy from historians.
On Deep History and the Brain was published in 2008. Smail seemed to be tremendously inspired by the research from the late 20th century and the first decade of the 21st on neuroplasticity. As he defined:
A neurohistorical perspective on human history is built around the plasticity of the synapses that link a universal emotion, such as disgust, to a particular object or stimulus, a plasticity that allows culture to embed itself in physiology.
Since “culture is indeed coded in human physiology,” the new approach to history aims at changing “the pattern of our explanations and the focus of our attention, which shifts inexorably toward a study of the cultural devices that evolved to instill the feeling of honor in human bodies.”13
Humans are also just animals that perform activities to regulate their moods and inner states. We could, then, write a history of humans based on that principle, a history revolving around the brain and neurobiological activities.
Smail is thinking about the horses that “get bored or lonely while isolated in a paddock [and who] sometimes take pleasure in startling themselves,” and the cats that are drawn to catnip.14 He is thinking about behaviors that are not specially adaptive.
By incorporating biology, Smail does not mean it in the kind of sociobiological sense that is often subjected to controversies in explaining culture with nature and finding a secular god’s rule about human’s social roles through studying chimpanzees and “evolution.”
Principally, Smail is plotting an escape, or emancipation, from the framework of political organization that often undergirds history writing. The neurohistory would be welcoming to the (very large) part of time that has been historically neglected or dismissed by historians as a “prehistory” belonging to the realm of archaeologists and scientists.
As a student of history of science, I find this book and the idea of a neurohistorical approach fascinating on many levels. For one, I think of how HoS attempts to capture science and scientific methods, locating them in their own historical time and pinning them down there. Applying science to history, then, seems to be letting science win the “game.”
At the same time, I am reminded of the various new approaches to history surfacing in the discourse, each seeking to address some problems with the traditionally “Great-Men-focused” approach to history. Floating Coast by Bathsheba Demuth was to me a breathtaking example of an environmental history that didn’t simply focus on activities initiated by humans.15 It is a history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters between Russia and Canada, the home of the Iñupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia. The author was careful to foreground how energy flew from the environment to the humans, and back. One chapter opens with the detail that the energy of a year-old bowhead whale could nourish a village for six months.16 To be able to bring forth that perspective, the author had to know the land well herself. I deeply admire her work for this reason.
Smail’s neurohistory is inspiring because it does not privilege human species the way most of our histories do. It embeds the human species back into the animal kingdom, back into nature. It accepts and makes peace with the gradient between humans and other animals. The complex social, technological, political activities that our histories are familiar with spiral out of principal needs and desires not exclusive to humans.
Indeed, Smail wonders about horses’ history, too. Horses do not make their own history, but we write about natural history nonetheless. In fact, “we write about historical populations as if they had little more awareness of history than horse.”17
Smail’s provocative theory reveals the tight coupling between our idea of what makes us human and our idea of what defines history. To agree, disagree, or partially agree with him, is to declare one’s stance on what essentially constitutes humanity.
Maria Stavrinaki writes in Transfixed by Prehistory about the moment that humans discovered deep time:
The expansion of time that prehistory produced affects human beings in their very constitution: they lose the distinctive signs and boundaries that separate them from other species and also from their own prosthetic inventions. […] This ultimately produces a temporal vertigo similar in its intensity to that caused by the feats of science and technology."18
Stavrinaki’s intellectual project outlines the arc of and explains the convergence of three grand threads from the nineteenth century: the discovery of earth’s deep time, the discovery of human as a species, and the birth of modern art. She vividly and compellingly illustrates how thinkers confronted the bursting of “the limits of time” with a new definition of human — a new separation of humans from other animals — grounded in creativity and the urge to create. Modern art, accordingly, was born with this somewhat anxiety-ridden self-awareness and self distinction.
Neurohistory opens up a chasm at once terrifying and exhilarating. This new type of history will necessarily have to be updated often, along with our studies of sciences. What we understand now about biology, physiology, and whatever else that need be incorporated into such a new historical writing, may appear rudimentary to the framework of “self” that future generations will be working with.
Much of our thinking today is dominated by the fear and expectation of environmental disasters, so we look into the past and find that historical events could have been seen from the previously neglected perspective of climate and environment. There’s now more “new perspectives” or “rewritings” of histories that take into account of the environmental influences upon human activities. One example is The Fate of Rome (2017), which looks at the empire’s fall through climate catastrophe and disease.19 Apart from traditional historical methods, the author Kyle Harper incorporated cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries in his tracing of Rome's fate beyond man-made decisions.
A important reference point in historiography: the sub-discipline of environmental history was just beginning to take shape three decades ago.
Without sciences’ intervention, history would have still constantly reinvented itself. Why resist incorporating science into history, then? Or if a science of history has already been established by the contemporaries of Ranke, why not come up with a new one?
Sometimes I struggle to see how history stands as a discipline on its own: isn’t it always a history of something else? When I conduct research, I always wonder about the things that I cannot know even using the most rigorous method. When I write about a polar scientist in the late 19th century, I try to think of all the factors that could have influenced him in his decision-making and knowledge-making process. But I have to understand that my attempt is always going to be a failure. Maybe he himself couldn’t even have explained to me why he wanted to drift to the North Pole.
I wonder if historians of science are some of the ultimate skeptics. By prying open the process behind the making of “objective” knowledge, and revealing the sociopolitical, cosmological and environmental factors that shaped the knowledge, they seem to declare themselves the closest adventurer to the mysterious pole of cognitive freedom. At least, I admit I am drawn to that point I can’t see on the map.
I do not lack belief in history. I am just so far uncertain about history’s relationship with truth. My philosophy is that I can almost certainly never instruct or predict, but merely to understand and recover. I cannot ask much from history besides seeing how certain people did certain things at certain points, based on certain motives and certain beliefs. Writing history, under this philosophy, becomes an exercise of understanding, performed through a somewhat forensic manner. I always try my best to find out what was really going on, but the point is not the accuracy as much as the process of trying to be rigorous.
I imagine a historian would hope their work to not be outrun by time too soon, even though it probably happens most of the time. When I study eccentric individuals from the past, be it a guy from Han dynasty China or a guy from 19th century Norway, I am always keen on understanding the part about their lives where they were coming to terms with the limits of their cognitive framework, methodology and instruments. They sensed there was something they wanted to get at but could not get to in their life time, so they worked with what they could. Those moments are relieving for a young historian in training who is always self-aware about the limits of her own cognitive framework as a human trapped in, and fundamentally shaped by, her biological experience.
Smail concludes towards the end of his book: “From the perspective of neurohistory, the progress of civilization is an illusion of psychotropy.”20 Writing history -- and making history in the process-- is also a form of psychotropy. Someone should write a history about that.
Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520258129/on-deep-history-and-the-brain.
Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 22-23.
Ibid.
Ibid,, 4.
Ibid., 35.
Ibid., 44-45.
Charles V. Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History, trans. G. G. Berry (New York, 1898), 17, quoted in Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 46.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis, 1957), 1, quoted in Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 52.
This is factually incorrect. For example, Chinese historiography dates back to 1000+ BC (Shang dynasty), at least five hundred years before Herodotus.
Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 53-54.
Edward Hallett Carr, What is History? (New York, 1961), 60, quoted in Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 70.
Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 71.
Ibid., 159.
Ibid., 127.
Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of The Bering Strait (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019). https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393635164
Ibid., 17.
Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 72.
Maria Stavrinaki, Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time (New York: Zone Books, 2022), 20.
Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/the-fate-of-rome.
Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, 187.