In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn provides some of the most useful correctives to the mindless American triumphalism of many textbooks. When I say “correctives” it might seem that I am implying the existence of absolute objectivity. I do not mean to. I am referring to relative objectivity. There are countless reasons why our peculiar little human vantage point gives us only a fragmentary and systematically distorted perspective on the world. We can see only about two octaves of the electromagnetic spectrum, which certainly extends to well beyond fifty. Similarly, the space and time scales we are aware of are a minuscule segment of the possible ones. Ours appears to be chiefly the result of the size of the earth, whose …show more content…
Zinn is correct that it is naive to pretend to it in any absolute sense. Any historical account is massively selective. (Some have suggested that the ability of the Internet to capture all text being created meant the end of history, others that it meant the beginning of the possibility of genuine history). Selectivity doesn't mean it is exactly false but it is obviously incomplete. Just as a three-dimensional object can be justifiably viewed from an indefinite number of angles, historical changes too can be viewed from many different quite legitimate perspectives. These are not "objective" because they provide only a partial view of their object, one constrained by the viewer's own location; but neither are they necessarily "subjective" because they can each provide legitimate evidence supporting their perspective and they can, at least in principle, be combined in a way that provides a much fuller, richer, more "objective" view of their focus of attention, one that often increases our ability to understand its past and predict its future. So while I think I agree with Zinn's position in regards to the absence of absolute objectivity, I am not sure I can agree with his vocabulary for expressing it. Or at least not with a naive interpretation of it. "Perspectivism" can be used to replace both the categories of "objectivity" and that of "subjectivity." All we can do is compare evidence and falsify previous illusions; but how well and earnestly we do this is the whole point. Not whether we have reached "objectivity" but how successfully we have falsified some specific previous illusion or how well we have produced evidence for some previously unrecognized links among specific phenomena. "How well" is the whole point. And "how well" can only be evaluated on the basis of specific evidence and specific interpretations of that evidence. Some models are vastly better supported than others. Some endure far longer than