This has been a wild week in the Red River Valley with blizzards and floods. Last Thursday, I asked people to share how they were teaching the "worldwide financial crisis" and we'll post a response by David Flynn, a professor of economics here at the University of North Dakota over on our Teaching Thursday blog. One thing his post brings out -- and it is certainly relevant to this particular moment in the region -- is the need to be able to teach uncertainty.
Teaching uncertainty is surely among the most difficult things for me to do. Historians, particularly in the classroom, find themselves in a position where they transform complex and confusing networks of events into more easily understood causal relationships. In fact, history is particular adept at demonstrating how individuals in the past did not grasp the complexity or consequences of their own situations. Surely Caesar could not have realized how crossing the Rubicon or engaging in a Civil War would have impacted the long term stability of the Roman Republic (although it is hard to imagine that he thought it would help the Republic). Likewise Constantine could not have fully understood the consequences of his decision to support the fledgling Christian church in the 4th century. Unpacking the consequences of these individuals' actions with the benefit of hindsight is certainly one of the key responsibilities of the historian and playing with such omniscience gives us a kind of authority in relation to historical actors. While most historians would readily admit that their command over the past offers very little in the way of command over the present, the public and our students sometimes see it that way. After all, there are still many who look to history for cautionary tales and take quite literally the old proverb about repeating the past if you can't learn from it.
During uncertain economic (or environmental!) times, historians (not exclusively, of course) tend to become more visible. The Obama election and economic turmoil of the last six months has led to more historians appearing in the media and speaking with confidence about the present. While this is certainly appealing and empowering to those of us who keep a comparatively lower profile, it certainly exposes us to a different set of expectation than we are likely to experience in more certain times. At the same time, budget crunches at universities and colleges have forced the humanities to defend themselves more vigorously and to demonstrate in ways that the general public can understand the relevance of their academic pursuits. The pressure is on to demonstrate our worth to a society that is undergoing challenges.
Uncertainty is a difficult sell in uncertain times. Of course, we all would readily accept that history is full of uncertainty and even the rhetorically omniscient perspective of the professional historian can only present a plausible interpretation of past events on the basis of a small fraction of the real variables present. The study of the past, just like our understanding of the present, is, in fact, plagued by uncertainty. Scholars, paradoxically, have found a certain amount of confidence by accepting the variability of the events that they study and the inability of their own methods, approaches, and tools to produce definitive and unchallengeable explanations of past events. In effect, we frame our entire discipline within the expectation that things will change with how we view the past; this is to say that we brace our own interpretations against an inevitable feeling of uncertainty.
So perhaps the current economic and environmental crisis is a good opportunity to present a counterpoint to the confidence projected in the classroom and formed around the internal cohesion of historical narratives. The past like the present is contingent, uncertain, and subject to change.
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