Question: If we attempt to write non-human history, does it remain history?
I am interested in investigating this question further because embedded in the study of history is an epistemological assumption that history itself is a process that is guided by actors and in, turn, acts upon them. History, as it is often written and practiced as a discipline, operates by the assumption that history itself is a process (like mechanics). And while historians no longer are trying to turn history into a mechanical science like they were in the late 19th century (see Herbert Baxter Adams and the Johns Hopkins School in the United States) there still exists a tacit assumption that the historical process works to produce a historically-determined, bounded rationality in human beings.
So, if we are writing about non-human nature, does this still apply? Is it appropriate for me to argue, for example, that avian behaviour is a product of historical processes? Birds certainly do adapt to changed physical environments, such as habitat destruction and climate change, but is that a historical process or a biological process?
When writing about human beings we would say that changes in economic structures or belief systems are historically determined. This assumption is premised on human beings as makers of their own history. So, the Reformation and its influence on changing economic systems in Europe is a response to the overreaching of the Catholic Church, and so forth. In other words, human action precipitates more human action. Causal principles evermore are linked to a changing human understanding of the world.
One example of this would be Galileo’s revolutionary understanding of the heavens. His “sin” was to undo more than a thousand years of teaching about the heavens and challenge the astronomy of Aristotle, which the Church had adopted as central to its cosmology. We would say that Galileo revolutionized the human understanding and perception of the heavens and therefore erosion in belief could be said to be caused by the rise of empirical science, of which Galileo’s astronomy was one part. This interpretation places historical drama entirely within the human mind and imagination. Historical changes in human behaviour are often seen as proportional or even inversely proportional to human discoveries (for an inverse, see the continuing reaction to Darwin).
But what about non-human nature? The ability or inability of a species to respond to climate changes, ecological destruction, an ice age and so on are either successes or failures of adaptation and are not, per se, historically determined changes because they are a response to changes in nature. While these changes may be caused by human activity, biological adaptation in plants and animals is not determined by historicism, that is social context or socially contextualized meanings. Human social meanings and notions of the good or the progressive do not permeate the biological processes of plant and animal adaptation.
The historical behaviour of species or of climates is of interest to human beings as history makers because we can use this information to produce a schema of how the Earth operates as a system. This systemizing of Earth sciences is then seen as an instrument of greater control and/or human rationality. History, therefore, is a systematizer and an imperial tool.
But is history actually a system? After all, historians have never been successful in creating a historical system with the interpretive power and falsifiability of physics, for example. Historical theses are not the same thing as natural laws. So, is history then a schematizer for human control of nature? And, if so, is there such a thing as natural history, per se?
There is an ambiguity at the heart of modern historical study. When you compare history to other disciplines in the social sciences it lacks a specific set of methodologies that can be said to belong to it. There is quantitation in history but there is not forecasting, as in economics. There is sociology in history but it does not measure social response it contextualizes it, tracing what it posits are formative human patterns for contemporary social behaviours. Context, above all, seems to be the rule. Natural history, then, is an interpretive framework for the processes of nature across time. It remains a social science (even a literary enterprise) because it provides an interpretive context for human behaviour. Natural history teaches human beings how to anticipate natural processes but the history in it exists in so far as it provides a field for human activity.
Context is anything that can provide a narrative structure to the development and behaviour of human beings or species. But it cannot be said that context is predictive or above the creative interpretations and literary flair of the historian as writer. What we are left with is the historical sense, i.e. that human beings are the chief instruments of change in human behaviour. Human beings are history-makers after all because they are the only beings that have a developed a historical sense.
History circumvents natural law and this is what leads human beings to appear separate (liberalism might say “alienated”) from Nature. When I now look back on my discussion of this problem in “History and the Problem of Auto-Referentiality” I have come to the conclusion that there is no way to actually write a non-human history. I have wanted to see such a history written because of my normative commitment to animal rights and environmental preservation. But it would seem that history is an improper tool for discussing the long record of species or the interplay of ecology because history is not equipped to discern mechanisms in the non-human world that are, in fact, non-human. The historical search for causality is devoted to human motives, human behaviour, and the intended and unintended consequences of human invention and action.
