> 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.
History 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.
The 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.
We 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.
The 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)
The question is not whether US history books should relay the Nazi narrative of WWII or a western narrative. The question is which western narrative. There is a million ways of telling the story about WWII even while remaining factual, by selecting, framing, emphasizing different aspects etc. Just as an example, the western narrative during the cold war tended (for obvious reasons) to downplay the role of the eastern front and the USSR. This in turn made it hard to explain what Hitler was even trying to achieve with the war.
> This in turn made it hard to explain what Hitler was even trying to achieve with the war.
Perhaps ironically, the best way to understand what Nazi Germany was trying to accomplish is to read what they wrote about it - which is pretty much tantamount to "teaching the Nazi narrative," isn't it?
WW2 looked very different from the perspective of each state actor. It even looked substantially different to a common soldier or citizen of each state than it did to the state's leadership.
The Nazi leadership wanted expansion of the German state to include all of Europe. Most of the Nazi leadership wanted to exterminate "undesirables" within the borders of that state as well - but to the German citizen drafted into the Heer in 1942, it was about keeping the Communists at bay, and as the war wore on, about keeping the advancing Red Army from raping and pillaging what they saw as their homeland.
Honestly, I don't know how we should teach it as a society. I know how I teach my kids - I give the best overview I can of the motives of each major state actor and then reference individual accounts of people living under the regime. I do my best not to assign right or wrong to their actions, excepting things that are obviously morally repugnant like the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the actions of Unit 731, and the Rape of Nanking.
> The Nazi leadership wanted expansion of the German state to include all of Europe.
No they didn't. They wanted to expand the German state to include areas with significant German population (Austria, Sudentenland, Elsass, Slovenia etc.) and then they wanted to expand the state eastwards into Poland and Western USSR for "Lebensraum".
Germany occupied France, Belgium, Denmark, Norway etc. for military strategic reasons. They had no plans of incorporating these countries in the Reich, which would be counter to the whole Nazi ideology of a German ethnostate.
This is exactly the primary point of my post - yes, the Nazis didn't consider those countries to be "German", but they intended to include them in their conquests to build "Festung Europa" ("Fortress Europe").
You're right, I didn't differentiate between the areas they aimed to conquer for Lebensraum and the areas they intended to conquer for strategic purposes. Should I have? Why? Should I have gone so far as to mention that while they didn't intend to occupy Britain, they certainly intended to bomb them into submission?
"Nazi Germany wanted the German state to include all of Europe" is accurate, just incomplete. They also didn't intend to invade Switzerland or Sweden. They fought alongside the Finns for most of the war, until they fought against them.
Hell, you could even go so far as to color the actions of some of the German military staff as anti-Nazi even as they fought against the Allies - Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, for instance. Things like that are important pieces of information for historians and other interested people, but are they really important enough to cover in a high school history class?
This isn't accurate. As I understand it, the theory was that the state should control "the race". Which means that it would decide who has children with whom, control marriages, who educates them, how, where and why. In other words, control everyone, everything, to get a perfect society. The goal being improving/purifying "the race" further. The thing that makes it different from a bond movie is that it's not a singular "evil genius" type of guy but 20-30% of the population trying to do that.
I pity whoever had children in Germany in the 1930s because that must have been terrible, no matter how German you were. Granted, the experience was vastly different for Jews, but it wouldn't have been a good experience for anyone.
The "first" holocaust, so to speak, the beginning, was the state euthanizing psychiatric patients with no hope of recovery (real ... and imagined, like gays). Then they went after the long-term ill, like people in coma or with serious illnesses (this was before widely available antibacterial treatments so there was no shortage of such people), and generally everyone who was a burden, eventually including everyone who was perceived to not be 100% dedicated to the state, in the opinion of the idiot bullies that worked in the police and the various state services.
