9 ms·

The Rise of Post-Literate History

35 points by bertman 2y ago

kerkeslager 2y ago
Walther compares writing samples by Runciman and Riley-Smith. He notes that Runciman is an easier and more entertaining read, but less accurate than Riley-Smith. I agree. But then Walther steps away with the implicit conclusion that entertaining writing and accurate writing are mutually exclusive. He then goes on to blame inaccuracy in our cultural understanding of history on audiences that want to be entertained rather than educated accurately. This is a self-serving conclusion. Entertaining writing and accurate writing are not mutually exclusive. In fact, to some extent, writing is not accurate if it is not entertaining. If your writing fails to connect with your audience, they lose interest, and you fail to communicate the facts. Walther blames this vaguely on a decline of literary culture--which is to say that he implicitly blames the failure of history communication on readers. Nothing could be further from the case. People read more now than ever, but they don't read pretentious web magazines and they don't read people who use words like "casuistry" and "imbroglio". The failure to communicate is not caused by readers, it's caused writers like Walther who refuse to use their audience's language, instead expecting the audience to learn the writers' language. I don't know anything about Compact Mag--maybe Walther is writing for his audience there. But that just begs the question, why did Walther choose to write for that audience? Walther complains that history isn't reaching the general public, but his writing is clearly not written for the general public. Walther, you're part of the problem. If you want people to read what you write, write for people. EDIT: I've noted elsewhere on HN that some ideas are inherently complex, and therefore require more work from readers to understand, no matter how much work the writer does to make the idea clear. That's not what's going on in this article. The following sentence: > His career—as far as I am aware, he has no plans to publish a book on Nazi Germany—suggests that we are no longer faced with a gap between specialist knowledge and what remains of the reading public, to be spanned by belletristic popularizers; but one between historians who write without any hope of reception, much less wealth or literary fame, and a very different, more or less post-literate audience who would prefer that whatever historical edification they might receive come via podcast or even tweet. ...could have been: > Cooper's popularity suggests that the problem of communicating history to the public is no longer collecting specialist knowledge into big-picture descriptions. Now, historians interested in accuracy are failing to reach audiences that consume history in modern forms like podcasts or tweets. This isn't communicating a less complex idea, it's just removing the pointless babbling to sound smarter.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  could you point us to any history you've written in this style, as an example? EDIT: for that matter, any history anyone has written in this style? see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
  - gsf_emergency 2y ago
    I dunno, the only recent-ish historiographer that I remember from uni, because he fits, happens to count N. Ferguson amongst his politically disaligned fans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_tradition >Outside his academic historical writing, Hobsbawm wrote a regular column about jazz for the New Statesman (under the pseudonym Francis Newton, taken from the name of Billie Holiday's communist trumpet player, Frankie Newton). He had become interested in jazz during the 1930s when it was frowned upon by the Communist Party. The gentrification-skeptic before the gentrification!
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      on the (re)invention of tradition, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker,_or_The_Silver_Skates#Statues_of_the_boy_and_the_dike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker,_or_The_Silver_Sk... > "Mary Mapes Dodge, who never visited the Netherlands until after the novel was published, wrote..."
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    You mean, entertaining and accurate? Like something that can keep someone's attention, by writing in easy to understand vernacular? Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin? Sapiens, Yuval Harari?
    - gsf_emergency 2y ago
      We can add prophetic..? >Yuval Noah Harari ... is 100% correct that [the AI class divide] is going to be the biggest problem we are going to face later down the line in the 21st century and it's not going to be rosy. He and Moldbug at least. From Comments on The Superfluity of the Masses https://archive.ph/ngu66 https://archive.ph/ngu66
throw73848788 2y ago
How about raise of "post-empathy" history? Author like this, are so self absorbed into their mantras, they can not even see major flaws in their arguments. What happens if we apply this analogy about crusaders to modern times?
