On History
A few months into the COVID pandemic, the Daily Show Social Distancing Show, published on YouTube by Trevor Noah and crew, put out a video that took the political issues happening during COVID-19 and compared them against the same political issues that arose during the Spanish Flu epidemic of the early 20th century. They're over a century apart, but the similarities between the two pandemics are stark. A few examples: there was mismanagement of the situation by both Woodrow Wilson and Trump, misinformation about both diseases was rampant, and there were massive protests against the mandates for wearing masks on the grounds of Constitutional law. What surprised me most about this video is that, while it has slowly gathered a couple of million views in the last year and half, it never went viral. I'm not a historian (not least of all because I don't know if it's "a historian" and "an historian"), and so I'm not qualified to make some of the sweeping statements the follow. That said, most positions a person takes in a blog entry this short are likely to be at least partly wrong, but I hope the truth found herein, should it exist, acts as a counterbalance to the frenzy of political turmoil that has possessed so many.
I often tell people that if they want to reduce their anxiety about present-day political events and controversies, that they should study the sibling fields of history and law. History, because no issue that is happening now is entirely without precedent of a similar event from some prior era, and law, because no issue is as a simple as the people who would solicit your vote or political support would have you believe that it is. The conceit that every generation has that its own problems are unique to itself dissolves quickly when they are viewed as part of larger cultural, political, or social cycles on a much longer timeline. While one could despair about how human beings don't learn from the past and repeat the same mistakes, it can be helpful to bear in mind that if nothing really changes, then the past almost certainly generated an equal number of apocalyptic doomsayers. Their dim predictions never came to pass, and so the "Chicken Littles" that are rampant in today's political climate are more than likely going to be proven just as wrong.
I have often had the sense that the narrative we get about life in the United States in the years preceding and during World War II isn't entirely accurate. Our cultural memory, aided by mass media and technology, readily recalls the hornet's nest of controversy stirred up by the counter-cultural and civil rights revolutions of the 1960's. We don't have this aid to help us as much with earlier wars. The history books they issue us in grade school would have us believe that the social history from this era is a neutered, toothless, lobotomized dog, drooling lazily on the carpet. In the 1930's, FDR dramatically expanded the power of the federal government with his New Deal legislation, increased taxes and diminished the power of big business, and towards the end of this decade FDR ran for an unprecedented (and not necessarily Constitutional) third presidential term. What if all of this happened again, in our current present-day United States? What would be the public reaction to such a thing? I know you have a vision in your head already. In films, people are gathered around radios in their homes and bars listening to reports and rooting for the soldiers fighting overseas. Where is the lone radical who is going around the party, annoying everyone by talking endlessly about what an authoritarian tyrant FDR is and how corrupt the government has become? Where are the large gatherings of isolationists who opposed entering the war, even after Pearl Harbor? I recently sought out a book that would discuss this aspect of the history, and found a title called The Darkest Year, which covers the history of the United States on the home front from late 1939 to 1942. It contains few surprises: back then, it seems people were just as bigoted, reactive, and politically divided, in pretty much exactly the same ways they are now, during this era of our history.
During the impeachment proceedings in the latter days of the Trump presidency, I attended a lecture by a practicing attorney, one of whose specialties was Constitutional law. This was a tiny gathering of maybe two or three dozen people that took place in the small back room of a Unitarian church in the heart of San Francisco, and from the outside, any onlookers could have easily mistaken it for an AA meeting. The presenter was dispassionate and outlined the steps of impeachment proceedings, laws that govern each step, and how all impeachments in the history of the United States had played out. When the time came for the Q&A at the end, many people raised their hands and asked extremely politically charged questions, some of them diatribes that happened to end in some incidental question, and some of them speaking in a manner that suggested they were on the verge of boiling over. (You know how these things go.) The speaker declined consistently to comment on politics, instead keeping his answers entirely to the law. During one of his responses, he happened to make reference to the objections that many people have about a corporation, as a legal entity comprised of individuals, having the same right to lobby Congress for change as any one individual. To some, this enables corporations to wield an unfair amount of power in influencing legislation. Our speaker pointed out that the same body of law that allows for this also allows unions and labor organizations to lobby Congress for change as well...something that is never pointed out when the issue of corporate influence is denigrated. I am not saying that these areas of the law need no reform. To the extent that I have a political identity, I long ago decided to nurture a values-based consistency, true to myself, that lands me on both sides of the political divide if you consider each issue individually, whereas any attempts to adhere to either pure partisan ideology inevitably ends in self-contradictions.
