Welcome to Monday Methods – a weekly feature we discuss, explain and explore historical methods, historiography, and theoretical frameworks concerning history.
Despite the less than stellar quip in the title, today's topic is a rather serious one and has been inspired by users /u/cordis_melum and /u/StoryWonker who raised some of these issues in the sub recently. Namely, it is about the question, what an ethical engagement with our field and our material as historians can and should look like.
This point has been raised in the past extensively by my colleague /u/snapshot52 in his MM post about Ethical Engagement of researchers with tribes but going beyond the (massive) question of researcher's impact and engagement with indigenous peoples, it is known that archaeology, history, and anthropology have based their research, in part, on data obtained via unethical practices (e.g. looting of artifacts, forced contact of otherwise uncontacted indigenous peoples).
In addition, historically, academia was and is used on behalf of and to justify ideologies and institutions that we do not agree with and consider unethical (e.g. colonialism and imperialism, scientific racism). Even today, parts of our body of knowledge come from such problematic research sourced by material data obtained via dubious methods.
This of course begs several questions (as /u/cordis_melum pointed out): What is our duties as inheritors of that academic tradition? Is it possible for us to rectify those wrongs? How far should we go to make things right? How do we try to not repeat past mistakes, and how do we avoid making mistakes like this for future generations of academics?
However, even if we deal with these difficult and very large questions that concern ideological institutions or outright political (ab)use of history for contemporary political goals, the question of ethical engagement is one that can even concern public parts of our field that at first seem unsuspicious.
Going into the specific examples asked about by /u/StoryWonker in our recent AMA on the new CoD game: When working on or engaging with media products such as CoD WWII or Battlefield 1, we as historians are aware that what is portrayed is at least inspired by the sacrifices and suffering of real human beings in the past. How ethical is it to support or work on an entertainment product that turns these real sacrifices and sufferings into, well, entertainment.
Is it ethical, say, for a museum to offer its artifacts for photogrammetry so developers can create in-game models from them, or to give developers access to otherwise-closed archives so they can more accurately capture the experience of war as it pertains to shooting dehumanised simulacra of the very real dead?
Surprisingly, there has been little reflection on these questions within the field at large: Archaeologists do have guidelines and reflections on dealing with material culture and (historical) Anthropologists have also developed ways to ethically engage with living subjects of their study but historical academia has to some extent been missing their chance to integrate some of these thoughts and ideas into the field in a generalized way.
How much responsibility we have in engage with the public is always going to be a point for discussion in the field most likely but to develop methods and write reflections what kind of ethical engagement we should have with the people of the past has despite its obvious importance never really been codified or written about in an exhaustive manner.
The question whether the above raised questions can even be answered in a satisfying manner is one not really asked so far but one that is still with us in our work.
Discuss these questions and your opinions on such matters below in the comments. I am curious as to hear what opinions people have on this.
How ethical is it to support or work on an entertainment product that turns these real sacrifices and sufferings into, well, entertainment.
I actually asked almost exactly that question of a panel at the WW2 museum this weekend, when the topic was "Hitler in Satire", and they asked the question of when it was appropriate to make humour and entertainment out of the holocaust and the Nazis. With, of course, the ultimate example, "Springtime for Hitler". I suggested that the question they were asking was merely a subset of the larger question of using WW2 as a source of entertainment. They sidestepped the question.
Sadly, the news article has since been taken down, but I first came across the ethical problem when we (I handed over the cheque) donated some $35k to the RSA, a New Zealand veterans group. The headline on the six O'clock news was "RSA donation by gamers concerns peace advocates". They did not think that a game which involved entertainment from vehicles of war should be associated with the RSA. The RSA said basically "we're happy to take any money to advance the cause of our veterans, and also that the Americans know where New Zealand is"
A while later, we wanted to have a player event at the German tank museum in Munster. The museum were not massively pleased. They wrote an open letter. http://ftr.wot-news.com/2014/04/29/opinion-of-munster-tank-museum-on-world-of-tanks/
In principle, World of Tanks brings only such content, that goes directly against the values the tank museum tries to convey: - clinically clean battlefield; tanks without other weapon systems; techno-fetishism without real background; loss of historical context ; All in all, World of Tanks brings to millions of people exactly the opposite message that we want to convey.
We were apparently not their best friend. And, in fairness, if there's any one country in the world where the horrors of war are likely to be taken seriously by academia, it's Germany.
However, the letter continued.
Why do we then allow this virtual enemy of ours to enter our house? Does the Panzermuseum give up its approach up to look at tanks, war and violence critically? Not at all. The logic is very simple. We cannot prevent World of Tanks from spreading its primitive depiction of history anyway. It happens globally 24/7. What can we then do? Earlier, the Museums as “temples of education” turned up their noses and focused only on the “right” audience. We do believe however, that this approach is no longer helpful. We use another approach: we appeal to the audience of this game by bringing them into the Museum with the support of WOT. These players, interested in tanks, are brought to the museum throught the Wargaming event. Here, they encounter also the historical original tanks and here, they also encounter (just a little, but soon, a LOT more) history education, that brings the objects in the game into the interesting, but also irritating and critical context, that makes you think [...] What we do here is damage control upon the image of history as well as we can by addressing this target group actively and friendly, so that they become fans of the museum and can begin with the history education.
To a point, they're right. They are doing damage control if people only get their knowledge of WW2 and tanks from the game. But they are wrong in that that's the end of it. We actively teach the real history outside of the game, in free videos, articles, books and so on, and encourage folks to do exactly what Panzermuseum wanted, to go and learn for themselves.
Frankly, I think there is far more of a "PR" concern than an "ethical concern", I think the closest that games have gotten to 'ethics' in that sort of thing was the controversial "No Russian" level in CoD MW2 in which the player could choose whether to partake in the murdering of civilians to advance the larger goal. But the PR folks are more worried about "Does the Imperial Japanese Navy Flag offend our players in Korea" than the matter of "Should we be doing WW2 naval games to begin with?"
As a historian who has been supporting video games now for six years, and the odd movie or book, perhaps I am a little biased in my response, but I'm fine with our position. And, given the amount of veterans who play our games (myself included), I think we are not exactly an aberration. We are far more capable of distinguishing entertainment from history than the German museum (at least, at the time) considers us.
I'm not a historian, but I am a scientist. I'm currently struggling through dialectic of enlightenment, which commiespaceinvader has recommended before. I'm hoping that my comment is relevant here.
The gist I am currently getting is that 'enlightenment' as a concept has the potential to be a liberatory force for humanity, but also has the capability to create great suffering. This suffering occurs when a form of scientism is practised, leading to a greater strive towards The Truth which neglects the lives of others to devastating effect. In this way, science - and history - are only useful and Good insofar as they are present within an ethical framework which promotes and maintains the rights of others.
I'm wondering if a) my reading of the text is generally correct (although i'm only halfway through the chapter about Odysseus, so I might not have the full picture yet), and b) if so, whether this idea is one which can still be applied in the natural and social sciences, and the humanities.
to give developers access to otherwise-closed archives so they can more accurately capture the experience of war as it pertains to shooting dehumanised simulacra of the very real dead?
Could I get some clarification on this point? Do developers really have access to archives that historians do not have access to? Why don't historians have access to these archives?