Thinking in Fours – Part One

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A large frame quadrant at the Beijing Ancient Observatory, published public domain and copyright free.

Quadrant Diagrams

I’ve a soft spot for quadrant diagrams and have put them to use in various places over the years – for example, here, in Public History Weekly to think about the ‘institution’ and ‘destitution’ of pasts, and here to reflect on the ethics of historical identification.

Quadrant diagrams can be problematic, of course, if the terms they are made up of are polarized in a strictly binary manner. Furthermore, they are two-dimensional, giving positive and negative values on two axes, where the world is three-dimensional in space. Quadrant diagrams tend to the static also, since they denote logical contrasts, and they typically lack a fourth-dimensional element and a time that ticks.

It seems to me that they can have great value, however, as ways of working out the implications of a position or proposition, and in helping to scheme out alternatives. I’ve found that at leat four times in recent weeks, whilst reading, and I have found myself pencilling quadrants in the margins of books to help me think with (and against) their authors.

This post fleshes out the first of those scribbles in the context of an argument about history, responsibility and reparations for slavery. Parts 2-4 will look at arguments about aims in history education, arguments in Indian historiography, and, finally, the contrast between knowing (and not knowing) and believing (and not believing) histories.

It’s probable that quadrant diagrams are more valuable as things to break than as things to make and that their value is less to articualte binary concepts than to help test their limits and the limits of the conceptualisations we can build by combining binaries.

Legacy and Responsibility

I’ve been reading Thomas Harding’s White Debt: The Demerara uprising and Britain’s legacy of slavery (2022) on my early morning commute recently and finished it last week. Finished in the sense that I got to the end of the book, but not to the end of the issues it raises – linked to the topics it discusses and to the type of writing it embodies (what Megill calls ‘para-history’ (1)). I need to read it again and soon, to start exploring those issues with the care they deserve.

In his ‘Postscript’ Harding argues in support of the British paying reparatoins for slavery and says: ‘This is not about feeling guilty for what our ancestors did before we were born, it is about addressing the legacy of slavery that still impacts people today’ (Harding, 2022: 265). This sentence embeds a number of binaries, some of which explicitly contain both of the terms polarized and others in which only one term is explicitly present. An example of the former is the contrast between the ‘us’ whose ancestors’ actions are at stake, and those ancestors (‘them’); and, for example, between ‘feeling’ and ‘acting’ (my gloss on ‘addressing’). Examples of the latter include: the contrasts implied but not stated between the time of these ancestors (‘before we were born’) and our time; and between ‘us’ who will be doing the ‘addressing’ (through reparation) and those who will benefit from reparation, and who are still feeing the impacts of historic slavery now (a second ‘them’).

The diagram below tidies up what I scribbled in the margins on page 265 of my copy of Harding’s book, and focuses on the ‘us’ and the first ‘them’ in Harding’s text (‘our ancestors’), and on the contrast between ‘now’ and ‘then’. Perhaps it helps make explicit some possibilites that might be thought to be latent in Harding’s grammar.

Figure 1: History and responsibility, Schema 1

Quadrant 2 embodies the kind of responsibility that Harding doesn’t advocate, and, indeed, there may be good reasons for not setting this kind of responsibility out. The kind of claim that might be embodied in that quadrant seems absurd – in the sense of being inconsistent with conventional ideas about time and responsibility. ‘We’ didn’t ‘do’ these things – they took place before ‘we’ existed and ‘our’ intentions (and therefore scope for culpability) had no bearing on the outcome. What was done was done by ‘them’ and done ‘then.’

The kind of responsibility posited in Quadrant 2 remains absurd as long as we think individually (about the individuals who make up the ‘we’) or as long as we think in temporally-restricted ways (locating that ‘we’ solely in ‘our’ now in the twenty-first century). If the ‘we’ is a transcendant entity, bigger than and shaping individuals, such as a ‘family’, a nation, or a culture, however, then the apparent absurdity of holding agents in one time responsible for the actions of agents in another melts away. If ‘we’ is institutionalised (the ‘we’ of the British state, the Church of England, a family, and so on) then transcendance is factored in: that is a ‘we’ that is temporally extended across time, a corporate person that integrates individual people into itself and whose responsibilities, predicates and assets can transcend the limits of ‘our’ individual lives and stretch over centuries (2).