Like in the Soviet Union, what the Nazi state did was give people like teachers, police officers, army, gestapo (let's call it their FBI equivalent), ... absolute control over normal citizens. Needless to say, this power was not really used for the stated purpose, but to allow sadistic bullies to utterly control everyone around them. God help you if your kid did better in school than the assistant principal's kid. To let scared politicians torture 100 people to death because someone let their dog poop on their niece's law. To let moral busybodies in the state arrest all children and have them perform hard labor in a camp because there was a girl that got pregnant unmarried (Nazis arranged marriages), or had a kid with someone other than the arranged partner. To let bureaucrats take away children from their parents "because they didn't raise them right", and then (usually) torture those children (given the motivations of those people, like the assistant principal referenced above, I think you can "understand why" they would torture those children). To have the mayor declare that the fact that 10 people died from starvation because there's no food in any store, and it's the fault of that evil enemy, not the fault of him diverting all the food to a party in his garden for his wife's cat's birthday.
The thing people don't seem to understand is how the human mind works. Under such circumstances, you might expect people to revolt, but that didn't (and doesn't) happen. People wouldn't revolt, not even the Jews being deported. What do people do when they're tortured ? The vast majority ... try to join the torturers. That part is not different from the Taliban to the Soviets, to the Holocaust, except perhaps in scale and just how far they went.
That's why such a system can keep existing and continue itself. It's victims want to join, not revolt. That's why these systems can grow. In the Soviet Union, such a system existed for a further 30 years at least. Ask a few ex-Soviets, the bureaucrats were let loose there for much, much longer than in Germany.
The important thing to realize is that the US police/FBI/CIA/... contains many people that aren't all that different from their counterparts in 1930s Germany and, given the chance, they would do the same.
But of course, people have forgotten. We just need more laws, more powers, more investigations, to make society just and to make sure those damn rich bankers don't get away with everything, don't we ?
> Under such circumstances, you might expect people to revolt, but that didn't (and doesn't) happen. People wouldn't revolt, not even the Jews being deported.
Not true, there are multiple instances of Jewish uprisings - most famously the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the Sobibor uprising and multiple others. They just lost.
By the way, why do you use the euphemism "deported"? They were murdered.
True, but I would argue there has been serious persecution at least from 1936 onward.
I guess I meant they first got deported, then murdered. This is also what it looked like where they lived. They were put on trains (and I would argue, things were rather clear from, say 1941 onward. "Wir haben est nicht gewusst" is bullshit). Before 1940 or so, it was only deportation. Later forced labor, then mass-murder. This was accepted and even assisted (e.g. the "Jewish councils") by perpetrators ... and by victims, and by wittnesses.
Please don't think that I intend to deny what happened, that is not at all what I intended. I guess I've just read the term deported many times online, and in movies. I feel somewhat ashamed that I do see what you mean complaining about that being a euphemism and I do apologize deeply. That was not clear to me, but it should have been.
I 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.
A 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.
I 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".
Do 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.
The Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell has a podcast called "Revisionist History" http://revisionisthistory.com/ in which he drills into particular episodes of US history.
I find it interesting, even though I don't have the academic historical chops to independently assess its accuracy.
Example: In the episode called Miss Buchanan's Period of Adjustment, Gladwell explains that Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (the famous school integration case) had a severe consequence. It caused a large fraction of African American schoolteachers and educators to be thrown out of work. He points out that teaching was a major source of 1930s-1950s knowledge-work employment for African Americans was teaching in segregated schools. Quite a few Euro-American school boards obeyed the ruling admitting African American students, but did not employ the teachers from thew schools they left.
You have to be careful with Gladwell. His primary gift, is that is he is an incredible storyteller. Take him as entertainment not as a historian or scientist. He goes for surprising and unexpected simple reasons for everything, often by cherry-picking individual facts or annecdotes.
Do you have any particular instances of him getting it wrong. I often here this concern, but I'm yet to find someone that can point to a moment and say he got it wrong.
But why were these teachers not hired in other schools? Given segregation would give rise to exactly these kind of scenarios it reflects a severe lack of planning on desegregation and a system unwilling to desegregate, and betrays yet another instance of continued discrimination with black teachers paying the price.
