musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

What really happened?


Tell me, what are you supposed to do when there’s more than one version of the same event: when you have multiple choices? Tell me what you are supposed to think when there are  a variety of remembered histories, each claiming its own validity, its own proof. If it was a tale of conquest, a battle, or even an argument, is it really only the victor who gets to decide the truth? If so, then what about the other versions? Are they, by default, merely discarded? Forgotten? Does any lingering truth still inhere within the fragments of a midden in a razed village? It’s a question I sometimes ask myself if I awaken, cold and moon-wrapped, in the middle of a dream-filled night: is there a truth that can incorporate differences in perspective?

To confess belief in an ‘alternate truth’ -especially in these days- is hazardous, to say the least; to wander outside acceptable opinion is akin to treachery. But if Truth is something comprised of what is in accordance with accepted facts, then is everything else not Truth? Shouldn’t the other views at least merit some discussion, some context? As Plato once wrote, understanding and knowledge is founded on dialectical exchange – on the exposure of one’s views to the scrutiny of another, in showing that one view is true and another false.[i] To qualify, then, a claim should, at the very least, have multiple sources of input. Multiple defenders.

Of course, some issues are more open for discussion than others: to say that orange is the most beautiful colour is merely an opinion that can be argued; to assert that a parliamentary system is superior to a presidential system might permit a rigorous debate. But to insist, for example, that the Spartans (and other Greek forces) beat the Persians in the battle of Thermopylae sometime around 480 BCE would be a more difficult sell. Of course, one could concentrate on different aspects of the battle to identify the winners and losers: the Greeks, although vastly outnumbered, did hold off the Persians for three days -a brave, though temporary, win. There are many ways of looking at things.

Perhaps history, then, might benefit from competing viewpoints; might avoid angry rebuttals if only the victors get their visions aired; maybe things didn’t really happen that way… Sometimes a later, revisionist telling of history adds a more nuanced view of the facts, of course, but it’s often difficult to distinguish those changes from wishful thinking, from the Weltanschauung of the era.

And yet, sometimes there may be value to a balanced approach which allows a fuller appreciation of the conditions surrounding the events in question; that acknowledges different viewpoints as to causes and effects; an approach that seeks to mediate. History, by definition is about something that happened in the past, albeit perhaps with effects that have affected current events. It might profit from different ways of thinking about them.

As may be all too obvious thus far, I am only a receptacle for what I have been told about antiquity; as a non-historian, I am fascinated by less traditional ways of thinking about the past than I was taught in school: that there are many pasts -many versions of it, at least- and learning about each simply adds a richer context into which I can situate them, understand them.

So I was intrigued to learn that this multifactorial version of history is not merely a recent approach.[ii] ‘For the Aztecs, history didn’t require textbook-like consensus. In their understanding, truth wasn’t singular and could accommodate different perspectives. This pattern had almost certainly been part of their social practice for many generations, as they sat around campfires, talking and telling stories, trying to build common cause with the friends they’d made along their route… they turned it into an art form, a formalised way of keeping history that literally depended on multiple speakers standing up at different moments.’

But, by diluting the facts, and pointing no fingers so as not to embarrass or shame their guests, the Aztecs did not shy away from truths that transcended differences in perspective. Indeed, even if they found their guests had different recollections of the events in question, history and those who had taken part in it on whichever side, still lived within each of them. ‘History, they believed, was long – the trail of meandering footprints wound on for years.’ And so, they turned history into a genre, a formalized way of keeping history that literally depended on a variety of speakers coming forth to give their own versions.

Obviously, many historical events are sufficiently distant that nowadays it would be impossible to recreate that participatory involvement, and yet modern day historians perform a similar ceremony by searching whatever literature is available about the events in question and then trying to balance any contradictory evidence. Distance, and time usually lend impartiality to such investigations; each of any of the contemporary reports discovered hopefully represent one of the ‘multiple speakers standing up at different moments’.

Still, I would think that the changing Zeitgeist in different epochs makes it difficult to ferret through what at the time was felt relevant to record or pass on as legend, because that, in turn, must be sifted through our own cultural sieves. What to believe no doubt looms as large now as it did at the time being studied, in spite of our hope that we are being neutral, objective.

It is as difficult now to transcend our own cultural baggage, as it was for the ancients their own. Can we ever understand a different culture, let alone situate ourselves in a different era to test it? What really constitutes knowledge of a past when it is often retrievable only through the second, or third-hand accounts of witnesses; when the traditional understanding of the truth or reliability of the facts is best when, as Plato believed, it is founded on a dialectical exchange of views and exposing them to the investigations and opinions of others?

Of course, like the Aztecs, modern historians try to evaluate as many sources as are available, and meld them into some form of compromise – some type of majoritarian opinion. The problem, of course, is that whatever lies undiscovered in those pottery shards in the razed village, may be closer to another truth…

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[i] https://psyche.co/ideas/to-find-the-truth-we-must-establish-the-meaning-of-falsehood

[ii] https://aeon.co/essays/for-the-wanderers-who-became-the-aztecs-history-was-a-chorus-of-voices

gozzter

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