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Physics and mathematics remain the pride of human civilisation as they serve to remind us of our ability to symbolise every possible natural phenomenon. Our ability to isolate variables and experiment has helped us straighten out things that seemed arbitrary or mechanical. Our equations and formulae seem adequate for the sole reason that all variables are taken into account and we are able to perceive constants and further symbolise them as numbers - something that the social sciences can never aspire to do. It is for this very reason that subjects that concern themselves with the study of or are related to human experiences cannot be scientific, however rigorous the employed methodologies are. The unknowns are far greater and our templates are inadequate.
History, considered a discipline within social sciences, can never aspire to be a scientific field of study, much like other fields of enquiry relating to or involving human experiences - the sole reason being our inability to ‘templatise’ human experiences. The measure of how ‘scientific’ a discipline is, is based on the number of variables that can be controlled to achieve repeatable results.
History, among all such studies, requires special attention, given the recent spate of news regarding people taking a special interest in learning about their past. Most historians agree that history, as an academic subject, faces methodological and interpretative challenges. For any field of study, symbols remain essential. They standardise experience and remove ambiguity. The system of symbols we’ve adopted - language – cannot symbolise finer human experiences and the other unknowns that arise during the course of our social intercourse. The variables we control are small in number compared to the ones that we face in the guise of problems. As a result, conditioned responses always seem inadequate in the face of new problems. Language, as a template to symbolise every conceivable thought, is fast proving inadequate. Our quest to invent, discover, be creative and break new barriers will always face this problem.
Institutions are born out of frustration when there is a perpetual need to symbolise every experience or create templates. These templates go on to become institutions that are often, as history suggests, hijacked by opportunists. As a result, history, to a large extent, sets the value systems of a society. Our reactions to how virtuous or iniquitous an action is, is largely based on this very conditioning. The fact that each religion has its own set of moral, ethical, objective view of things serves to illustrate the point.
Knowledge is bound only by the templates we have adopted – a lens through which we try to get a peek into the universe that has far more variables and unknowns than we can possibly process or imagine. As a result, intellect is only a measure of one’s ability to manipulate or rationalise thoughts based on the different symbols she/he has acquired.
It might be even that history itself is a social institution. As I had written in my >post , new social institutions are built on the basis of old ones, often failing to see the need to reconsider their validity in the present context; or the idea of them being merely abstractions which, with every step blurs the boundary between our subjective reality and the rhythms of the physical natural world.
Similar to all other social institutions, history has always been and will remain a refuge that promises a sense of comfort and security to the majority or a vehicle that's waiting to be hijacked.
sriram.s@thehindu.co.in