Hanlons Razor is often appropriate, but I'm not sure it is in the case of history teaching. Teachers don't teach an incorrect or skewed version of history because they are "dumb". They either do it because the want to impart certain ideas and values to the students, or because they genuinely believe this is a appropriate view of history, which just pushes the question one level back - because who then taught the teacher the skewed version of history?
Teachers teach the curriculum they are assigned, that is all. The only variation is in private schools that do not conform to State and Federal curriculum standards by default. In public schools, teachers do not decide what they teach. Standardized testing guarantees that teachers stick to the script also.
>Teachers teach the curriculum they are assigned, that is all
A significant portion of my family is made of teachers and this is not true at all. In healthy (most) schools, teachers have enough wiggle room to tell students "This portion of your textbook is wrong/biased in a weird way". In some cases, they may be prohibited from saying specific things and other oddities, often by old and angry boards of education or similar, but if an educator actually believes in the importance of teaching children, they will find a way to impart the needed knowledge.
You can easily see this in situations like how heavily underpaid teachers still go out and purchase their own supplies because the schools do not give them the tools to do their jobs. Many teachers go above and beyond what their contract states.
Remember that teachers have often seen multiple different education standards and decrees come and go, and therefore understand actually educating is more important than meeting the minimum standard
As a k12 teacher - this has not been my experience at all.
In fact, I would invite you to take a look at the common core standards for English/Language Arts. They are hardly a curriculum script. They offer significant flexibility and opportunity to individualize content for your teaching context. Despite all the problems and issues I face on an average day, being pressured to teach canned curriculum is not one of them.
So far as I am aware, standardized testing does not apply to history and other non-core subjects. Like science also, unfortunately. Everything outside the three Rs (reading, writing, 'rithmetic) is slashed, because that's what the tests target.
You're wrong. Most states have some form of Standards of Learning (SOL) testing at each grade level. These cover the three Rs, plus history and science. Most of these were implemented as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act.
Interesting. I know that my state and the neighboring one only count the reading, writing and mathematics portions of whatever standardized testing they require. Although I believe that the state legislature just eliminated the whole very expensive set of standards that they had just put into place.
Not only do most kids not take AP tests, not all schools offer AP classes. OF the schools that offer them, not all of them offer the full array.
The other unfortunate side of AP classes is that much of history classes is taught well before the AP class. I had 2.5 years of history in high school: One semester was a law education class, only offered to "advanced" students instead of geography (a real shame, as I think the class was one of the more helpful classes I took), one European history class, and one AP American History.
The American History class was the most interesting and probably the most free, actually. My particular class used a college-level book and the teacher would add in things that weren't covered by the book and she'd point out where the book might be misleading or wrong. That class was also where I was introduced to "The Jungle", "Grapes of wrath", and Malcolm X's biography.
I oddly don't remember as much about the actual test (it was 20 years ago), but it wasn't nearly the same as other standardized tests at the time. If I remember correctly, it was more based on thinking and processing history than memorizing facts.
Brings to mind another related absurd pedagogical approach the "lies to children" approach of starting by saying that molecules are the smallest object possible. Then atoms. Instead of being truthful and mentioning quarks but saying they are so advanced and deep that even most physicists don't even do anything with them calculation related or otherwise.
"Lies to children" is a perfectly good pedagogic approach. Adding caveats to every concept sucks time and energy from learning the broad themes of the subject. When we teach people programming, we start with variables and loops and don't mention page faults and cache poisoning. The same goes for any field.
Demanding nuance of a particular kind in history pedagogy, as you see often these days, is just a bad-faith "isolated demand for rigor" that has the effect of privileging the worldview of those demanding the selective nuance.
Yeah, french people are very patriotic. There are some good reasons for that, be it past or present, beauty of the country etc, but as with other over-patriotic countries (I am looking at you US, but not only), a lot of people like simple world views so France/US/whatever becomes simply the best country ever, no real discussion allowed, critical view is ignored or simply attacked.