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  >> What happens if we apply this analogy about crusaders to modern times? That's precisely what the author is doing. He’s drawing a parallel between “appealing storytelling” history and “rational analysis” history as applied to the crusades, to 21st century interpretations of 20th century history. What major flaws would you assert the author has made?
  - throw73848788 2y ago
    > than his predecessor, for whom the Crusades were essentially a series of barbarian invasions—the sacking of the refined and cosmopolitan East by the uncouth and venal younger sons of minor French lords The "barbarian invasion" is quite easy to prove. Crusaders destroyed Byzantine empire. Hell, they even sacked christian cities at Dalmatian coast on the way there.
    - zusammen 2y ago
      [dead]
      - zusammen 2y ago
        [dead]
    - pm3003 2y ago
      He's not saying it's false, but he's referring to the fact that the religious dimension of the Crusades has been occulted by a lot of 20th century historiography as incomprehensible and necessarily false. It was rather presented as an excuse, and the Crusades were even considered by some a precursor to European colonialism, driven by economic gains, overpopulation etc. This unbalance is the historiographical mistake, as would be (according to the article) the lack of attention for the Baltic or Albigean Crusades, hitherto considered not-much-more-than-local events which were given a religious stamp of approval for various political and financial reasons and thus not "real" crusades.
asimpletune 2y ago
I get the sense that this has been history’s dilemma since the beginning. Thucydides wrote an “inquiry” into the events of the Peloponnesian War, one of the world’s first histories. It is an excellent book and a masterpiece of literature. However you can’t help but wonder as you read it: how could simply writing what happened have been something so novel? Throughout the book he makes clear his methods and objectives, almost as if to directly contrast them with some kind of default of the day. You get the sense that people of his day didn’t write history so much because if one were to go through the trouble of writing something it should be trying to advocate a specific conclusion for its readers. Something like a moral lesson or to elevate a specific polis. Anyways, in the end Thucydides did end up advocating a specific conclusion but it’s one that could only be done through history. It’s subtle, detailed, balanced, and self-critical. I don’t know how to explain it other than history does something different to your brain, and in the end that is very worthwhile as literature. However, after this new literary genre had been established, it’s not like the whole world suddenly changed. It certainly made a dent among those who read it, but I think everybody else sort of continues to operate under some set of default principles about what the point of a book should be, similar to what I described in Thucydides’ time. Even now, most people who cite Thucydides, for example in the news but also often in academia, don’t seem to have read the work in its entirety, at least based on the conclusions that they’re advancing. So it seems that things aren’t really so different from his time. It’s a shame though because it really is something entirely new, and Thucydides proved, to me at least, that a careful account of the facts can be just as dramatic and entertaining as the best fiction.
- drewcoo 2y ago
  What about Thucydides implies a default history telling? There is no such thing as "just the facts." There is always a human hand in selecting the facts and how they are presented. That is bias. That is intent. Subjectivity. Humanity.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - sevensor 2y ago
fedeb95 2y ago
It's not just a problem of history. Fact or fiction? Fiction captures people the most; yet finding a fiction that doesn't contradict facts is way harder than voicing the first fiction that works.
stereolambda 2y ago
I don't where the author frequents but my experience on the internet about the Dark Ages is much opposite. People who have strong opinion about them tend to go past "nuance" straight into denialism, as if there wasn't obvious archeological, economic and literate decline in Latin Europe. This is a problem where historians look at what they're saying more as being a part of a continuing debate, where they can say revisionist stuff to sound more original in their field, with an understanding that their interlocutors will know the basics. There are many ridiculous views in public which form when historians effectively say "for a long time we have been thinking A <the basic thing about the subject>, but on the second/third order, if you look at it sideways, in some cases B". The whole part besides B gets cut off, because people stopped actively writing A 50-70 years ago. Now A is completely boring and passee and even suspicious to younger audience. But B can serve as fodder for video essays, tik toks, blog posts for us ancient peoples etc. I think this might also explain much of WW2 revisionism. Of course knowing that especially for this period it can be ideologically motivated in some cases, and in the extreme can lead to someone like David Irving. This also isn't new. Also, in general if a field of scholarship advertises consensus more than sound dispassionate methodology, then of course various randoms will think of having their own "consensus" because why not.