Quadrant 3 seems to isolate responsibility in the past also, insulating slavery and the perpetrators of slavery in the past – ‘what’ they did before we were born belongs ‘then’ and is effectively insulated from now (‘our’ present – the time in which ‘we’ can ‘act’ and be held responsible for acting).

Harding’s argument lives on the left hand side of the diagram – in Quadrants 4 and 1 and is interestingly unclear about exactly where it might sit. ‘People today’ are impacted by past action but even though Harding argues for ‘our’ responsibility ‘now,’ his form of words avoids explicitly identifying an agent responsible for these impacts. ‘Slavery’ is made responsible (through the use of the genitive ‘of’) for its ‘legacy,’ even though it is hard to see how we can thinkig of this ‘it’ as having intentions and as acting, and, therefore, as having responsibility.

A reformulation of the quadrant diagram can, perhaps, help, in turning apparent semantic possibilities and impossibilities into historical relationships and responsibilities.

Figure 2: History and responsibility, Schema 2

This forumulation introduces the arrow of time (the ‘now’/’then’ axis) and it introduces two arrows of causation, operating across time, leading from ‘them,’ here denoting slave-ownders, to ‘us.’ The arrow of causation is differentiated into two: one relating to an ‘us’ impacted negatively by the consequences of enslavement and exploitation (first and foremost captured Africans and their descendants) and the other relating to an ‘us’ impacted positively by those consequences (first and foremost families and institutions whose wealth now has roots in capital and other resources accumulated in the time of slavery) (2).

The question now becomes about relationships of responsibility and entitlement arising in the present between those who are the inheritors of positive and those who are the inheritors of negative distributions of material wealth and of poverty and of their cumulative impacts over time; between those who are the inheritors of positive and those who are the inheritors of negative positioning in cultures and ideologies originating in enslavemenet, and so on.

Talk of inheritance, of course, points to strutures: to interlocking matrices of institutions that enable and perpetuate distributions of resource (law courts, archives, and so on); and to ideologies, those interpersonal networks of discourses and frameworks of meaning and implication that evolve in time and that carry past conceptualisations into presents and futures.

Conclusion

Harding’s book is a very powerful and a very moving read and the project of researching and writing that it arises from was motivated, as Harding explains, by a sense of family responsibilty. The book succeeds in articulating history, responsibility and reparation graphically and very compellingly.

The marginalia on marginalia that I’ve elaborated here contribute very little by comparison. Nevertheless, scribbling, interrogating and tarrying with a quadrant diagram can, perhaps, help clarify some of the ways in which arrows of time and causalilty can help break down neat logical separations that can serve to help isolate and insulate both agency and responsibility and past and present.

References

(1) Allan Megill discusses para-history in the following 2002 review article – Megill, A. 2002. ‘Two para-historical approaches to atrocity’, History and Theory 41 (4): 104–23. For Megill, ‘para- historical’ enquiry mixes historical and moral questions (so that, for example, ‘who made it happen, who allowed it to happen?’ is no longer just an empirical question)

(2) The Trevelyan family, who recently made some reparation for what members of the family had done during the period of slavery explicitly framed things in collective terms – family responsibility (for example, here). One of the signal achievements of UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery project is to show how deeply slave holding was embedded in British society – contributing to the accumulation of wealth in families across the social spectrum.

The Ancient of Days

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“The Ancient of Days,” 1794 (Frotispiece to Europe: A Prophecy)
© The Trustees of the British Museum

One of the things I did on my second teaching practice, as a trainee teacher in Norwich in 1993, was teach Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) to an English A Level Class. It was a privilege to do so, although I doubt I taught the novel well – my ‘main’ subject specialism was History and English was ‘subsidiary.’ I expect and hope that my class will have forgotten all about my teaching, but I hope at least some of them remember the novel.