For those who would seek only a single book on the history of Christianity, you could do little better than Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, authored by Diarmaid MacCulloch, who is professor of the history of the church at Oxford. I find MacCulloch compelling because he talks not just about history, but about the meta-awareness we must operate with when considering historical accounts. He does not just relay historical events, but often embeds them with a sense of how his own philosophy of history pertains to his account. In a lecture he gave at the University of Sheffield, he talks about Samuel Butler's book The Clash of Civilizations, a book which he argues had a tremendous influence on how politicians during the second Bush administration developed foreign policy with respect to the Islamic parts of the world, despite the fact that the book itself does not paint an accurate representation of multiple facets and nuances of the Muslim faith or the Islamic world. As he says in the introduction to his Christianity: "There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified."
Why the reason for this tendency to oversimplification? It is surely not a matter of intelligence. Human beings are not creatures that move through their lives as passive receptacles of sequences of events. These events must be infused with meaning, they must have purpose, and be given form that makes us feel a sense of progress or self-actualization. Alfred Adler, a contemporary of Freud and Jung, offered the rather radical notion that it isn't a person's history that determines their present, but quite the inverse: their present determines their past. You can imagine a set of twins who grew up in the same household, both of whom experienced the same levels of mild developmental trauma from imperfect parents. The first one sees himself as a resilient, adaptable individual who is capable of handling and overcoming whatever challenges or difficulties life might throw at him. The other, in contrast, sees himself as a victim of poor life circumstances that are beyond his control to improve, and so lives as a despairing depressive who hopes each day for a miracle to pull him out of his hole. The latter will remember his childhood as a dark time he was forced to live through, without hope of escape, and which ended because he eventually grew up and moved out of the house. The former, on the other hand, might remember his childhood as a difficult time, but he will remember his strength and courage in enduring it, and his ability to persevere despite hardship.
We cannot expect a single man with the intellect of a monkey to produce a great work of literature. Nor would the aggregation of a million men with such intellects amount to anything that could collectively produce such a great work. (Except, perhaps, given chance and time, per the infinite monkey theorem.) What is an individual human being? A pile of internal contradictions and conflicts that spends its lifetime trying to resolve them, with all the futility of a dog chasing after its own tail. We shouldn't be surprised when a city, a state, a nation, or any other large group of individual human beings fails, in the aggregate, to operate any differently than this.
This is why narratives that a nation lives by matter just as much as the narratives that govern a person's life. How a country full of people imagines themselves to be will determine what gets remembered, because nothing will be retained that cannot be indexed in the flow of the narrative, and how things get remembered will invariably be colored by the broader arcs of the narrative itself. Two historians might write two separate accounts of the same events from history, compiled from the same pool of sources, and each will be different, perhaps radically so, depending on the narratives, and hence the biases and perspectives, of each individual. To bastardize Kierkegaard: life must be live forwards but misremembered backwards. I have a friend from college who majored in history who once told me that he chose history as his field of study because, unlike political science, theology, sociology, etc, it offers the events in the most neutral way possible and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions. Early on in my adult life I came to agree with him, but this doesn't mean that history is truly neutral. Any account has a skewed perspective for Kantian reasons, but this doesn't invalidate most historical accounts. To bastardize Winston Churchill: history is the least objective academic field in liberal arts, except for all of the other ones.
When I set out to learn one particular subject as deeply as possible, my strategy usually involve acquiring as many different books on the subject as I feel I might want to read. This not only allows for an uncoordinated spaced repetition in my absorption of the material, but it also allows me to view the same material from a variety of different perspectives. If one needs to produce a 3-D rendering of an object using a camera, then a series of 2-D photographs from different angles, fed into a series of multiple view geometry programs, can produce a mesh of the object in three-dimensional space. If one would understand any particular aspect or era of history, the more snapshots one can take of it, the better the mental rendering of the matter will be.
There is usually a massive gap between the past events that historical documentaries narrate and the present we are currently living. World War II, as covered above, is the one that sticks out the most. While WWII documentaries present soldiers fighting overseas, or high-level analysis of military strategies, the present-day experience of living domestically in the United States is a far cry from this perspective. It is apples and oranges. Even those who are in the armed forces currently may a hard time aligning the individual viewpoint of their own circumstances with the broad stories told of past wars. I'm disappointed there aren't more historical documentaries that take this into account, because the fact that the life experiences of our ancestors weren't terribly different than our own is a useful perspective. We can't imagine living as citizens within the conflicts of the Loyalists and the Revolutionaries, the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans, the Yankees and the Confederates, and so on, even if the experience of the citizen largely matches our own, because these events are presented as high-level chronological events that gloss over the low-level conflicts of the time by homogenizing all individuals on each side of the conflict into a kind of average historical persona.