- RandomThoughts3 2y ago
  [flagged]
- kergonath 2y ago
  > People who have strong opinion about them tend to go past "nuance" straight into denialism, as if there wasn't obvious archeological, economic and literate decline in Latin Europe. I don’t think most historians have a problem if you argue that by “dark ages” you mean that the amount of primary sources decreases significantly due to a range of societal and economic factors. However, this is not what is meant by the vast majority of people who talk about dark ages as a period of backward evolution and human regression. Most of these people go to the other side of the purely ideological coin, and proceed to show their complete lack of understanding of what the Roman Empire or the early medieval period were in Europe. So yes, when you start talking about dark ages you paint a target on yourself. It does not reflect very well because it means that either you are accepting that uncritically, or that you know better but are trolling. It’s not very difficult to see why that could cause a somewhat unsympathetic reaction. It’s not persecution and it is not a cabal.
anshumankmr 2y ago
He has sidelined the benefits of new media formats like podcasts and social media in democratizing access to history and also he should also probably mention that main stream historians can leverage these tools to reach and educate a wider audience without compromising on the quality of research they work on. For example, I personally am not a historian but I did learnt about quite a bunch of stuff through reading encyclopaedias a kid, and using YouTube/Spotify as a teenager/adult, which ranges from Egyptology to stuff on Troy to WWI/WWII to cold war stuff to stuff about my country etc which, though I would never claim to be an expert personally, but it used to help when I attended quizzes representing my school and now its at best a convo topic.
- kragen 2y ago
  The benefits of podcasts and social media in democratizing access to history? What might those possibly be? By comparison to the written word, podcasts and social media excel at sensationalism, emotional manipulation, and organizing mob violence. They sacrifice verifiability, corrigibility in response to criticism, and the ability to quote primary and secondary sources at sufficient length for the reader to evaluate them, as well as random access through indices and table of contents. Most of what you "did learnt" from "YouTube/Spotify" is almost certainly false. Any historian, not to mention any political scientist, would undoubtedly be staggered to gain your insight that the only benefit of historical perspective was as "a convo topic", fettered as they are by their illusion that the universal principles governing human events continue their operation today just as they have for millennia. What podcasts and social media provide access to may be democratic (though I seem to see a pretty egregious Gini coefficient in podcaster subscriber numbers and Twitter follower counts) but history it ain't.
  - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
    I think the point of article wasn't that 'sensational' history is wrong, it was just that the sensational one gets the attention. Hard Core History is a podcast, and fairly accurate. Even HBO shows like The Pacific, while dramatized, didn't have anything obviously 'wrong'. While being dramatic can help people put themselves into the situation, and help understanding. It doesn't just have to be a book of figures. I think you are conflating that 'real' history books must be dry, with 'dry' being 'correct'. But other forms of media can also be used to present accurate information. Or to restate, accuracy isn't dependent on the form of media.
fweimer 2y ago
Why is it a problem if people prefer a certain writing style? (Or unpainted marble sculpture, for that matter?) Surely these texts are not intended as scientific works, and not used as reference material for further research. Maybe it's hard to admit that people read history books for entertainment (instead more lofty goals, like educational value) because of the subject matter they typically deal with. Certainly it makes it more difficult to look down upon those that prefer watching TV shows deemed meritless. Misrepresentation of WW2 history has been common long before the Internet and social media, see the enduring popularity of the Wehrmacht and some of its leaders, particularly in the U.S. That's not really a problem per se, either. Things get very, very iffy when alleged historical facts are used as justification. But in most cases, that issue won't go away if we had a way to be absolutely certain that we get the facts right and present them objectively. The past is just too different.
HellDunkel 2y ago
I had to use a translator to help me with this text and i am still unclear what the main point is. Tucker Carlson is a (self admitted) lier and the other podcast guy is most likely just after the clicks. Even an illiterate can smell the BS.

