Abusing History

Review of Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (New York: Modern Library, 2009), ISBN 978-0-679-64358-6, Hardcover, $22.

I am proud to be a historian, and always have been, which is why reading Margaret MacMillan’s new exploration of the nature of historical study is so distressing.

Past provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, MacMillan is currently warden of St. Anthony’s College at Oxford University. Her book, Paris 1919, won numerous historical awards and was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times. Her new

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book appears as part of the Modern Library’s prestigious Chronicles Series. It received a good review in the New York Times and will probably receive good reviews elsewhere. Her words are bound to carry considerable weight.

In a number of ways, they deserve it. Soundly argued and well written, Dangerous Games is a good introduction to the kind of traditional questions thoughtful readers have been asking about history for years, though much of what MacMillan has to say is common sense. Few professional historians will find any surprises in it.

Of special interest are several statements concerning psychological matters, judgments that subtly and not-so-subtly reinforce the anti-psychological biases of mainstream history. Since they will likely pass general readers by unnoticed, they desperately need identifying as a number are shockingly uniformed, thoughtless, or downright wrong.

Although MacMillan begins with a few simple well-accepted observations, she invokes the authority of another specialty: “Memory, psychologists tell us, is a tricky business.” Presenting a collegial face to an often ignored fellow discipline is of strategic importance (she later goes on the attack) as she notes what everyone knows: that memory is “selective” and “malleable;” that in remembering we often “make our own roles more attractive or important”; and that we “edit out…what no longer seems appropriate or right.”

She makes an obligatory nod to French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who coined the term “collective memory” in the 1920s. (He meant by it “the things we think we know for certain about the past of our societies.”) “Collective memory,” she writes, “is more about the present than the past because it is integral to how a group sees itself.” Who could disagree?

Yet MacMillan places these mundane observations around a glaring bit of mis-information, which begins inno-

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cently enough. “In the 1990s,” she writes, “there was much public concern and excitement about recovered memories. Authoritative figures published books and appeared in the media claiming that it was possible to completely repress memories of painful and traumatic events.”

Now that the “panic has died down,” she writes, “we are ruefully admitting that there is no evidence at all that human beings repress painful memories” [italics added]. “If anything,” she writes, “the memories remain particularly vivid.” She cites a University of Toronto study as proof, ignoring psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s findings, the work of the International Society for the Study of Traumatic Stress, the experiences of tens of thousands of therapists over the last hundred years, the millions who have successfully recovered repressed painful memories in their therapies, and the evidence of history itself.

What produced our current mistaken belief was, she writes, “The preoccupation of the Romantics with the supernatural and the imagination, as well as later work, most notably that of Sigmund Freud, into the subconscious, [which] predisposed us to believe that the mind can play extraordinary tricks on us.” (What MacMillan is getting at here is unclear, since she has already noted that “psychologists tell us” the mind does play tricks, but in any case it is a good opportunity to do some Freud-bashing.)

She goes on to say that, “The director of the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust in Israel once said sadly that most of the oral histories that had been collected were unreliable” [italics added]. The reason? “Holocaust survivors thought, for example, that they remembered witnessing well-known atrocities when in fact they were nowhere near the place where the event happened.” There is a modicum of truth to these observations. No thinking person in the world doubts that memory is fallible. MacMillan is setting up a straw man, holding memory to an impossible standard of ac-

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curate perfect recall every time out. This badly distorts the picture by more than implying that because some memories contain errors, all memories are suspect. She lets herself off the critical hook by quoting someone else—a major authority to boot. By not qualifying the half-truth, MacMillan gives potential ammunition to those Holocaust deniers who are on the prowl for statements by reputable historians they can turn to their advantage. It is an example of the kind of thoughtless misuse of history MacMillan herself cautions us against. When she speaks of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work, however, the question of faulty memory somehow disappears: 22,000 statements were collected over two years, an “extraordinary and moving experience which brought the evils of apartheid into the open.”

Freud appears again as MacMillan resurrects the old saw about his ill-considered collaboration with Bullitt on the Woodrow Wilson project. She claims that, “Sigmund Freud did his own reputation no good when he teamed up with the American diplomat William Bullitt to write a biography of Woodrow Wilson. Freud never met Wilson and never read his intimate diaries, because Wilson did not keep them, yet he talked confidently of Wilson’s obsession with his father and his feelings of failure.”