I relished the prospect of teaching Dickens. I’d been entranced by Fagin, Bill Sykes and Nancy in Oliver! (1968) in the early 1970s and then by violent effigies like Wackford Squeers, in Dickens period TV drama in the late 1970s. I had studied Dickens’ Great Expectations and Little Dorrit in English Literature at school, and had read him for pleasure – although I read Hardy more. The Early Victorian period fascinated me as an undergraduate – its Chartists, utilitarians and utopian reformers. All of this coalesced in a kind of recognition and imagined home-coming when visiting my maternal grandmother’s home town, Hetton Le Hole, around the time of her funeral in 1988. Passing Primitive and Wesleyan Methodist chapels, old grocers’ shops, working men’s clubs felt like revisiting the scene of so many familiar dramas.

Primitive Methodist Chapel, Hetton Le Hole.

Finally, Hard Times had begun to impinge on my imagination during my teacher training when I began to be interested in the history of education and historic educational practices. The peculiarities of the Gradgrindian world view, modelled so closely on Jeremy Betham‘s ‘fiction’-busting, and the detail of the monitorial system of education both became very interesting in this context, as did the Victorian ‘object lesson‘ and a number of other matters relating to Victorian pedagogies, from the National Schools to John Ruskin.

I don’t remember much about my teaching of Hard Times – although I do remember that one student inferred that Stephen Blackpool was obsessed by money because he kept saying ‘mun’ (i.e. ‘must’). It looks – judging by my annotations to the text (e.g., below) – like I was particularly interested in questions of plot structure and homologies between narrative components and transformations – I was reading about Propp, early Barthes and Levi Strauss at the time, and mistook plot diagrams and matrices for narratology. As I read those annotations now, this was me trying (and not entirely managing) to work through the homology –

  • Gradgrind : his daughter : : Jupe : his daugher
Annotations in my copy of Hard Times (1984), Summer 1993

I revisited all of this last week, as I started reflecting on something that had stuck in my mind ever since I’d read Hard Times closely in order to teach it in 1993. This was the common reference to compasses in both Dickens Hard Times (1984: 184-5) and in Blake’s Ancient of Days (1794) and Newton (1795-c.1805), and what seemed to me at the time to be the common meanings attached to engaging with the world with compasses, geometry and associated forms of rationality. ‘Had Dickens read Blake?’ I wondered.

Eduardo Paolozzi’s Newton at The British Library
© David Olivier 2006 (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)

I had wondered this but I had never asked anyone who might have known the answer or done anything, myself, to research it. That could easily be done, I’m sure – there must be studies of Dickens’ probate records and scholars must have asked what books he owned and what he had read (at least one such enquiry turns-up rapidly online). All I knew – as I put it here last week – was that ‘Blake’s star only really rose once the pre-Raphaelites picked him up’ so it was unlikely that Dickens had read him, but that it was also true ‘Wordsworth knew him’ and that it was possible, therefore, that others were aware of his work, even, perhaps, in the 1840s and 50s.

The Blake/Dickens question occurred to me again last week, for the first time in a long time, perhaps because I had recently finished S.F. Said‘s marvellous – and marvellously Blakean – Tyger (2022). I asked English scholars I knew via Twitter the question, and, as a result, learned the following, thanks to the generous and erudite Adam Roberts.

Twitter thread 18th October 2022

As Roberts said, then, it seems very unlikely – although of course not impossible – that Dickens had ever seen – let alone been influenced by – Blake’s Newton or his Ancient of Days.

Where external breadcrumb trails aren’t available – such as – for the sake of argument – a record of a copy of Europe: A Prophecy in Dickens’ library records – we must rely on internal textual evidence, and there is a inscription under the British Museum’s copy of the Ancient of Days that looks, at first, to give us some internal evidence to work with (the inscription reproduced below). I spent some minutes comparing this and Dickens’ ‘compasses’ paragraph. There more I looked at the two, the more parallels began to appear and the more convinced I became, despite the facts of the matter, that the passages were linked.

However, on checking back with the British Museum’s online curatorial notes, it became clear that this text wasn’t in Blake’s hand but ‘annotated in pen in a near-contemporary hand, possibly of George Cumberland’ and, also, that the text wasn’t Blake’s text but ‘verses from Milton.’

In the end, then, I was asking the wrong question – in 1993 and again last week. The question should have been ‘We know that Blake read Milton – he wrote a prophecy all about him after all – had Dickens done so also and, if yes, was this where both of them picked-up the compass metaphor as a striking figure for ambitious and controlling intellect?’ What explains the parallels between Blake and Dickens here isn’t any direct textual link but the wider traditions and tropes of English poetry.

