7 ms·

History Must Be Curved

79 points by bdfh42 13y ago

bdfh42 13y ago
Michael Flynn's essays are splendid - a "must read". Plus - I am now tempted by the novels.
simias 13y ago
I wonder if this tendency to simplify and turn older history into myths is going to disappear or at least change dramatically starting with, say, 2nd half of the 20th century. We record everything, we store everything. We have videos of everything. Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and many others became legend through the retelling and deformation of their stories. Will Barack Obama, Albert Enstein and others become legend 5 centuries from now? Will there be a funding myth of the Gods giving the internet atop of a mountain to the prophet Berners Lee? Would Cleopatra be a legend nowadays if we could browse her teenage posts and selfie shots on facebook? I think myths exist to fill the gaps in our knowledge, in this case our knowledge of what actually happened to Charlemagne and Arthur. If we had detailed and completely trustworthy accounts of what those people did on a daily basis back then, with photos and videos to prove it there would be no myth, I postulate.
- markild 13y ago
  I believe that a lot of myths have some truth to them, though in a varying degree. We do record a lot of data today, and it might be enough to give a (pretty) clear picture, if you sift through it all, but I don't think that necessarily is enough to prevent misinterpretations in the future. Gangnam Style has more than a billion (with a b(!)) views, and if I were a historian in the future, arguably probably a bad one, I would easily attribute a lot of value to this. You could call it some sort of selection bias. What is left behind, doesn't always represent the state of things, and if it does, things are still open to interpretation.
- arethuza 13y ago
  It's not even clear there was an Arthur - although he is referenced in the Y Gododdin. NB I get quite a thrill mentioning the Y Gododdin as I can look out the window from my desk and see Edinburgh Castle - the Din Eidyn where the warriors feasted and drank mead for a year before doing battle.
- rmc 13y ago
  I think we'll still have legends. We're recording lots of things now, but 100 years ago we were recording more things than 150 years ago. As an example, consider Churchill and Hitler. Both lived before your "2nd half of the 20th century", we don't have their blog posts, but we have a lot of information on them. Yet there is still a mythos and legendary aspect to how both are remembered now. Even with a lot of information on both, legends are forming.
- smackay 13y ago
  I'd say the propensity towards generating myths is going to accellerate for two reasons: first, migating all that data is not an easy task - we barely have an upgrade path for simple data such as images. As a result a lot of it is going to be lost. Secondly, we have vast amounts of data but don't have corresponding vast amounts of information or knowledge. Our inability to distil truth from all the mountain of data will ensure that myth fills in all the annoying gaps. Update: the big and important stuff is likely to remain unscathed but as we see in the thread about Malcolm Gladwell we already have instant myth making on a time period of only a few months or years.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  This tendency will not change in even the slightest way. It's not about not having the information available in the world. It's about what fits in people's heads. (It's also about the need to back up moral pronouncements with stories.) Albert Einstein may or may not be legend five centuries from now, but he's a legend today, and we've got plenty of documentation of him (including a ritually-preserved blackboard that he filled when lecturing -- he was considered a legend before he died).
  - mcherm 13y ago
    But I notice that the study of "history" changed dramatically (came into existence where previously there had been no such thing) when writing made it possible to find contemporaneous records from older societies. I wonder whether ubiquitous recording and giant databases will wreak a similar change because of the degree of contemporaneous original sources, or whether it will be fairly similar to the written record we have of "history" today -- fragmented and messy enough that it is difficult but not impossible to extract a sense of the time by careful study.
- vidarh 13y ago
  We have present day myths, so no. Heck, we have "myths" even in any mid-sized group or company. Or even smaller ones. I work in a 15 person company that is less than 20 years old. There are arguably "myths" surrounding certain acts and people in the company's past that have arisen through retelling by people who themselves no longer work here. Some of them would have been trivially disproven by talking to the people who were there, or checking source control. But it doesn't happen; the myths keep getting retold.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  In five centuries from now we will be running on computers or god knows what. If anyone was still interested in history they could download it right to their brain instantly. Ok that sounds a lot more absurd than I intended, but it also seems absurd to me that in five centuries there will still be normal humans around telling oral myths.
- sneak 13y ago
  > If we had detailed and completely trustworthy accounts of what those people did on a daily basis back then, with photos and videos to prove it there would be no myth, I postulate. Did you hear that vaccines will give your baby autism?
- po8crg 13y ago
  Albert Einstein is already well on the way to being a legend.
innino 13y ago
Trojan horse for rehabilitating religion.
- kijin 13y ago
