Who the hell are you to disregard the man's wishes?

[APB]

@Lissa

Despite what you think, most good historians do not have such a blase attitude toward documentation. I know quite a few of them…

I strongly suspect that I know at least as many professional historians as you do and quite probably a great many more. But who’s counting?

@Lissa

Archivists and people involved in the preservation of documents and artifacts do not think in terms of what importance something will have next week, or in ten years, but must try to imagine what people a hundred or even a thousand years from now will want.

One of the problems is that things seem so commonplace to us that they don’t get preserved. Off of the top of my head, I’m thinking of an ATM reciept-- things that no one thinks to keep.

Which hardly begins to address the problems involved in archival management. A single ATM receipt could indeed be vital evidence for a future historian. I can easily imagine someone citing such a receipt to clinch a major debate. After all, it is excellent evidence to place a specific person at a specific place at a specific time. But does that mean that every ATM receipt needs to be kept? Space is the least of the problems. Who would catalogue them? More importantly, would any historian ever think the effort of searching them was worth the likely value of what they would find? Of course, it’s easy to say that only the important ATM receipts should be kept. But who’s to say which are the ‘important’ ones? Historical agendas change. Past experience suggests that predicting what people in the future will think is important is no less haphazard than assuming that it’ll be what we think is important.

As it happens, one of the most common types of documents found in family archives from the period before banks became common is the equivalent of ATM receipts, namely receipts by which one individual acknowledges that they had received a cash payment from the person who retained the receipt. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of these survive. And some historians do use them. Or rather they use some of them. They’ll browse through them en masse and spot the one or two that interest them. A few historians study individual collections in depth. But no professional historian seriously thinks all such documents will ever get used individually. The same point applies even more emphatically to other useful but even more numerous documents, such as land deeds or court records.

This is the paradox involved in any large-scale archival research. The skilled historian is the one who knows which documents to ignore. The number of documents such an historian will consult will always be only a fraction of the documents they know could conceivably be relevant. Only by ignoring some can they ever begin to get to grips with what survives. Research involves time and effort. There is always a limit to what historians, individually or collectively, can consult.

Like most documents surviving in archives, such receipts were not kept for the benefit of future historians. They were kept by the original owners for their own use and it just happened that they were never thrown out. But most were thrown out. Except that this doesn’t reduce what value there is in some of those that do survive. Historians’ ability to study the past doesn’t depend on everything being saved. It doesn’t even depend on most of the ‘important’ things being saved. All that would mean would be that there would be even more for historians to ignore. The physical impossibilities of consulting more than a fraction of what survived would still kick in.

@Lissa

Any historian will tell you that the value of primary source documents is far greater than those that have been diluted through the lens of others’ perceptions.

But I went on to give examples of primary source documents by John Paul II, some of them private ones, which would have survived anyway. And what any historian would actually tell you is that the value of a primary source need not be greater than another person’s perception. It all depends on the individual and on who the other person is. Even documents someone writes for their own use with the intention that no one else should ever see them can mislead.

@Lissa

The amount of exceptions to that last statement tends to indicate the opposite. While JP may end up being more well-documented than most, it is often a single document which changes perceptions. A good historian knows not to pooh-pooh small details.

Which completely misses my point. Of course the small details matter. History is all ultimately about small details.

But not all small details survive. Nor can they. Nor is it just the unimportant small details that get lost. That is precisely the reason why professional historians learn to accept that they do not, and indeed cannot, have all the small details they might wish. They usually think themselves lucky if they have just some of the relevant ones.

Not having all the details is the necessary condition of any historical research. The whole point about history as written by the professionals is that it aims to be the best attempt at a fair and accurate account with the details that do survive, or rather with the details that the best and most assiduous efforts of that historian has been able to gather. No historian ever writes anything without thinking that there was once evidence which, had it survived, would have added to their account. But they’re historians. They know why records get lost and that this is because of chance and, yes, because people often deliberately destroy them. It goes with the territory.

[Frank]

@Miller

I’ve said, over and over, that it is not, because breaking the vow causes no harm to anyone.

Breaking a promise I have made causes harm to myself. YMMV, and obviously does.

[Miller]

@This Year's Model

Breaking a promise I have made causes harm to myself. YMMV, and obviously does.

That’s a start, but it raises a host of other questions:

How does it harm you?

If John Paul’s secretary does not feel he has harmed himself by betraying this particular trust, then is the act still immoral?

Is harming yourself even immoral? If I cut someone else with a knife, that’s pretty clearly immoral. If I cut myself with a knife, is that equally immoral?

[Frank]

@Miller

How does it harm you?

I’m flabbergasted. I honestly can think of nothing further to say to you.

[danceswithcats]

@Miller

I have addressed the argument that breaking a vow to a dying person is immoral. I’ve said, over and over, that it is not, because breaking the vow causes no harm to anyone. You and danceswithcats keep saying it is immoral, but you’re not saying why. What is your basis for determining what is, and is not, immoral?

