
History Must Be Curved - bdfh42
http://www.popehat.com/2013/10/09/history-must-be-curved/
======
DanielBMarkham
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
yep. see "made to stick"

------
dsego
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
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
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.

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simias
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.

~~~
thaumasiotes
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
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.

------
bdfh42
Michael Flynn's essays are splendid - a "must read". Plus - I am now tempted
by the novels.

------
ctdonath
_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?_.

------
mathattack
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)

------
innino
Trojan horse for rehabilitating religion.

~~~
kijin
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.

~~~
innino
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.

~~~
kijin
A lot of benign facts are used in textbook political propaganda, too. More ice
in North Pole this year! Global warming must be false! Doesn't make it any
less interesting that ice levels fluctuate as wildly as it does. Sure, it gets
annoying when people with the wrong ideas repeat it all the time. But if
you're someone who is genuinely interested in how polar ice caps behave, it
doesn't matter because you already know that those little fluctuations are par
for the game.

Historians of science need to stay away from both extremes: (a) the religious
pundits who claim that science is just like religion, as well as (b)
simplistic views of science that paint it as more objective and value-free
than it really is. If every historian flocked to (b) just because they got
annoyed of having their work co-opted by (a), we'd end up with an
understanding of science that is just as unrealistic. Without a solid
understanding of how social, psychological, and even religious factors
influence science, how do we even go about trying to reduce such influences?
You don't solve problems by pretending they don't exist. Who cares if Jerry
Falwell's ilk use it in their propaganda, they bend and use _everything_ in
their propaganda anyway.