  If so, then what? Just because X is bad (I'm assuming you think religion is bad) and Y facilitates/rehabilitates/resembles X doesn't mean that Y must be wrong. Just because science historically hasn't been the perfect antithesis of science doesn't mean that science is religion, nor vice versa. It's just an inevitable consequence of the fact that people aren't perfect. History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) is often criticized by hardcore atheists like Dawkins, because it draws attention to similarities and relationships between science and religion, throughout history and sometimes even in the modern age. Yeah, that can be a bit embarrassing to some. But it's not the historians' fault that a lot of European scientists in the early modern period casually crossed the boundary between science and religion every day. Whatever religious beliefs they had does not lessen the importance or correctness of their discoveries in any way. If you don't like someone telling you a true story because your opponents would love to tell it, too, that's your problem. Lots of dictators also hate it when people tell true stories about them, but we tell them anyway because the stories are true.
  - kijin 13y ago
    s/perfect antithesis of science/perfect antithesis of religion
  - innino 13y ago
    Sorry but the savvier religious strategists do this stuff all the time: a friendly message about how the medieval Church "wasn't all that bad," a little chuckle about how modern science isn't as epistemologically pure as it wants to be - the basic message is hey, we're not all that different after all... It's not that I think they have any real chance of success with these tactics, but I do find this behaviour insulting. No good historian thinks such simplistic nonsense about the Galilean episode. Any good historian is well aware of the progressive simplification of the past. It's not that these specific points aren't all true, it's way they're used, the subtle insinuations, that I find slimy. As for Feyeraband, well, again he's a favourite of the religious pundits - doesn't matter that none of his critiques of science really had an impact - again the suggestion is that hey, knowledge is limited, so all these scientists who like to think they're purveying ultimate truth are so silly, and maybe hey this religious stuff isn't all bad? Again it's insulting - any good scientist is highly aware of the limits of reliable knowledge - and anyway, just because there are some limits on the reliability of knowledge, doesn't mean we can't at least try and distinguish between more and less reliable knowledge. The religious pundits don't want us to do so, of course, they would rather that we get shocked over the hubris of prideful scientists, and walk around "knowing" that everything is relative, nothing is really knowable... Helps them out. This is all textbook religious propaganda to me, the more so because it's so benignly packaged.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
People continually underestimate the power of the narrative. Humans want to see things in terms of stories, of drama, heroes, and so forth. Even if the underlying history doesn't fit the narrative, allowance will be made so that it does. The story wins out over all else. This is why the internet meme is so powerful. Nobody steals your kidneys and leaves you in a bathtub, but it makes for a helluva great story. Bill Gates isn't giving away money for emails, but wouldn't it be awesome if he was? I could probably put together a list of 100 Hollywood movies that purposefully destroy the truth just in order to sell more movie tickets. And people love it. (sidebar: "Big Fish" is a great movie about this topic) Movies will even go to great lengths to reassure you that they are telling a true story -- then bullshit the hell out of you. People know that they're stretching and murdering the truth, but guess what? They don't care. A good story is much more interesting than what actually happened, or some cold collection of facts. And I think 3 centuries is being generous. Most times this begins way before the people involved die. There are many people alive today trying to restore in the public's mind what actually happened, instead of what the public believes happened through consuming some terrific story.
- lazyant 13y ago
  yep. see "made to stick"
mathattack 13y ago
While I don't subscribe to Howard Zinn, I like to read him for an alternative viewpoint. He has strong views about how we curved the opinion on Columbus and built a myth around him. http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
dsego 13y ago
I think history should be rewritten. The great leaders of the past like Napoleon or Columbus (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day) should be portrayed for what they were, blood thirsty psychopaths. Emphasis in history lessons should be on science and art, not war and conquest.
- pavel_lishin 13y ago
  Emphasis in history should be on those events that made a large impact. Would you emphasize the Dada movement over World War I? Would you focus more on the discovery of nuclear fission, rather than World War II? (For that matter, could you?)
  - dsego 13y ago
    Fair point. But too often those events are simplistically described as us vs. them, good vs. evil (with good always being us). Maybe the emphasis could be put on individual stories (e.g. Anne Frank) instead of anthropomorphising nations.
- antiterra 13y ago
  The real lesson is that humans are tribal and can classify people outside their tribes as something lesser. It's a fundamental and frightening part of our nature; the average human has the capacity to be cruel and brutal. That is the banality of evil. It's not just European great leaders, it's everyone, and it's fueled by the same underlying tendency that creates smartphone brand fanatics.
ctdonath 13y ago
Science doesn’t follow a mythic positivist ideal but the plural scientific methods described by Feyerabend: a mixture of empiricism, flights of fancy, intuition, aesthetics, doggedness, and jealousy. Scientific theories are underdetermined. Any finite set of facts can support multiple theories, and for a long time the available facts were equally explained by geostationary or geomobile models. This marvelously addresses the current HN thread Should We Stop Believing Malcolm Gladwell?.