If I make a promise to you Miller, and renige on that promise whether you’re dead or not, I’ve lied. In lying to you, I’ve injured your person, by nature of failing to discharge the trust which you inbued in me when the vow was given. I’ve also injured myself, as the man I see in the mirror has lost a measure of respect.

To put this in real simple terms, how about “thou shalt not bear false witness” as in the ten commandments. Apparently God didn’t approve of lying.
If you read the Law, e.g. the Pentateuch, many references are present regarding swearing of oaths, and the matter is not to be dealt with in a capricious or cavlier manner. Oddly, I’d have thought that the key person involved, and whose actions I have decried would be familiar with the text referenced.

[Miller]

@This Year's Model

I’m flabbergasted. I honestly can think of nothing further to say to you.

Oh, Christ. It’s not that difficult a question. You ought to be able to answer it if you’ve spent more than five minutes of you life actually considering your moral code, rather than just following it reflexively. But, apparently, you’ve never bothered to do that. Good job. Thanks for sharing your opinion. Some day, it might even be worth something.

@danceswithcats

If I make a promise to you Miller, and renige on that promise whether you’re dead or not, I’ve lied. In lying to you, I’ve injured your person, by nature of failing to discharge the trust which you inbued in me when the vow was given.

But if I’m dead, I don’t have a person to injure. I’m a non-person at that point.

Obviously, that gets muddier when you introduce the concept of life after death. It seems unlikely to me that, wherever the Pope ended up after he died, that he could possibly care about (and therefore, be injured by) his secretary’s failure to destroy his diaries, but I guess that’s pretty much unknowable.

I’ve also injured myself, as the man I see in the mirror has lost a measure of respect.

Yeah, fine, but that doesn’t answer the question of why you should keep a promise to a corpse in the first place, does it? Certainly, if you violate your own moral code, you feel like shit about yourself. But that does address why anyone else should adopt your moral stance in regards to this issue, nor why you feel you have the authority to pass judgement over people who do not share your reverence to the departed.

To put this in real simple terms, how about “thou shalt not bear false witness” as in the ten commandments. Apparently God didn’t approve of lying.

I don’t see this as a matter of bearing false witness, though, which I’ve always understood to be a ban against lying about people, not necessarily to people. I’m hardly a Bible scholar, though.

If you read the Law, e.g. the Pentateuch, many references are present regarding swearing of oaths, and the matter is not to be dealt with in a capricious or cavlier manner. Oddly, I’d have thought that the key person involved, and whose actions I have decried would be familiar with the text referenced.

Does the Bible present this as an absolute, or are there circumstances where lying is permissable, where telling the truth would cause a greater harm than lying? Is it not, therefore, possible that John Paul’s secretary, who knows both the late Pope and his diaries far better than you or I, has decided that the contents of those diaries are more important than his promise to the late pontiff?

[Miller]

@Miller

But that does address why anyone else should adopt your moral stance in regards to this issue, nor why you feel you have the authority to pass judgement over people who do not share your reverence to the departed.

“But that does not address…” etc.

[danceswithcats]

I’m at a loss with you Miller. First you indicate that once one is dead, all obligations to that person made while alive are rendered null and void. That IMO is the posture of a weasel. History and literature of rife with tales of men and women who honored the dying request of someone close to them. They were people of backbone, people of truth, people whose values were unswerving. Apparently your system is negotiable.

I’m not a scholar of the Bible, either. I’ve alluded to the citations in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus as being the foundation, of which Mr. Dziwisz is undoubtedly aware, and has apparently suffered a lapse of recall.

Spare us your situational ethics. You are either a teller of truth, or a teller of lies. You are either a man of your word, or one bereft of trust. It is easy to see where your lot is cast.

[Miller]

@danceswithcats

I’m at a loss with you Miller. First you indicate that once one is dead, all obligations to that person made while alive are rendered null and void. That IMO is the posture of a weasel. History and literature of rife with tales of men and women who honored the dying request of someone close to them. They were people of backbone, people of truth, people whose values were unswerving.

Weasel? Where? I’ve got a pretty consistent moral standard: don’t harm other living people. Where have I backpeddled, extemporized, or modified that stance in this thread?

Apparently your system is negotiable.

Nope! Not in the least. In fact, it’s pretty easy to explain: don’t hurt people. Breaking a promise to a dead guy? Doesn’t hurt him, not immoral. Pretty simple, and largely effective, in my experience.

I’m not a scholar of the Bible, either. I’ve alluded to the citations in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus as being the foundation, of which Mr. Dziwisz is undoubtedly aware, and has apparently suffered a lapse of recall.

Or, maybe he knows them better than you do. Who’s more likely to understand the proper meaning and context of a biblical passage? A guy who spent his adult life working in the Vatican and was a personal aid to the fuckin’ Pope, or a random yob on the internet who writes like a fourteen year old who’s read too many Dungeons and Dragons novels?