So what? Examples of bad historical method are found everywhere, including the works of historians. The fact that Freud was not a historian, that his historical work was not always good history, and that many bad histories are also produced by historians does not negate the possibility that all may contain some psychological insight. I suspect MacMillan’s Freud-Bullitt reference is an oblique way of discrediting psychologically-oriented history, using it as an unfair stand-in for the vast amount of sound, carefully documented psychological history that has been written over the past 40 years.

MacMillan rightly takes to task the “many vociferous

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critics” who admit to not having read, or only partly read, the various studies they rail against (critical attacks on Frankland’s official British history of RAF bombing during World War II are put to good use here), yet she fails to mention the thousands of historians who automatically reject psychological approaches without having once explored a single work of critical and carefully researched psychological history.

Her dismissive comments about repressed memory and Freud allow MacMillan to use the words unconscious, trauma, and therapy inconsistently and without according them their technical meanings. She asks, “How often have we seen revolutionaries committed to building new worlds, slip back unconsciously into the habits and ways of those they have replaced?” Or: “In Spain after Franco’s death the Spanish came to “an unspoken agreement—the ‘pacto del olvido’—to forget the trauma of the civil war and the years of repression that followed.” Or: “Examining the past can be a sort of therapy as when we uncover knowledge about our own societies that has been overlooked or repressed.” Contradiction follows contradiction; at one moment there are no repressed memories, then, suddenly, there are.

MacMillan is too good a historian not to acknowledge the irrational, as when she speaks of “the unreasoning forces of ethnic nationalism.” At times she seems on the verge of accepting a psychodynamic process. “Many of the old conflicts and tensions remained frozen into place just under the surface of the Cold War,” she writes. “The end of that great struggle brought a thaw, and long-suppressed dreams and hatreds bubbled to the surface again.” Citing as proof Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian hostilities of the 1990s she seems to be accepting the existence of repressed material. Yet once again, the Rational Model comes to prevail. To MacMillan, Kuwait and Bosnia were nothing more than part of a rational political phenomenon, unscrupulous politicians—Saddam Hussein and Slobodan

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Milošević—fanning the flames of hitherto repressed ethnic hatreds.

Someone needs to ask how those “unreasoning” dreams and hatreds were “frozen” if they were not collectively repressed. She seems to have little understanding of historical trauma. MacMillan ignores the fact that repressed hatreds derive from real past traumas kept alive for decades, or even centuries, by intergenerational transmissions.

MacMillan writes that “History is about remembering the past, but it is also about choosing to forget.” I want to emphasize the “choosing to forget” part since she presents it as if it is all about rational decisions. Since she has nominally dispensed with the notion of repression and repressed memory, she can be cavalier about the work of others. During the Cold War, she writes, “The threat of nuclear war, of course, was always present, and from time to time, during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, it looked as if the last moment of the planet had come. But it did not, and in the end most of us simply forgot about the danger.” The principle of simple forgetting as applied here will come as news to Robert Jay Lifton and all those who have spent a lifetime observing and writing about the psychological and political consequences of the world’s massive collective repression of nuclear terror since 1945.

Much of what MacMillan has to say is sensible but often intertwined with thoughtless statements that run counter to the evidence, which will likely continue to feed the denials of the historical profession and no longer fit the 21^st century. Explicitly and implicitly denying and devaluing fundamental psychological processes can also have the effect of turning people away from seeking out potentially healing therapy.

By way of conclusion, MacMillan gives good humanist counsel, writing, “If the study of history does nothing

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more than teach us humility, skepticism, and awareness of ourselves, then it has done something useful.” Moreover, “History demands that we treat evidence seriously, especially when that evidence contradicts assumptions we have already made.” Good points all, if only historians could apply these principles to the psychological histories they still refuse to admit as a serious part of the historian’s craft.

One abuse MacMillan does not name is this continued failure of historians to accept the role of the irrational, of emotions and fantasies, and the power of repressed traumas and acknowledge them as causal agents in human behavior. Pretending or denying they do not exist, playing them down and rationalizing them away, as MacMillan does, keeps us from creating a more comprehensive history that is truly human.

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