79 points by bdfh42 13y ago

Michael Flynn's essays are splendid - a "must read". Plus - I am now tempted by the novels.

I wonder if this tendency to simplify and turn older history into myths is going to disappear or at least change dramatically starting with, say, 2nd half of the 20th century. We record everything, we store everything. We have videos of everything. Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and many others became legend through the retelling and deformation of their stories. Will Barack Obama, Albert Enstein and others become legend 5 centuries from now? Will there be a funding myth of the Gods giving the internet atop of a mountain to the prophet Berners Lee? Would Cleopatra be a legend nowadays if we could browse her teenage posts and selfie shots on facebook? I think myths exist to fill the gaps in our knowledge, in this case our knowledge of what actually happened to Charlemagne and Arthur. If we had detailed and completely trustworthy accounts of what those people did on a daily basis back then, with photos and videos to prove it there would be no myth, I postulate.

markild 13y ago
I believe that a lot of myths have some truth to them, though in a varying degree. We do record a lot of data today, and it might be enough to give a (pretty) clear picture, if you sift through it all, but I don't think that necessarily is enough to prevent misinterpretations in the future. Gangnam Style has more than a billion (with a b(!)) views, and if I were a historian in the future, arguably probably a bad one, I would easily attribute a lot of value to this. You could call it some sort of selection bias. What is left behind, doesn't always represent the state of things, and if it does, things are still open to interpretation.
arethuza 13y ago
It's not even clear there was an Arthur - although he is referenced in the Y Gododdin. NB I get quite a thrill mentioning the Y Gododdin as I can look out the window from my desk and see Edinburgh Castle - the Din Eidyn where the warriors feasted and drank mead for a year before doing battle.
rmc 13y ago
I think we'll still have legends. We're recording lots of things now, but 100 years ago we were recording more things than 150 years ago. As an example, consider Churchill and Hitler. Both lived before your "2nd half of the 20th century", we don't have their blog posts, but we have a lot of information on them. Yet there is still a mythos and legendary aspect to how both are remembered now. Even with a lot of information on both, legends are forming.
smackay 13y ago
I'd say the propensity towards generating myths is going to accellerate for two reasons: first, migating all that data is not an easy task - we barely have an upgrade path for simple data such as images. As a result a lot of it is going to be lost. Secondly, we have vast amounts of data but don't have corresponding vast amounts of information or knowledge. Our inability to distil truth from all the mountain of data will ensure that myth fills in all the annoying gaps. Update: the big and important stuff is likely to remain unscathed but as we see in the thread about Malcolm Gladwell we already have instant myth making on a time period of only a few months or years.
thaumasiotes 13y ago
This tendency will not change in even the slightest way. It's not about not having the information available in the world. It's about what fits in people's heads. (It's also about the need to back up moral pronouncements with stories.) Albert Einstein may or may not be legend five centuries from now, but he's a legend today, and we've got plenty of documentation of him (including a ritually-preserved blackboard that he filled when lecturing -- he was considered a legend before he died).
- mcherm 13y ago
  But I notice that the study of "history" changed dramatically (came into existence where previously there had been no such thing) when writing made it possible to find contemporaneous records from older societies. I wonder whether ubiquitous recording and giant databases will wreak a similar change because of the degree of contemporaneous original sources, or whether it will be fairly similar to the written record we have of "history" today -- fragmented and messy enough that it is difficult but not impossible to extract a sense of the time by careful study.
vidarh 13y ago
We have present day myths, so no. Heck, we have "myths" even in any mid-sized group or company. Or even smaller ones. I work in a 15 person company that is less than 20 years old. There are arguably "myths" surrounding certain acts and people in the company's past that have arisen through retelling by people who themselves no longer work here. Some of them would have been trivially disproven by talking to the people who were there, or checking source control. But it doesn't happen; the myths keep getting retold.
Houshalter 13y ago
In five centuries from now we will be running on computers or god knows what. If anyone was still interested in history they could download it right to their brain instantly. Ok that sounds a lot more absurd than I intended, but it also seems absurd to me that in five centuries there will still be normal humans around telling oral myths.
sneak 13y ago
> If we had detailed and completely trustworthy accounts of what those people did on a daily basis back then, with photos and videos to prove it there would be no myth, I postulate. Did you hear that vaccines will give your baby autism?
po8crg 13y ago
Albert Einstein is already well on the way to being a legend.

innino 13y ago

Trojan horse for rehabilitating religion.

