Utilizing Sympathy and Empathy in Historical Analysis

Utilizing Sympathy and Empathy in Historical Analysis

It is very easy for contemporary students of history to condemn past generations for their crimes against humanity.  How could not the people who legally, socially, politically, economically and religiously institutionalize chattel slavery in the United States fail to see moral repugnance and insidiousness of their actions?  How did Jefferson fail to comprehend the inherent and seemingly very apparent contradictions between his grandiloquent words in the Declaration of Independence and his status as a slave owner?  It remains startling to consider the historical reality that women were deprived of the right to vote from 1607 to 1920.  John Winthrop, the second governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Puritan clergyman, who penned the immortal words referring to the burgeoning settlement as “a city upon a hill” also characterized the annihilation of Native Americans as service in the name of Almighty God. 

For a century following the abolition of slavery in the United States, the Southern system of legal and social segregation, undergirded by an uncritical acceptance of White supremacy, persisted without any formidable challenge from the federal government.  It created the conditions in which nearly four thousand people were lynched without any adjudication of those murders.  Perhaps one of history’s starkest ironies is found in the documentary accounts of White Southerners leaving church services and then attending a picnic in an open field where someone was lynched.  Consider the smell of burning and searing human flesh permeating the air as people ate fried chicken and potato salad.  Incredulously, countless murders of African Americans in the South during the height of segregation remain unsolved.  Nevertheless, as we evaluate those dastardly deeds, we quickly and facilely pass judgment upon the perpetrators and other people who indirectly supported their actions.  Yet, a frightening question remains.  Would we have chosen and acted differently?  Were we in the same set of circumstances, how would we have responded to the predominant worldview?  Moreover, are we any different than those persons?  Are our contemporary moral, ethical, legal, economic and political choices any different than theirs relatives to circumstances of a twenty-first century, global economy and village?

A scholarly consensus amongst historians posits the necessity of a minimum of a quarter century’s distance from an event in order to analyze it without emotion and undue influence from one’s personal prism of experience.  When we are too close to a situation, personal feelings and preferences inevitably invade our perspective.  Even in the grand academic discipline and study of history, without distancing one’s self, depersonalizing the topic and emotionally detaching from the object of study, any student will surrender fallaciously to moral superiority and arrogance in his or her assessment of the past deeds of humankind.  The benefit of hindsight fuels this myopic analysis in which a student of history fails to appreciate the inherent limitations of his viewpoint as he or she condemns historical persons for the same offenses.  Rather, as he or she grapples relentlessly with the hard facts and factors which reliable and authentic evidence demonstrates with which historical persons lived, sympathy if not empathy might taper the intensity, breadth, depth and certainty of analysis and judgment. 

I hasten to state and accept the formal and socially scientific respectable methodology of the discipline of history which insists upon requisite evidentiary standards as one analyzes the record of past events.  The historical method first requires thorough research and gathering of extensive and relevant evidence. Second, you evaluate the evidence for its reliability, authenticity and relevance.  Third, a historian synthesizes evidence thereby drawing logical, factual and collegially and intellectually respectable conclusions which instruct our understanding of past events.  Historical methodology does not permit historians to extrapolate a comprehensive understanding from a past era or event from meager evidence.  Erroneously, a historian attempted to detail the lives of wives of slave owners solely from the diary of one woman who acknowledged the fictionalization of certain details.  Parallel to the necessity of maintaining a chain of evidence in the practice of law, historians discard embellishments, hearsay and fictional details.  Conversely, an embarrassment of riches in which a historian peruses bountiful documents does not necessarily yield a more insightful or correct analysis. 

Mostly, historians detach emotionally thus they resist any statements of feelings and personal outlook as these undoubtedly skew anyone’s evaluation.  They restrict themselves to the hard facts, reliable documents and reasonable evidence.  Historians seek a logical conclusion based primarily and fundamentally upon foregoing methods.  Like scientists who submit willingly to peer review, historians offer logical assessments of the data that any reasonable, impartial colleagues can corroborate independently.  Assuredly, historians resist the superfluous notion that their analyses are “the truth.”  The historical method, properly employed, yields “a truth” which future discovery of evidence and release of relevant documents may expel, expand or revise.