35 points by bertman 2y ago

Walther compares writing samples by Runciman and Riley-Smith. He notes that Runciman is an easier and more entertaining read, but less accurate than Riley-Smith. I agree. But then Walther steps away with the implicit conclusion that entertaining writing and accurate writing are mutually exclusive. He then goes on to blame inaccuracy in our cultural understanding of history on audiences that want to be entertained rather than educated accurately. This is a self-serving conclusion. Entertaining writing and accurate writing are not mutually exclusive. In fact, to some extent, writing is not accurate if it is not entertaining. If your writing fails to connect with your audience, they lose interest, and you fail to communicate the facts. Walther blames this vaguely on a decline of literary culture--which is to say that he implicitly blames the failure of history communication on readers. Nothing could be further from the case. People read more now than ever, but they don't read pretentious web magazines and they don't read people who use words like "casuistry" and "imbroglio". The failure to communicate is not caused by readers, it's caused writers like Walther who refuse to use their audience's language, instead expecting the audience to learn the writers' language. I don't know anything about Compact Mag--maybe Walther is writing for his audience there. But that just begs the question, why did Walther choose to write for that audience? Walther complains that history isn't reaching the general public, but his writing is clearly not written for the general public. Walther, you're part of the problem. If you want people to read what you write, write for people. EDIT: I've noted elsewhere on HN that some ideas are inherently complex, and therefore require more work from readers to understand, no matter how much work the writer does to make the idea clear. That's not what's going on in this article. The following sentence: > His career—as far as I am aware, he has no plans to publish a book on Nazi Germany—suggests that we are no longer faced with a gap between specialist knowledge and what remains of the reading public, to be spanned by belletristic popularizers; but one between historians who write without any hope of reception, much less wealth or literary fame, and a very different, more or less post-literate audience who would prefer that whatever historical edification they might receive come via podcast or even tweet. ...could have been: > Cooper's popularity suggests that the problem of communicating history to the public is no longer collecting specialist knowledge into big-picture descriptions. Now, historians interested in accuracy are failing to reach audiences that consume history in modern forms like podcasts or tweets. This isn't communicating a less complex idea, it's just removing the pointless babbling to sound smarter.

082349872349872 2y ago
could you point us to any history you've written in this style, as an example? EDIT: for that matter, any history anyone has written in this style? see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
- gsf_emergency 2y ago
  I dunno, the only recent-ish historiographer that I remember from uni, because he fits, happens to count N. Ferguson amongst his politically disaligned fans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_tradition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_tradition >Outside his academic historical writing, Hobsbawm wrote a regular column about jazz for the New Statesman (under the pseudonym Francis Newton, taken from the name of Billie Holiday's communist trumpet player, Frankie Newton). He had become interested in jazz during the 1930s when it was frowned upon by the Communist Party. The gentrification-skeptic before the gentrification!
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    on the (re)invention of tradition, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker,_or_The_Silver_Skates#Statues_of_the_boy_and_the_dike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker,_or_The_Silver_Sk... > "Mary Mapes Dodge, who never visited the Netherlands until after the novel was published, wrote..."
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  You mean, entertaining and accurate? Like something that can keep someone's attention, by writing in easy to understand vernacular? Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin? Sapiens, Yuval Harari?
  - gsf_emergency 2y ago
    We can add prophetic..? >Yuval Noah Harari ... is 100% correct that [the AI class divide] is going to be the biggest problem we are going to face later down the line in the 21st century and it's not going to be rosy. He and Moldbug at least. From Comments on The Superfluity of the Masses https://archive.ph/ngu66 https://archive.ph/ngu66

throw73848788 2y ago

How about raise of "post-empathy" history? Author like this, are so self absorbed into their mantras, they can not even see major flaws in their arguments. What happens if we apply this analogy about crusaders to modern times?