I had spotted the parallel but not the link. George Cumberland – if that’s whose handwriting that was – had seen both the parallel and the intertextual reference that explained it.

A Letter to Peter Seixas

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It was with great sadness that I learned, last week, that the great history education scholar and educator Professor Peter Seixas would shortly be leaving us, after a long and heroic struggle with cancer over more than a decade.

Peter died yesterday, Sunday the 9th October. Colleagues and friends were invited to share messages with him in the days before he died – the context for the message that I am posting here.

I’m reposting my message to Peter here as a tribute to him and opportunity to celebrate aspects of his work.

I have added hyperlinks to the items mentioned in my letter and corrected some minor errors.

From a UBC interview with Peter Seixas

Dear Peter,  

My good friend Lindsay Gibson tells me that you will be leaving us this Sunday. I am greatly saddened to hear this – a world without your example is a poorer world for us all in history education, and, of course the more so for all who know you.  

I am heartened, however, by the opportunity that this sad news gives me to salute you as a scholar and an inspiration, and to thank you for your work. So often, there isn’t the opportunity to do this when we lose somebody, and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity.  When we no longer have you, we – and all those who seek to continue and to deepen traditions of humane learning – will still have your work. It is a towering achievement and surely the richest and most multifaceted body of history education research and reflection I know.  

The covers of Seixas (ed) 2004 and Seixas and Morton (2013)

Peter Lee – to whom I am forever grateful for so much – introduced me to your work in the late 1990s when I was beginning my doctoral studies with him at the Institute of Education, and when I was beginning to think systematically about historical interpretation (or ‘accounts’ as we sometimes call that).  Your classic paper analysing and comparing kids’ responses to The Searchers and Dances With Wolves as representations was vital in helping me get started and, I expect, I need now to return to it to see what further inspiration it can give. That paper helped restructure my thinking about interpretation in many ways – not least in prompting me to consider hermeneutic questions and the assumptions that viewers bring to the worlds they construe. It also helped me reflect on my practice, since I was still, then, a history teacher and head of history with classes of history students to teach. I had never properly considered the power, and the challenges, of working with changing non-disciplinary interpretations and representations before reading that paper. The paper was a game changer. It also focused me on getting my students to think about the importance of the moment of interpretation, and the discourses and genres available at that time, in shaping how (hi)stories are told. In addition, the paper resonated with me personally, as a consumer of (hi)stories. The Searchers had terrified me – in a fascinated way – when I watched it on TV as a child in the early 1970s: it seemed to come from an over-drawn, hate-filled and rather lurid (technicolour) world. I had never made the connection with the themes explored, so very differently, in Dances With Wolves until I read your paper, and it was really powerful to reflect on historicity and how and why the ‘presents’ expressed through both films were so different. I watched Dances With Wolves again last week – it just turned-up as a recommendation and that recalled your paper to mind, again. It struck me, watching it, just how far historicity has shifted since the film came out. In the early 90s, Dances With Wolves seemed very much of the moment, but it looked, last week, like a message from a more innocent world – pre-Trump, pre-Charlottesville, pre-Putin, pre-Bolsonaro, pre-Brexit. Not for the first time since 2016, I was left feeling nostalgic for ‘futures past’.  

Marketting materials for The Searchers (1956) and Dances With Wolves (1990)

Peter Lee also introduced me to your work on historical consciousness, just when your impactful and world-leading Centre at UBC was being set up around 2001. Again, I owe Peter more than I can express for doing that. The thinking you brought together for the Centre’s launch, which I followed at a distance in my reading, became foundational for the work I have done since. I confess that Jörn Rüsen gave me a headache when I first started reading him – I’m made of stronger stuff now and can now cope. Your 2004 paper with Penny Clark on kids’ responses to the troubling representations of First Nations in the murals in the British Columbia Legislative Buildings, on the other hand, was immediately clear to me and has resonated with so many of the things I have worked on since. Like your paper on reading films, this one was a superb model of how to do empirical work well in history education. It also brought theory and empirical data into interaction in inspiringly productive ways. It helped raise my game – I hope – as an empirical researcher, then. More importantly, perhaps, it broadened my thinking about why history education might matter – and how – and about what we might achieve in history education with and for the kids we work with. Thinking about how we are encouraging kids to think about the past became a vital task for me and your work with Penny, bridging Nietzche and Rüsen, provided some very powerful concepts for that. Were we, for example, encouraging identification through history education – eliding the differences between past and present in troubling ways? Were we, perhaps, encouraging critical approaches that treated the past as an object that we might judge, comfortably, from the comfort of our ‘superior’ now? Were we, alternatively, thinking historically about the past and about the moments at which representations were made and consumed, and were we doing so in ways that helped kids reflect on the interactions between past, present and future in cognitively responsible ways? These remain vital questions and, if anything, have become so much more important in recent years when the public past has become – rightly – such a central topic of challenge, revision and contestation.  