kijin 13y ago
If so, then what? Just because X is bad (I'm assuming you think religion is bad) and Y facilitates/rehabilitates/resembles X doesn't mean that Y must be wrong. Just because science historically hasn't been the perfect antithesis of science doesn't mean that science is religion, nor vice versa. It's just an inevitable consequence of the fact that people aren't perfect. History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) is often criticized by hardcore atheists like Dawkins, because it draws attention to similarities and relationships between science and religion, throughout history and sometimes even in the modern age. Yeah, that can be a bit embarrassing to some. But it's not the historians' fault that a lot of European scientists in the early modern period casually crossed the boundary between science and religion every day. Whatever religious beliefs they had does not lessen the importance or correctness of their discoveries in any way. If you don't like someone telling you a true story because your opponents would love to tell it, too, that's your problem. Lots of dictators also hate it when people tell true stories about them, but we tell them anyway because the stories are true.
- kijin 13y ago
  s/perfect antithesis of science/perfect antithesis of religion
- innino 13y ago
  Sorry but the savvier religious strategists do this stuff all the time: a friendly message about how the medieval Church "wasn't all that bad," a little chuckle about how modern science isn't as epistemologically pure as it wants to be - the basic message is hey, we're not all that different after all... It's not that I think they have any real chance of success with these tactics, but I do find this behaviour insulting. No good historian thinks such simplistic nonsense about the Galilean episode. Any good historian is well aware of the progressive simplification of the past. It's not that these specific points aren't all true, it's way they're used, the subtle insinuations, that I find slimy. As for Feyeraband, well, again he's a favourite of the religious pundits - doesn't matter that none of his critiques of science really had an impact - again the suggestion is that hey, knowledge is limited, so all these scientists who like to think they're purveying ultimate truth are so silly, and maybe hey this religious stuff isn't all bad? Again it's insulting - any good scientist is highly aware of the limits of reliable knowledge - and anyway, just because there are some limits on the reliability of knowledge, doesn't mean we can't at least try and distinguish between more and less reliable knowledge. The religious pundits don't want us to do so, of course, they would rather that we get shocked over the hubris of prideful scientists, and walk around "knowing" that everything is relative, nothing is really knowable... Helps them out. This is all textbook religious propaganda to me, the more so because it's so benignly packaged.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

People continually underestimate the power of the narrative. Humans want to see things in terms of stories, of drama, heroes, and so forth. Even if the underlying history doesn't fit the narrative, allowance will be made so that it does. The story wins out over all else. This is why the internet meme is so powerful. Nobody steals your kidneys and leaves you in a bathtub, but it makes for a helluva great story. Bill Gates isn't giving away money for emails, but wouldn't it be awesome if he was? I could probably put together a list of 100 Hollywood movies that purposefully destroy the truth just in order to sell more movie tickets. And people love it. (sidebar: "Big Fish" is a great movie about this topic) Movies will even go to great lengths to reassure you that they are telling a true story -- then bullshit the hell out of you. People know that they're stretching and murdering the truth, but guess what? They don't care. A good story is much more interesting than what actually happened, or some cold collection of facts. And I think 3 centuries is being generous. Most times this begins way before the people involved die. There are many people alive today trying to restore in the public's mind what actually happened, instead of what the public believes happened through consuming some terrific story.

lazyant 13y ago
yep. see "made to stick"

mathattack 13y ago

While I don't subscribe to Howard Zinn, I like to read him for an alternative viewpoint. He has strong views about how we curved the opinion on Columbus and built a myth around him. http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html

dsego 13y ago

I think history should be rewritten. The great leaders of the past like Napoleon or Columbus (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day) should be portrayed for what they were, blood thirsty psychopaths. Emphasis in history lessons should be on science and art, not war and conquest.

pavel_lishin 13y ago
Emphasis in history should be on those events that made a large impact. Would you emphasize the Dada movement over World War I? Would you focus more on the discovery of nuclear fission, rather than World War II? (For that matter, could you?)
- dsego 13y ago
  Fair point. But too often those events are simplistically described as us vs. them, good vs. evil (with good always being us). Maybe the emphasis could be put on individual stories (e.g. Anne Frank) instead of anthropomorphising nations.
antiterra 13y ago
The real lesson is that humans are tribal and can classify people outside their tribes as something lesser. It's a fundamental and frightening part of our nature; the average human has the capacity to be cruel and brutal. That is the banality of evil. It's not just European great leaders, it's everyone, and it's fueled by the same underlying tendency that creates smartphone brand fanatics.

ctdonath 13y ago

Science doesn’t follow a mythic positivist ideal but the plural scientific methods described by Feyerabend: a mixture of empiricism, flights of fancy, intuition, aesthetics, doggedness, and jealousy. Scientific theories are underdetermined. Any finite set of facts can support multiple theories, and for a long time the available facts were equally explained by geostationary or geomobile models. This marvelously addresses the current HN thread Should We Stop Believing Malcolm Gladwell?.