I’m going to go with the guy in the Vatican on this one.

Spare us your situational ethics. You are either a teller of truth, or a teller of lies. You are either a man of your word, or one bereft of trust. It is easy to see where your lot is cast.

I’d be insulted by this if I weren’t laughing so hard.

[Miller]

It occurs to me that I’ve been posting under the assumption that the cardinal made his promise to the dying pontiff in good faith, and reconsidered it after the pope had passed. If he made the promise with the intent to later break it, yeah, I suppose I’d have a problem with that, but seeing as the actual consequences of his breach are negligble, I don’t see it as a particularly big deal. It certainly doesn’t rise to the level of spittle-flecked outrage demonstrated by danceswithhyperbole, among others. I do think lying to actual living people is a bad thing, but I also don’t consider that an absolute. There are situations where it is excusable, and there’s not enough information to determine if this was or was not one of those situations.

[Lissa]

@APB

Which hardly begins to address the problems involved in archival management.

I did note that space is a concern for many insititutions and so judgements and sacrifices have to be made.

A single ATM receipt could indeed be vital evidence for a future historian.

Possibly, but on a side not, I doubt if any will survive for very long. That thermal paper is a bitch.

I can easily imagine someone citing such a receipt to clinch a major debate. After all, it is excellent evidence to place a specific person at a specific place at a specific time. But does that mean that every ATM receipt needs to be kept?

Not at all. In my insititution, we consider several factors. Firstly, do we have something that’s identical, or nearly identical? If so, did it belong to someone important, or an important date-- does it have any special significance that we can determine? Thirdly, would keeping multiple examples take up much space? (Multiple copies of Encyclopedia Brittanica might be a problem, whereas a slip of paper won’t necessarily cause any problems. Diaries, journals and the like are automatically retained. (They’re as rare as hen’s teeth these days.)

Space is the least of the problems. Who would catalogue them?

grin Probably me. I end up doing most of the “grunt work” anyway. (I’m one of those rare individuals who doesn’t get bored or frustrated by tedious tasks.)

That’s generally not something we really worry about. Already in our collection rests about five lifetimes worth of collections which need to be cataloged. It’s in a safe place, numbered so we know where and from whom it came, and we’ll get to it one of these days. There’s no rush.

More importantly, would any historian ever think the effort of searching them was worth the likely value of what they would find?

No one can say. We err on the side of caution. We don’t want anyone cursing our names in the future because we decided it wasn’t important enough to include in our collection.

Of course, it’s easy to say that only the important ATM receipts should be kept. But who’s to say which are the ‘important’ ones? Historical agendas change. Past experience suggests that predicting what people in the future will think is important is no less haphazard than assuming that it’ll be what we think is important.

Quite so. Again, that’s why we err on the side of caution.

As it happens, one of the most common types of documents found in family archives from the period before banks became common is the equivalent of ATM receipts, namely receipts by which one individual acknowledges that they had received a cash payment from the person who retained the receipt. . . . . . The same point applies even more emphatically to other useful but even more numerous documents, such as land deeds or court records.

Call me a nerd, but I find these things fascinaing reading. We have a large collection of family account books, business records, land deeds, etc. They tell great stories.

We have a lot of traffic from researchers delving into our archives for these very types of things. Geneaologists, especially. It happens to them often that the one crucial page has been removed from the court archives (people seem to have no qualms about ripping a page from a book in the archives if they’re not watched.) Then, they have to comb through mass piles of records to find the little tidbit which had previously been condensed in other areas. Far be it from us to be the people who decided that none of this stuff would ever be important.

Research involves time and effort. There is always a limit to what historians, individually or collectively, can consult. . . . .The physical impossibilities of consulting more than a fraction of what survived would still kick in.

The task can be daunting, but I think if you asked most researchers, they would agree they’d rather be confronted with an embarassment of riches of documentation rather than a dearth.

But I went on to give examples of primary source documents by John Paul II, some of them private ones, which would have survived anyway. And what any historian would actually tell you is that the value of a primary source need not be greater than another person’s perception. It all depends on the individual and on who the other person is. Even documents someone writes for their own use with the intention that no one else should ever see them can mislead.

Of course, and that can be interesting in of itself. Still, the more the merrier. It’s best to have several accounts of the same incident to compare.

But not all small details survive. Nor can they. Nor is it just the unimportant small details that get lost. That is precisely the reason why professional historians learn to accept that they do not, and indeed cannot, have all the small details they might wish. They usually think themselves lucky if they have just some of the relevant ones.

All the better, then, when we CAN save something valuable. Why not spare them the sense of resignation whenever possible?

But they’re historians. They know why records get lost and that this is because of chance and, yes, because people often deliberately destroy them. It goes with the territory.

All the more reason why when it doesn’t HAVE to go with the territory, we should make every effort at preservation.