Extract from the discussion of the BC Legislative Building murals at First Nations: Land rights and Environmentalism in British Columbia website.

Your work on the ‘Big Six’ historical thinking concepts has also been vital for my thinking and practice as a history educator, and it has been my pleasure and privilege to discuss this work in many parts of the world – Kazakhstan, Armenia, Brazil and Lebanon, for example – over the last decade. Your summary expositions of these concepts – online, through the impressive resource banks that your Centre created, through The Big Six book and, also, through your remarkable chapter on them in Joined Up History – has been so very useful for so many of us, as has your modelling of how we might put these concepts to work in planning for progression in historical understanding. The model has also been very powerful in helping me think about how history is configured in curricula in different contexts. ‘Why is taking an ‘ethical perspective’ so central in Canada and backgrounded or absented in England?’, I have often wondered. I was debating this very question earlier this week, using your visual model that puts the ethical perspective front and centre in the ‘history head’, with student teachers in Leeds and London. It is hard to think of a book that I have recommended my students to consult so frequently in our library at IOE since 2014, and I know that it has been vital for my colleagues in London and more widely also. Thank you for this work, on behalf of all my colleagues and students.  

The Historical Thinking Project webpage.

Finally, I can’t reflect on the power of your work for me without mentioning the impact of your dialogue with Andreas Körber, on translation and its discontents in 2016. You were so generous in sharing that paper ahead of publication and I was humbled to be asked to comment on relations between ‘interpretations’ and ‘accounts’: thank you! I don’t recall what I said but I hope it was helpful. What struck – and continues to strike – me about the paper was the scholarly virtues and generosity that it embodied. In the paper, you reflected on the limitations of US and Canadian approaches to history education, pointing to ways in which German traditions might complement and enhance them. You were also very generous in pointing to the features of historical sense making – highllighted in Project CHATA work on accounts and in my work on interpretations – that Canadian and American traditions of research had underplayed, sometimes confused, or simply not addressed. Thank you! I’ve noted, in the last year or so in particular, very encouraging new work emerging from Canada and from the US on these issues and I can’t help but think that this is your influence working through in positive ways, yet again. I found this paper a tremendous encouragement and I hope to use it to drive new work on interpretation in the coming years, in dialogue with US and Canadian work and – if I have the skill – with German work on ‘deconstruction.’  

I don’t want to burden you more at this time with a long message, so I’ll say no more about the multiple and fundamental ways in which your work has transformed my practice and my research and done good in the history education world more broadly.  

I don’t want to end, however, without thanking you for your personal kindness also. I was so thrilled, in 2009 publishing my first co-edited book, when you agreed to look at it and write an endorsement for the publishers: thank you for that encouragement and for your support. I must also thank you for your generosity in commenting on the guide I wrote for senior high history teachers on teaching interpretation in 2015/16. It was a long text and I had doubts about it. Your encouragement and appreciative comments were vital in helping me revise and finish the text. I also introduced reflecting on historicity as a vital consideration in my introduction to the text at your suggestion – thank you for making that vital point.  

Vale, Peter, and profound thanks. I have never met you personally, but I am forever in your debt. I know that this is true also for so many history educators here in England – and for our students from around the world to whom we introduce your work. You will continue to be a beacon, inspiration, and model for us all as we try to move forward in uncertain times.  

I will continue to think with you – I hope – as long as I continue to think.   

Warm regards and appreciation in sorrow and in hope.

Arthur 

A link to Peter Seixas’ profile at the University of British Columbia.