madaxe_again 2y ago
>> What happens if we apply this analogy about crusaders to modern times? That's precisely what the author is doing. He’s drawing a parallel between “appealing storytelling” history and “rational analysis” history as applied to the crusades, to 21st century interpretations of 20th century history. What major flaws would you assert the author has made?
- throw73848788 2y ago
  > than his predecessor, for whom the Crusades were essentially a series of barbarian invasions—the sacking of the refined and cosmopolitan East by the uncouth and venal younger sons of minor French lords The "barbarian invasion" is quite easy to prove. Crusaders destroyed Byzantine empire. Hell, they even sacked christian cities at Dalmatian coast on the way there.
  - zusammen 2y ago
    [dead]
    - zusammen 2y ago
      [dead]
  - pm3003 2y ago
    He's not saying it's false, but he's referring to the fact that the religious dimension of the Crusades has been occulted by a lot of 20th century historiography as incomprehensible and necessarily false. It was rather presented as an excuse, and the Crusades were even considered by some a precursor to European colonialism, driven by economic gains, overpopulation etc. This unbalance is the historiographical mistake, as would be (according to the article) the lack of attention for the Baltic or Albigean Crusades, hitherto considered not-much-more-than-local events which were given a religious stamp of approval for various political and financial reasons and thus not "real" crusades.

asimpletune 2y ago

I get the sense that this has been history’s dilemma since the beginning. Thucydides wrote an “inquiry” into the events of the Peloponnesian War, one of the world’s first histories. It is an excellent book and a masterpiece of literature. However you can’t help but wonder as you read it: how could simply writing what happened have been something so novel? Throughout the book he makes clear his methods and objectives, almost as if to directly contrast them with some kind of default of the day. You get the sense that people of his day didn’t write history so much because if one were to go through the trouble of writing something it should be trying to advocate a specific conclusion for its readers. Something like a moral lesson or to elevate a specific polis. Anyways, in the end Thucydides did end up advocating a specific conclusion but it’s one that could only be done through history. It’s subtle, detailed, balanced, and self-critical. I don’t know how to explain it other than history does something different to your brain, and in the end that is very worthwhile as literature. However, after this new literary genre had been established, it’s not like the whole world suddenly changed. It certainly made a dent among those who read it, but I think everybody else sort of continues to operate under some set of default principles about what the point of a book should be, similar to what I described in Thucydides’ time. Even now, most people who cite Thucydides, for example in the news but also often in academia, don’t seem to have read the work in its entirety, at least based on the conclusions that they’re advancing. So it seems that things aren’t really so different from his time. It’s a shame though because it really is something entirely new, and Thucydides proved, to me at least, that a careful account of the facts can be just as dramatic and entertaining as the best fiction.

drewcoo 2y ago
What about Thucydides implies a default history telling? There is no such thing as "just the facts." There is always a human hand in selecting the facts and how they are presented. That is bias. That is intent. Subjectivity. Humanity.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- sevensor 2y ago

fedeb95 2y ago

It's not just a problem of history. Fact or fiction? Fiction captures people the most; yet finding a fiction that doesn't contradict facts is way harder than voicing the first fiction that works.

stereolambda 2y ago

I don't where the author frequents but my experience on the internet about the Dark Ages is much opposite. People who have strong opinion about them tend to go past "nuance" straight into denialism, as if there wasn't obvious archeological, economic and literate decline in Latin Europe. This is a problem where historians look at what they're saying more as being a part of a continuing debate, where they can say revisionist stuff to sound more original in their field, with an understanding that their interlocutors will know the basics. There are many ridiculous views in public which form when historians effectively say "for a long time we have been thinking A <the basic thing about the subject>, but on the second/third order, if you look at it sideways, in some cases B". The whole part besides B gets cut off, because people stopped actively writing A 50-70 years ago. Now A is completely boring and passee and even suspicious to younger audience. But B can serve as fodder for video essays, tik toks, blog posts for us ancient peoples etc. I think this might also explain much of WW2 revisionism. Of course knowing that especially for this period it can be ideologically motivated in some cases, and in the extreme can lead to someone like David Irving. This also isn't new. Also, in general if a field of scholarship advertises consensus more than sound dispassionate methodology, then of course various randoms will think of having their own "consensus" because why not.