A bit more humble approach would do everybody much better, since every single country out there has done things to be ashamed of, or outright utterly horrible. Realizing you are not that much better than the other guy may bring some sense of equality that I don't see in current world (american life worth more than some other, modern colonialism done by former colonial powers including US, Russia and probably China, and so on and on).
There is an excellent fun little book "1066 and All That", which parodies English history as people remember it from their education. It happens to have been written in 1930 but most of its jokes hold up, and the subset that people remember from that period hasn't changed quite so much.
History as remembered by the public is always going to be fragments made into a mythos. The problem is that some of that mythos defines the propaganda contours of the present, whether that's people saying the US civil war wasn't about slavery or whether it's Brexiteers saying that "no deal will be fine because we survived the second world war".
This book was a breath of fresh air for me. I had taken a college level course in history not terribly long before this book came out, and I felt that much of the content was wrong or questionable. This book helped confirm my original suspicion something I struggled with for quite some time. I am glad to see the author is pushing forward with what he originally stated. He was right.
On another note, it is interesting to see the flag has the gold trim around it in this shot.
I also enjoyed this book. However, I find it strange you had that experience in a college level course. I took two terms of US history in college and the professor had zero qualms about calling out discrepancies and shining a light on how history was/is written through certain cultural standards and lenses. Despite not really being a “history person”, they were some of my favorite courses because I felt like there was very little bullshit being presented as absolute truth.
Different professors are different. The person who taught my college general education literature class used it as an opportunity to unapologetically proselytize the good word of Jesus Christ. 90% of every quiz question or essay prompt was relating every book back to Christianity.
I found it offensive, but at this point in my college career the fight had been abraded out of me. I tried doing the assignments dispassionately, writing things like "Taking for granted that there is an omnipotent entity at the helm of the universe, I think the author contends that <rest of my answer>".
I'd get my paper back with every secular apologism scribbled out in red, and comments on the margins that were like "JESUS LIVES" and other such academically cool business. Also he was giving me D's. This was a state school, not a religious one.
Having fought 25% of my professors that ended up being lunatics no appetite remained in me to take this one to the tribunal. So, I salvaging my grade by feigning conversion. I started writing incomprehensibly unrelated answers to short essay questions. A question might read something like "In what way was Dostoevsky influenced by stoicism." I would answer "God is great!" My reward was A's.
I no longer find anything within a normal distribution of human arch-types strange.
The sanitized version prevents people from comprehending the scope of the horror and abuse, bequeaths an air of normalcy, and leads to simplistic conclusions in modern generations.
At every given point minorities have faced huge resistance for the simplest of things and basic human equality and dignity - and I suspect every adult educated citizen knows this - and the effects of these continue to fester. It's not 'complexity' if you historically discriminate against people they will suffer and there will be far reaching multi generational consequences. This can't be wished away in denial, how can a problem remain unsolved after 200 years?
We hold others coming out of hundreds of years of colonialism to standards we often to do adhere to ourselves and which these societies lacking development, wealth and time have not had an opportunity to develop.
This becomes another way to not shine the torch on ourselves. Redlining, housing policies, access to education, employment, credit, segregated living and education and the police & justice system will not pass scrutiny. And this has so far escaped global attention and censure but at some point the USA as a whole will be held to account for the condition of the minorities. And at that point the depravity of Pioneer and Volker funded studies by people like Charles Murray - whose work continues to be used even on an educated forums like this regularly, revisionist history and blaming others will not hold because we do not accept these excuses from other countries we hold to account.
I have reviewed most of the history my kids learned as they were growing up. Most of it is actually decent.
Often, uncomfortable truths are avoided where contemporary standards differ wildly from a historical context. This is unfortunate because students do not understand that "normal" changes over time. This is probably most pronounced wrt race relations (e.g. what passed as normal race relations in 1860 throughout the entire US would be considered outrageously racist now...or the idea that in 1943 Americans sympathized with imprisoned Japanese citizens, the normalcy of anti-Semitism throughout most of history etc).