I say this advisedly and with caution. What I mean is that embedded within historical writing is the normative commitment to organizing and prioritizing value. Natural law cannot be said to fit readily into any such systematizing because it imposes a system of limits upon human behaviour. Natural law is, foremost, about claiming that human beings are subservient to a higher order in Nature and cannot become the masters of the laws of Nature. History (as we have conceived it) would be incoherent if it was written from a natural law perspective because it would suggest that all of human behaviour and human striving was not part of a verifiable, falsifiable, superior rationality that would lead to abject human mastery over Nature. The theologians would say that such a superior rationality does exist but as God and that theology or philosophy would be a more appropriate means of discerning this rationality. But in the end, that rationality would constrain -perhaps even determine- human behaviour because it would, above all, be about limits.
History may tell the story of human limits but is it, in its foundations, a discipline that acknowledges the limits of human instrumentality if it functions, principally, as an apologetics for human behaviour? If human beings are history-makers and if history is designed to demonstrate that human behaviour is what determines human undertakings (the successful and the failed), how then can history be used to accurately examine and depict the activities of a non-human world?
To my mind, this quote by George Grant illustrates the issue nicely:
“To put the issue simply: are we truly and finally responsible for shaping what happens in the world or do we live in an order for which we are not ultimately responsible, so that the purpose of our lives is to discover and serve that order?” (see Philosophy in the Mass Age, pp. 39)
History, as I understand it methodologically and normatively, is a world-shaping discipline. It is the foundation of the idea of progress because it asserts that the world is made and remade by human action and that, progressively, human beings are shaped by their past errors and achievements. But non-human Nature cannot ultimately be judged and eludes this metric; all-too-often what we learn about it in historical chronicles is its recession from the rise of human civilization. It constitutes an otherness that exists beyond the reach of a common language and history is a linguistic discipline.
Environmental history raises the important conceptual question: what role does the environment (the non-human) play in human history? Consideration of this question offers many potential variables and much context that could help explain past human events. Still, for those of us who are historians but are also contemplating the limits of the idea of human progress and the wealth and security that is supposed to accompany it through the control of our environment, history does not offer a counter-narrative to technological progress, market rationality, and the mass production of tools and machinery that expands the reach of the human will-to-control. (Does such a narrative exist? Is the act of historical writing entirely beholden to the idea of progress?) After all, history is a long catalogue of natural destruction and the rolling back of the wilderness frontier. If this is supposed to be the natural order of things, -I think it is the historical but not natural order- historical analysis is troubling because it provides ample evidence to sustain, dare I say, a thesis of inevitable human domination of the Earth and all life therein.
But this is not satisfying precisely because it implies that the past actions and past achievements of human beings are more determinative than our present moral doubts and our contemplation of the good or of the love of otherness not only in one another, but in the non-human. History is not about contemporary contemplation, it is about assembling the pertinent details of the past to present a pattern. And while it certainly can be argued that the historian is not required to be historicist in his/her spiritual beliefs or in contemplating the evolution and destiny of human beings, the discipline itself appears to confine the historian to marshaling the past to create the visible horizon of the present.
That is historicism: the rationality of the present is bounded by the past. As James Joyce once wrote in Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” History is the accumulated weight of the past: to discard that weight is to be liberated from history. I have found that this is precisely what must be done to contemplate and understand the non-human in Nature and therefore to serve, pace George Grant, a non-historical order.
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Disclaimer: I am not questioning the validity of environmental history. What I am trying to determine is how historians can account for non-human Nature and the natural world apart from human interactions with it. I am interested in this principally from a normative and preservationist position. I am also doubtful that this is something historians can do. But I do not believe that the limitations of historical research in a field such as I am suggesting undercuts the validity of environmental history as a historical field itself.
Jeremy Nathan Marks
