Trevor Getz
must be congratulated for putting up a colossal target for everyone to shoot
at! His question should properly be split into two parts: Whose world? And
whose history? Yet, the first part of the question is no question at all: it's
everybody's world, powerful or powerless, rich or poor, living or dead, for the
ghost, left unpacified, might still be speaking to Hamlet and us! For the
second part of the question, no easy answer is readily available. For obvious
reasons, only some are professed historians. They write from their own
perspectives, employing whatever archival materials they have access to and
cognitive or analytic tools available to them. It would be a shame to blame
them for not exerting themselves to cover everybody and everything that cries
out to be covered. How can those engaged in this Herculean task of writing the
world's history be expected to do justice with equanimity to each and all even
if they are consciously and conscientiously committed to do so? Since,
proverbially speaking, "no [wo]man is well pleased to have his all neglected,
be it ever so little," there is and should always be a pool of latent histories
for historians to jump into in terms of scope and coverage.
As for
those trumphalist accounts that we daily encounter in textbooks, newspapers,
policy statements, government resolutions, etc, they are reminders of the
presence of various forms of haunting centrisms, including ethnocentrism, at
work in our human psyche, such as those leading to the Christian dismissal as
vain of all human efforts in pursuit of an omniscient omnipotent pure good God!
Imperfect as all these are, they are all of what we have and we cannot easily
discard them in favor of pure and perfect knowledge, something that might be
eternally absent from us humans. Show us one single account that is not at all
biased of human history? Show us one single form of political enterprise that
is devoid of unjustified oppressive violence? Centrisms lead to entrenched
dogma, while ignorance breeds self-congratulated conceits. Maybe that's pretty
much the human lot. But that's also where humility, empathy, and dialogue shine
out. And reflecting on the contours of world historiography, especially in
connection with the WHA, I do feel that the pilgrims of world history do
represent progress by consciously embracing the whole world, by crossing the
boundaries of existing entities, and by choosing interaction over isolation as
the way for human progress.
As a
late-comer to world history, I do not claim to know better than each and every
one of my colleagues. In fact, I am never confident that we moderns (in the
neutral sense of the term) necessarily know better than the ancients,
especially in handling such interpersonal or social cohesives as love, law, and
order. As a student of European witchcraft history, I am never confident that
those inquisitors exhibited more barbarous cruelty than their modern
counterparts. But that is not the real issue, I mean, the comparison of degrees
of "barbarity." What is at issue is the degree of human efforts in sustaining
the bonds of love and order among peoples, and to that end, empathy is the
prerequisite for real understanding, for confronting real or perceived evils,
who would fail to [re]act?
Mr.
Sun Yue teaches at the College of Foreign Languages, works for the
Global History Center, Capital Normal University, and edits its affiliated Global History Review, an annual
publication in Chinese featuring the work of both international and Chinese
scholars. His current research interest is the Early Modern
European Witch-Hunt, and global history. He can be contacted at suny_wood@yahoo.com. |
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