Instead children are taught to view the past through the standards and tastes of the present, and history becomes a matter of making moral judgements and shaping present morality (a valuable function but not the point of history). But indeed even our study of history will one day make great history...what happens when history is written by people who have never had to kill to survive?
I've had this same conversation but concerning ages when normal things happen. Look at when people got married and had children in 1860 vs 1960 vs 2018. In this short amount of time people went from having children being normal from 12-14 to 18-30, to 25-40. Yes people still have children at young ages but it is more of a norm to do it later. Just look at all the HN articles talking about that the last couple years. Then listen to conversations when you hear about a 22 year old marrying a 16 year old, things get said like "pedophile" and "gross" and "thats just wrong." Even though not too long ago that was normal.
And that feedback is just from the States. Other countries and regions are different. Maybe here 18 is a magical age where you become an adult but in the far East its 16. In Amazonia it is 13. (I just made those numbers up, I do not know).
Makes you wonder, what is normal or moral to me that is just learned behavior and not really normal or moral?
These things aren't just arbitary changes, they're part of the consent revolution and the general post-Enlightentment search to have reasons why we do things rather than just the arbitary tyranny of ""normal"".
This is actually inaccurate. You are portraying it as a monotonic trend towards older marriages, but it was actually a local minimum in the 50s and 60s. The average age of marriage in 1890 was roughly the same as 1990 for men and 1980 for women[1]. After that typical marriage ages dropped gradually until the 50s and 60s and then started rising again.
Which is a real shame since one of the points of learning history is to understand why things happened and how very different things can be from our own times and cultures. It is good to go through the uncomfortable bits, since those are the most difficult to understand, and the most rewarding. I sometimes think that the difference between one culture through time is larger than the difference in culture between two different countries now.
It is good to understand the most different things, either to avoid them and their root cause, or to adopt the things people in history have done better than us. History repeats itself :D
> This is unfortunate because students do not understand that "normal" changes over time. This is probably most pronounced wrt race relations (e.g. what passed as normal race relations in 1860 throughout the entire US would be considered outrageously racist now...
There were people back then who thought it was an outrage too. Maybe you should be more uncomfortable with the past.
It is likely that a few centuries from now our degradation of the environment will be subject to a different moral filter...yet how many of us feel uncomfortable buying a new smartphone? The problem of moralizing is that our present "high horses" are wobbly.
I don't know that we need to interpret the GP's post as moralizing. You can also interpret it as a simple statement of fact: History is usually written by those who were in power at the time, and that means that it doesn't typically include the opinions of those who weren't.
The common meme that the vast majority of people in the antebellum south thought slavery was OK is a great example of this. It doesn't even pass the smell test unless you either don't have a good sense of just how many people were enslaved at that time and place, or you don't think slaves count as people.
That isn't to say that the morals of the people dictating how society worked weren't different at the time, just that getting the phrasing right does matter.
> The common meme that the vast majority of people in the antebellum south thought slavery was OK is a great example of this.
Even that is a somewhat controversial statement - as the author mentioned, historians (or anyone who is interested in and studies history) are apt to bring in nuance. From my understanding from reading the correspondence and journals of people in that era, people in the antebellum South weren't "OK" with the institution of slavery to the same degree. Some thought it was wrong but the most practical option, some thought it was abhorrent, some had their opinions colored by their own fortunes being tied closely to it. Some where abject racists even by the standards of the time.
It was a controversial and nuanced issue at the time... like every other political issue in the public arena.
"It is likely that a few centuries from now our degradation of the environment will be subject to a different moral filter...yet how many of us feel uncomfortable buying a new smartphone?"
You negate your own point when the second clause clearly implies that you're still applying the fashionable standards of today.
To demonstrate how the future may be different, you need to apply different standards. The future may well consider today's environmental degradation as simply a necessary step to the glorious future they live in, and be amused at the parochialness of the people of the time who were worried about it. They could use the metaphor of an egg; shortly before the chick hatches, the egg environment is getting pretty nasty, full of waste products that have nowhere to go. The chick can project that death is certainly around the corner if they don't stop growing soon. But it can't stop growing; it must hatch.