While I would love to see a series of historical documentaries that compare the average daily lives of the social milieus past and present in the manner as the "Daily Show" clip linked earlier, it may be there is extremely limited interest in such a thing. The pedantic historian can bash his head against a wall, frustrated that people at large don't understand history the way it really happened, but instead remember a series of events that fit into a mythologized version of the past with which they are more comfortable. Perhaps this is a matter of cognitive burden, because simple and inaccurate will usually win out over complex and accurate, and only the historian has the mental energy to allocate to such matters. I suspect this comfort is more a matter of psychological need. Human beings are consistently refining how they see themselves, and our own pasts, both collective and personal, are a major part of this. Some people prefer to regard the history of the United States as presented in the 1619 Project, while others might read Ben Shapiro. Some prefer Howard Zinn while others read David McCullough. It is all well and good to quibble endlessly about what the facts are, since such debates are our nation's Original Sin from the pre-Revolutionary days, but what should be understood is that one's own preference speaks volumes about who they think they are or who they wish themselves to be.
My interest in any subject matter is largely from the perspective of human psychology. I study the Bible on a regular basis, but for psychological reasons and not religious ones. Ask a person who knows scripture what their favorite stories from the Gospels are, and you'll learn something quickly about who that person is. People have difficulty articulating their values succinctly (if they even know what they are), nor can you pry open a person's head and get an understanding of what's going on in there. One can only pass light into one ear and observe what kind of light emerges from the other side, and deduce from this, indirectly, what kind of refraction is happening. Something nigh-universal like the Bible is perfect for this; cultivation of religious belief or attitudes is simply a matter of curation between conflicting statements. The old question of "What Would Jesus Do?" is actually a perfect Rorschach test, a blank canvas onto which one can project the most revered parts of themselves, and this is a short-circuit to learning who another person is without being too invasive. This principle can be extrapolated from the individual to the masses. There is always a gap between the actual events of history and the way that large groups of people remember them. This is not willful ignorance but some form of wishful self-actualization of a collective identity. One cannot determine how the minds of the collective function, but understanding the chasm between truth and belief offers a glimpse into the polarizing filters at work.
I often tell people that if they want to reduce their anxiety about present-day political events and controversies, that they should study the sibling fields of history and law. History, because no issue that is happening now is entirely without precedent of a similar event from some prior era, and law, because no issue is as a simple as the people who would solicit your vote or political support would have you believe that it is. The conceit that every generation has that its own problems are unique to itself dissolves quickly when they are viewed as part of larger cultural, political, or social cycles on a much longer timeline. While one could despair about how human beings don't learn from the past and repeat the same mistakes, it can be helpful to bear in mind that if nothing really changes, then the past almost certainly generated an equal number of apocalyptic doomsayers. Their dim predictions never came to pass, and so the "Chicken Littles" that are rampant in today's political climate are more than likely going to be proven just as wrong.
I have often had the sense that the narrative we get about life in the United States in the years preceding and during World War II isn't entirely accurate. Our cultural memory, aided by mass media and technology, readily recalls the hornet's nest of controversy stirred up by the counter-cultural and civil rights revolutions of the 1960's. We don't have this aid to help us as much with earlier wars. The history books they issue us in grade school would have us believe that the social history from this era is a neutered, toothless, lobotomized dog, drooling lazily on the carpet. In the 1930's, FDR dramatically expanded the power of the federal government with his New Deal legislation, increased taxes and diminished the power of big business, and towards the end of this decade FDR ran for an unprecedented (and not necessarily Constitutional) third presidential term. What if all of this happened again, in our current present-day United States? What would be the public reaction to such a thing? I know you have a vision in your head already. In films, people are gathered around radios in their homes and bars listening to reports and rooting for the soldiers fighting overseas. Where is the lone radical who is going around the party, annoying everyone by talking endlessly about what an authoritarian tyrant FDR is and how corrupt the government has become? Where are the large gatherings of isolationists who opposed entering the war, even after Pearl Harbor? I recently sought out a book that would discuss this aspect of the history, and found a title called The Darkest Year, which covers the history of the United States on the home front from late 1939 to 1942. It contains few surprises: back then, it seems people were just as bigoted, reactive, and politically divided, in pretty much exactly the same ways they are now, during this era of our history.
