Prof. Diarmaid Ferriter

2023 HUBERT BUTLER ESSAY PRIZE AWARD CEREMONY

As a history undergraduate at UCD in 1991, I was taught a course on the history of science by Peter Butterfield. Peter was a quiet, considerate, generous minded and understated teacher. It could not have been easy for him teaching in the shadow of his famous father, Herbert Butterfield, the Cambridge historian and public intellectual. Shrewd and insightful, Herbert Butterfield’s range of interests was very wide, covering religion, international relations and historiography, and significantly, in light of this year’s essay competition, science. One of his best known books was The Origins of Modern Science (1949). He was intrigued by the nature and limits of power, the role of individuals and the morality of the questions that surrounded them. He also recognized, and this was something his son Peter came to appreciate, that an historical understanding of the evolution of science was vital, as was the need for historians and scientists to appreciate each other: “It is an essential part of the historian’s technique, which the student of the natural sciences might not find congenial at first- to regard each generation as existing in its own right; as an end in itself and not merely a link in a chain leading to us, and therefore as interesting for its own sake…one seeks to know not just of the emergence of new scientific ideas, but to understand the older view being superseded. It is unhistorical to dismiss the ancient teaching as merely wrong science or even as an obstruction that had to be overcome”.

In the mid 1950s Butterfield made a strong case as to why historians were bound to take an interest in science, but also how, in his view, scientists had not understood “the kind of things that can be achieved by historical enquiry or attained by historical reflection…I do not think that the history of science can be properly written by scientists who imagine that all they have to do is get up a little history…It has occasionally seemed to me that the scientists, while possessing their own severely critical method in the handling of his evidence when engaged in scientific research, have tended to forget that history has its own technique, its own apparatus for the handling of sources.”

As Butterfield offered these reflections, his Irish peers, Theo Moody in Trinity College Dublin and one of my predecessors in UCD, Robert Dudley Edwards, had firmly established the importance of the professionalisation of Irish historiography, what’s often referred to as the promotion of ‘scientific history’. This professionalisation began in the mid 1930s and the two men were heavily influenced by their time in England and experiences in London University’s Institute of Historical Research. In Ireland, they established the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies and the Irish Historical Society, equivalents of the Royal Historical Society. With increased professionalization, the focus was on history written based on extensive research in primary sources. But we need to be careful of sweeping assertions about this representing a revolution in technique; Queen’s University Belfast’s David Hayton points out that those who preceded Moody and Edwards were not ignorant of the ‘scientific’ method; indeed, Irish medievalists had a tradition of basing their work firmly on documentary analysis. What was at play during the Moody/Dudley Edwards era was a determination that rigorous, document-based history- ‘scientific history’- would replace politically prejudiced or sectarian history that dominated public understandings of the past.

It was bogus, however, to assume that any historian could stand detached from their times or that they could write, to use a loaded term, ‘value free’ history, and Dudley Edwards and Moody of course had their own prejudices and were guided by the lights and leanings of their time. Perhaps inevitably, the claim to be championing ‘objective’ history prompted criticism and the contention that what was really at play was a revisionist critique of nationalist interpretations which in truth, as Hayton and others have observed, was very political. Brendan Bradshaw, the eminent historian of early modern Ireland, upped the ante in 1993 by suggesting the developments of the 1930s amounted to a wrong turn: “the assimilation of a view of history as a science, with the historian akin to the natural scientist peering down his microscope at a range of data…simply viewing it in a detached way”. Ulster historian A.T.Q Stewart also offered a version of this critique; when he was interviewed the same year about the difficulty of clinging to the idea of objectivity, he maintained: ‘If you look at history it is about humanity and it is about emotions and some historians write as if it were not. Their view has become terribly narrow’.

I have occasionally been asked myself whether history is a science or an art. It is both, I would reply; we use what might be fairly described as scientific methods of research, and we need to trust that approach to a point, but it also must be about humanity, empathy, creativity, philosophy and emotion. We have come much more into that realm in recent years, sometimes for tragic reasons, and on the back of horrific revelations, by focusing on the power of personal testimony. A point often made by Catríona Crowe and myself when reflecting on the theme of historians and archives, is that the documents might tell you what happened, but they do not often tell you what if felt like. We talk much more now about trauma, submerged and marginalised voices and experiences, and we rightly decry an excessive focus on the deeds of men. But we can also confidently assert that the range of our documentary sources, much expanded, can facilitate rigorous standards of research and peer review and a far wider framework of interpretation.

History is also, as Hubert Butler recognised, intensely about the local, or as he put it, “life lived fully and consciously in our own neighbourhood”. Reading from the small into the large was something he excelled at, allowing him to reflect, like his contemporary Herbert Butterfield, on such themes as religion, identity, state formation and fracturing.

Butterfield was intensely religious but not self-righteous; indeed in 1952 he asserted “The greatest menace to our civilization is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness – each only too delighted to find that the other is wicked – each only too glad that the sins of the other give it pretext for still deeper hatred”. These are words that continued to resonate beyond their Cold War context, and also chime with aspects of the legacy of Hubert Butler. In the same year, 1952, when Butler sought to inform a public meeting about the realities of war-time Croatia and the role of the Catholic Church he was ostracised, locally and nationally, by a grand Irish coalition of the righteous.

Butler’s remarkable range was apparent in essays that could be quiet- “the least noisiest of writers” as John Banville called him - but his mind was internationalist, and his writings were suffused with empathy, nuance and spikiness. So are the essays that were submitted for this year’s prize under the title “How far can we trust Science?” It is a great pleasure to pay tribute to their quality and to congratulate the winners. They too recognise in their essays that while we can trust science to a large extent, it is not enough on its own. It must be enveloped in humanity and appreciation of historic context and awareness of the philosophical questions it raises. Science can be enhanced when it embraces a historical perspective. As this year’s winning essayist Shane Conneely recognises, science is not a thing that is “but rather it is a thing that people do together” and as a result the “product of competitions for prestige, biases, ego and artifice”. There is also an acute danger when people visited by genius “use their capacities to be wrong in very clever ways”.

We should never assume that science is the only tool of understanding. Stuart Begley in his essay notes that major scientific discoveries “dislodge and disconnect us”; we can be saturated or overwhelmed, as, say, in the face of Artificial Intelligence. Will our sense of what it is to be human be diminished as a result? If so, we need to fight back. Another of this year’s essayists, Desmond Traynor, thankfully and boldly, asserts that “Science isn’t an exact science” and that those who practised science in the seventeenth century were known as natural philosophers and engaged in a discipline in which intellectual speculation and not technology was paramount.

This year’s essayists, like the great master, Hubert Butler, recognise the undesirability of excessive deference towards science while also denouncing dangerous denials. They understand, as Butterfield and Butler did, the menace of contrived self-righteousness and certainties and that if science is not humanised and understood properly it can do more harm than good. That is true of history also. The important point is that historical considerations are not a diversion from ‘real’ science nor just an assistance to science. Rather, history is intrinsic to all science.

Diarmaid Ferriter, Kilkenny 13 August 2023