(Before you go "But jerf...!" and start trying to tear that metaphor apart, bear in mind I'm writing from the perspective of an already-glorious future here, not claiming it is absolutely something true of the present.)
Another heterodox idea I've considered is that the future may well mock us for our concern over the environment when the real threat was technological tyranny the whole time, except the tyranny probably wouldn't let alone learn that much about the present time.... But the general idea holds; there are plenty of future threats that may turn out in the end to be far more dangerous than the environment and for it to have been a near waste of time in the end to put so much effort into the environment instead of dealing with $THREAT.
To get here, I'm also projecting into the future the subconscious idea that most of us carry that there is something inevitable about the way the future went and that somehow people should have known. A modern example of this is that it's really easy to look at history and say Y2K was overblown and everybody should have known it. But at the time, it was a rational fear, and the reason why it didn't happen is that people worked really, really hard. So in the future, if some other disaster overtakes humanity, I fully expect the future to project back on to us a belief that we should in the here-and-now already know about this threat and have been dealing with what seems to them to be patently obviously a bigger deal than the environment.
In the real here-and-now, where the future is not known, taking good care of the environment is a rational move. But in the future they may really be cursing us for not throwing billions of dollars at friendly AI. Or whoknows what.
Wow, I love the "hatching from the egg" metaphor. Like you, I have no idea if it's applicable here, but it's a great metaphor.
The future may well consider today's environmental degradation as simply a necessary step to the glorious future they live in, and be amused at the parochialness of the people of the time who were worried about it.
I'm doubtful about this outcome, though. If we do significantly degrade the environment, and even if the degradation was arguably necessary, I'm doubtful that "the glorious future" will judge us kindly.
Can you think of cases where current popular sentiment is similarly charitable toward the past? Overall, I think we are quite morally critical of the past, and not very accepting of the tradeoffs that were considered necessary at the time.
Whatever the real outcome is going to be, it is likely that you'd be doubtful of it, though. People's track records on predicting the future weren't all that great even before tech took off on its probably-only-sigmoid-but-still-kinda-exponential-right-now curve.
"Can you think of cases where current popular sentiment is similarly charitable toward the past?"
It would be very hard. I am of the opinion that our current culture is excessively cut off from the past. While not every culture in the world necessary did things like ancestor worship (an extreme of past honoring), our culture is historically very unusual in its outright contempt for the past. And it makes me rather uncomfortable in a lot of ways because I think the 20th century is replete with too many examples of cultures going full on "let's start from a blank page and create the future that should exist!" and failing... several million bodies later.
I find myself wondering how much of it has been the natural severing of experiences due to the aforementioned changing tech (how can I emotionally attach myself to great-great-grandpa's experiences, when he lived his entire life on a farm, hardly moved from his village, and couldn't even imagine the job I currently have, etc. [1]), and how much of it is social engineering by people who essentially don't want you to find out just how many current political ideas have actually already been tried and failed, utterly and horribly. At the same time, in a lot of ways, I think we've changed less than we think, and our contempt for the past may well be one of those things that the future will have contempt for us for. For instance, it's obvious that we believe in many ways that we don't need "privacy" anymore, but it's not hard to see the current furor around social media as the beginning stages of laboriously recreating the need for privacy from scratch. It will be a different idea of privacy than what we had before, but having to tweak the lessons of old is something every generation has to do. How much pain could we have saved ourselves, though, had we tweaked our ideas of privacy instead of throwing them out entirely, only to rediscover them? (And that's before the totality of what the social media giants are doing has really come out and penetrated into the body politic. I suspect social media's troubles have just begun.)
[1]: Not just guessing that, by the way. That's what my family's genealogy has turned up. Seems like they moved maybe once in their lifetime, but certainly my ancestors were not travelers. My grandfather had enough of a hard time understanding my interests; I would appear all but an alien to my great-great-grandfathers.