RandomThoughts3 2y ago
[flagged]
kergonath 2y ago
> People who have strong opinion about them tend to go past "nuance" straight into denialism, as if there wasn't obvious archeological, economic and literate decline in Latin Europe. I don’t think most historians have a problem if you argue that by “dark ages” you mean that the amount of primary sources decreases significantly due to a range of societal and economic factors. However, this is not what is meant by the vast majority of people who talk about dark ages as a period of backward evolution and human regression. Most of these people go to the other side of the purely ideological coin, and proceed to show their complete lack of understanding of what the Roman Empire or the early medieval period were in Europe. So yes, when you start talking about dark ages you paint a target on yourself. It does not reflect very well because it means that either you are accepting that uncritically, or that you know better but are trolling. It’s not very difficult to see why that could cause a somewhat unsympathetic reaction. It’s not persecution and it is not a cabal.

anshumankmr 2y ago

He has sidelined the benefits of new media formats like podcasts and social media in democratizing access to history and also he should also probably mention that main stream historians can leverage these tools to reach and educate a wider audience without compromising on the quality of research they work on. For example, I personally am not a historian but I did learnt about quite a bunch of stuff through reading encyclopaedias a kid, and using YouTube/Spotify as a teenager/adult, which ranges from Egyptology to stuff on Troy to WWI/WWII to cold war stuff to stuff about my country etc which, though I would never claim to be an expert personally, but it used to help when I attended quizzes representing my school and now its at best a convo topic.

kragen 2y ago
The benefits of podcasts and social media in democratizing access to history? What might those possibly be? By comparison to the written word, podcasts and social media excel at sensationalism, emotional manipulation, and organizing mob violence. They sacrifice verifiability, corrigibility in response to criticism, and the ability to quote primary and secondary sources at sufficient length for the reader to evaluate them, as well as random access through indices and table of contents. Most of what you "did learnt" from "YouTube/Spotify" is almost certainly false. Any historian, not to mention any political scientist, would undoubtedly be staggered to gain your insight that the only benefit of historical perspective was as "a convo topic", fettered as they are by their illusion that the universal principles governing human events continue their operation today just as they have for millennia. What podcasts and social media provide access to may be democratic (though I seem to see a pretty egregious Gini coefficient in podcaster subscriber numbers and Twitter follower counts) but history it ain't.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  I think the point of article wasn't that 'sensational' history is wrong, it was just that the sensational one gets the attention. Hard Core History is a podcast, and fairly accurate. Even HBO shows like The Pacific, while dramatized, didn't have anything obviously 'wrong'. While being dramatic can help people put themselves into the situation, and help understanding. It doesn't just have to be a book of figures. I think you are conflating that 'real' history books must be dry, with 'dry' being 'correct'. But other forms of media can also be used to present accurate information. Or to restate, accuracy isn't dependent on the form of media.

fweimer 2y ago

Why is it a problem if people prefer a certain writing style? (Or unpainted marble sculpture, for that matter?) Surely these texts are not intended as scientific works, and not used as reference material for further research. Maybe it's hard to admit that people read history books for entertainment (instead more lofty goals, like educational value) because of the subject matter they typically deal with. Certainly it makes it more difficult to look down upon those that prefer watching TV shows deemed meritless. Misrepresentation of WW2 history has been common long before the Internet and social media, see the enduring popularity of the Wehrmacht and some of its leaders, particularly in the U.S. That's not really a problem per se, either. Things get very, very iffy when alleged historical facts are used as justification. But in most cases, that issue won't go away if we had a way to be absolutely certain that we get the facts right and present them objectively. The past is just too different.

HellDunkel 2y ago

I had to use a translator to help me with this text and i am still unclear what the main point is. Tucker Carlson is a (self admitted) lier and the other podcast guy is most likely just after the clicks. Even an illiterate can smell the BS.