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> We historians tend to make everything so nuanced that the idea of truth almost disappears. People in graduate history programs have said things to me like: Wh
by projektir 8y ago
> We historians tend to make everything so nuanced that the idea of truth almost disappears. People in graduate history programs have said things to me like: Why should we privilege one narrative above others with the term “true”? That kind of implies that all narratives are equal—or, at least, that all narratives have some merit, that no narrative has all the merit.
This is happening a lot among more than just historians and it's a serious problem. Some things are true and that has consequences. Ignored, reality will pass us by.
- maze-le 8y agoI can see this development as well, and I think it is the influence of postmodernism. As a philosophical thought the postmodernist school states (among other things) that all knowledge is sociol-culturally conditioned, so no bit of knowledge can be evaluated without evaluating the cultural context in which it is created. This leads to a situation in which all {opinions / stories / facts / utterances} are viewed as equally meaningful and important. In the 1980s no one cared, because the discourse was purely academic in nature. By now postmodernism has gained widespread adoption in education, social sciences and political theory. And the citation from above is the direct result of that.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoA bit off topic, but: What is the postmodern stance on lies? If "all {opinions / stories / facts / utterances} are viewed as equally meaningful and important", does that leave any place for saying that something is a lie? If not, that's a huge problem. If your philosophy/epistemology doesn't understand that some things are simply lies, and some statements are simply intending to lie, that leaves a huge vulnerability for liars to exploit.
- olavk 8y agoHistory is extremely complex and nuanced, that is the problem. It literally encompasses everything that ever happened. So anything you can say about history is inherently an oversimplification with ignores a lot of possible angles and voices and narratives. Just deciding what goes into a textbook in inherently political, even if everything stated in the book are objective truths.
- m_mueller 8y agoThe scientific way of looking at the world has never been, and potentially will never be, absolutely true, as in a correct model that explains reality in all its facets. I do however disagree with your position in one decisive way: The scientific method demands that any stated fact is falsifiable, and that already falsified facts are not used again as a basis for further theories. Once it has been shown that flat earth is false, it cannot simply be said to be "a different opinion" and that we have no right to stop its further propagation. Nothing is provenly true, but we know what's false, anything else is still up for discussion. So, once it has been shown with reasonable documentation that things like Ausschwitz or Nanking or Japanese internment in the US happened, it is not up to "politics" to make it part of history or not. Sure, it can be rationalized and interpreted in different ways, but that doesn't change any of the facts, as long as there is not a solid disprove of these events that can deal with all the evidence that supports them. Edit: The statement that contents are "political" is a classic unfalsifiable claim, thus is an invalid argument. Evidence demands counter-evidence.
- olavk 8y agoWe can agree that the earth is not flat, but I don't think this is really the issue. The article mentions the question whether the Japanese internement is treated in single sentence, or on multiple pages with pictures, personal accounts etc. Stating it is "a fact" does not really help you decide which approach is appropriate for an US history textbook. Yeah we can agree that textbooks should not make objectively false statements, but that is not really the difficult part.
- candiodari 8y agoThe issue is that there are narratives that are 99% true (like the West's version of the Tiananmen massacre, or the Holocaust/WW2), and narratives that are 1% true, and deliberate misleading (like China's version, and Nazi's or Iran's version of the Holocaust/WW2) People don't want to own to what they did. Not individual criminals, not states, not governments, not religions. Especially not when there's financial consequences. (but the fact that western governments also hide disgusting acts they committed does not change the fact that there is a serious scale difference)
- 0x445442 8y agoI find most of the folks espousing "nuance" and "narrative" are, in the end, really just arguing against positions they don't agree with using high brow language. Case in point would be to point them to David Irving's work on holocaust history and watch them flee from "nuance" and back to "truth".
- olavk 8y agoDo you think that "nuance" means that everything is equally true? I think that is a strawman. Holocaust deniers are factually wrong just like flat-earthers. Understanding that there is no single concise objectively true narrative of history is not the same as having to believe that the pyramids were built by aliens.