Death really is around the corner for chicks in an egg though. Even professional hatcheries supposedly can't manage more than a ~90% hatch rate. The thing that is silly about the chicken's worry (apart from the anthropomorphism) is not that the situation wasn't actually life threatening, but that it is completely out of the chicken's control as an embryo.
Pollution and climate change are killing millions. For anyone in the glorious future looking back, I hope they will not be amused at how disturbing that is to us, but instead think, "yeah that was really terrible, thank goodness we got through it".
"Pollution and climate change are killing millions. For anyone in the glorious future looking back, I hope they will not be amused at how disturbing that is to us, but instead think, "yeah that was really terrible, thank goodness we got through it"."
How emotional are you about the deaths of Roman soldiers in their fight against Carthage?
If you claim anything other than almost total emotional detachment, let me pre-emptively say that I straight up don't believe you, and think you're just saying it for dialectic purposes for the narrow purposes of winning points in this particular discussion, but that in all likelihood it will over a decade before this topic even crosses your mind again, barring perhaps memories of this conversation. Nobody cares. Nobody has the emotional capacity to care that much, because there's too much history, and too much tragedy in it.
No, future humans aren't going to be wringing their hands about whatever horrors we may have suffered. There's a certain amount of evidence that WWII has already passed beyond the cultural event horizon where almost anybody has any deeply felt emotional reaction to reading about it, despite the fact its vets still live among us.
(Also, this is very much exactly the sort of "but jerf!" I was talking about.)
(Also, HN fancies itself rather smart but I gotta say, having discussed this sort of thing now twice in the past couple of days, it does not seem to be populated by people who have any ability to pull themselves out of modern fashions, even hypothetically, even for the duration of a single message. The prospect that people of the future aren't going to look back on us as the Enlightened Ones who had all the answers seems to be something not very many people here can even begin to think. Well... I'll be sure to bring that up with the future when I meet it.)
Your premise is a civilization with values that are some extension my own, which considers the environmental recklessness that preceded it as either amusing or necessary. That doesn't sound plausible. I really believe that, but I don't feel emotional about every specific tragedy in recorded history.
> A modern example of this is that it's really easy to look at history and say Y2K was overblown and everybody should have known it. But at the time, it was a rational fear, and the reason why it didn't happen is that people worked really, really hard.
This mythos is playing out now in the Brexit debate, where because nothing too bad happened in y2k everyone who makes projections about the likely bad impact of "no deal", including the government's own preparedness staff, are dismissed as "scaremongering".
History becomes propaganda unless you watch it very carefully.
Well anyone remotely informed in the future would judge based on how obvious it was. While we may consider civil war amputations barbaric we don't blame them for it given their lack of alternatives. In addition to the bleed out risk preantibiotics it would become gangrenous and kill the patient even if done in a clean room by time travelers who lacked antibiotics. However we tend to have "what a bunch of idiots" reactions to lack of hygiene like ignoring advice to get water upstream from the latrines.
I doubt we would be judged over nonrenewable usage for advanced at the time tech if it takes say fifteen PHDs to understand how to fabricate a biodegradable future smartphone from say genetically modified algae based nanotech wafers that are subjected to a one hundred and fifteen step process.
If you read moralizing into my statement that says something about you. Yes, there is conflict today just as there was conflict in the past. I'm just telling you, you can't understand history without understanding that conflict as anything but normal.
But I'm sure you have your reasons for approaching history- and today's issues, for that matter- the way you do.
Just because folks were outraged doesn't make it any less normal.
For example: It is normal for low-paying jobs in the US to require drug tests, even though there are folks that think this is outrages and could even be harmful. All it really takes is enough folks doing the act or for such things to remain a legal part of being able to do some jobs.
Something being normal is simply widely practised or widely encoded into law. It doesn't make it right or without struggle nor does it take away from the conflict. It was part of the reason there was conflict and struggle.
Knowing what was normal - widespread, encoded in law, and other such things - is part of understanding what the struggle was all about. Normal doesn't equal correctness, just what was average and widespread at the time.
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.