Moses - White exchange, Post 1

I submitted this exchange when we were formulating the idea for the group because I think it nicely summarizes White's major ideas, apparently (per Moses and endorsed by White himself) stretching back to the early 60s.

It strikes me that White is relatively unconcerned with the methodology of professional history. I'm as much of a skeptic about the "neutral" status of archives as anyone, but White does seem to conflate the fact that to write professional history is to write a narrative and the idea that to write a narrative involves a more-or-less arbitrary selection of facts with which to populate it. In other words, since we necessarily pick and choose historical facts (archivally-derived or otherwise) to support our arguments, White seems to argue that all narratives are equally arbitrary and thus their value must be judged aesthetically or inspirationally (i.e. in terms of their inspirational quality vis-à-vis social or political activism.)

I think Moses is correct in pointing out that A. the very facts White alludes to, in his discussion of the Holocaust, are based precisely on traditional western historical research and B. that within scholarship, meaning-claims are predicated on fact-claims and that both meaning and the facts themselves are subject to informed debate. In other words, the facts used and the conclusions reached in historical narratives as crafted by historians are not, in fact, arbitrary (nor are they ever definitive, obviously.)

That said, what I like about White's reading of professional historiography is that he forces historians to acknowledge their own subjectivity and to interrogate their own biases. I think our generation of graduate students takes that for granted, but we may be among the first to do so. Furthermore, I'm sympathetic to both Moses's and White's claim that history ought to be concerned with ethics (as well as be an ethical concern), but unlike White, and like Moses, I don't think it's responsible to craft ethical myths out of history without a kind of Weberian concern for self-criticism. In other words, I think that there's an inherent value in trying to be disinterested; I endorse an inductive rather than a deductive method in one's research, because despite his caveats about relativism = ethical responsibility, I'm not convinced by White that it's impossible to create historical narratives that are "better" because they're more factually accurate, not just more poetically/rhetorically skillful.

What do people think about Moses's claim that the ethical must be linked to the moral in order for it to be efficacious and/or meaningful? I'm skeptical about that.

-Chris