During the impeachment proceedings in the latter days of the Trump presidency, I attended a lecture by a practicing attorney, one of whose specialties was Constitutional law. This was a tiny gathering of maybe two or three dozen people that took place in the small back room of a Unitarian church in the heart of San Francisco, and from the outside, any onlookers could have easily mistaken it for an AA meeting. The presenter was dispassionate and outlined the steps of impeachment proceedings, laws that govern each step, and how all impeachments in the history of the United States had played out. When the time came for the Q&A at the end, many people raised their hands and asked extremely politically charged questions, some of them diatribes that happened to end in some incidental question, and some of them speaking in a manner that suggested they were on the verge of boiling over. (You know how these things go.) The speaker declined consistently to comment on politics, instead keeping his answers entirely to the law. During one of his responses, he happened to make reference to the objections that many people have about a corporation, as a legal entity comprised of individuals, having the same right to lobby Congress for change as any one individual. To some, this enables corporations to wield an unfair amount of power in influencing legislation. Our speaker pointed out that the same body of law that allows for this also allows unions and labor organizations to lobby Congress for change as well...something that is never pointed out when the issue of corporate influence is denigrated. I am not saying that these areas of the law need no reform. To the extent that I have a political identity, I long ago decided to nurture a values-based consistency, true to myself, that lands me on both sides of the political divide if you consider each issue individually, whereas any attempts to adhere to either pure partisan ideology inevitably ends in self-contradictions.
For those who would seek only a single book on the history of Christianity, you could do little better than Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, authored by Diarmaid MacCulloch, who is professor of the history of the church at Oxford. I find MacCulloch compelling because he talks not just about history, but about the meta-awareness we must operate with when considering historical accounts. He does not just relay historical events, but often embeds them with a sense of how his own philosophy of history pertains to his account. In a lecture he gave at the University of Sheffield, he talks about Samuel Butler's book The Clash of Civilizations, a book which he argues had a tremendous influence on how politicians during the second Bush administration developed foreign policy with respect to the Islamic parts of the world, despite the fact that the book itself does not paint an accurate representation of multiple facets and nuances of the Muslim faith or the Islamic world. As he says in the introduction to his Christianity: "There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified."
Why the reason for this tendency to oversimplification? It is surely not a matter of intelligence. Human beings are not creatures that move through their lives as passive receptacles of sequences of events. These events must be infused with meaning, they must have purpose, and be given form that makes us feel a sense of progress or self-actualization. Alfred Adler, a contemporary of Freud and Jung, offered the rather radical notion that it isn't a person's history that determines their present, but quite the inverse: their present determines their past. You can imagine a set of twins who grew up in the same household, both of whom experienced the same levels of mild developmental trauma from imperfect parents. The first one sees himself as a resilient, adaptable individual who is capable of handling and overcoming whatever challenges or difficulties life might throw at him. The other, in contrast, sees himself as a victim of poor life circumstances that are beyond his control to improve, and so lives as a despairing depressive who hopes each day for a miracle to pull him out of his hole. The latter will remember his childhood as a dark time he was forced to live through, without hope of escape, and which ended because he eventually grew up and moved out of the house. The former, on the other hand, might remember his childhood as a difficult time, but he will remember his strength and courage in enduring it, and his ability to persevere despite hardship.
We cannot expect a single man with the intellect of a monkey to produce a great work of literature. Nor would the aggregation of a million men with such intellects amount to anything that could collectively produce such a great work. (Except, perhaps, given chance and time, per the infinite monkey theorem.) What is an individual human being? A pile of internal contradictions and conflicts that spends its lifetime trying to resolve them, with all the futility of a dog chasing after its own tail. We shouldn't be surprised when a city, a state, a nation, or any other large group of individual human beings fails, in the aggregate, to operate any differently than this.
This is why narratives that a nation lives by matter just as much as the narratives that govern a person's life. How a country full of people imagines themselves to be will determine what gets remembered, because nothing will be retained that cannot be indexed in the flow of the narrative, and how things get remembered will invariably be colored by the broader arcs of the narrative itself. Two historians might write two separate accounts of the same events from history, compiled from the same pool of sources, and each will be different, perhaps radically so, depending on the narratives, and hence the biases and perspectives, of each individual. To bastardize Kierkegaard: life must be live forwards but misremembered backwards. I have a friend from college who majored in history who once told me that he chose history as his field of study because, unlike political science, theology, sociology, etc, it offers the events in the most neutral way possible and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions. Early on in my adult life I came to agree with him, but this doesn't mean that history is truly neutral. Any account has a skewed perspective for Kantian reasons, but this doesn't invalidate most historical accounts. To bastardize Winston Churchill: history is the least objective academic field in liberal arts, except for all of the other ones.
When I set out to learn one particular subject as deeply as possible, my strategy usually involve acquiring as many different books on the subject as I feel I might want to read. This not only allows for an uncoordinated spaced repetition in my absorption of the material, but it also allows me to view the same material from a variety of different perspectives. If one needs to produce a 3-D rendering of an object using a camera, then a series of 2-D photographs from different angles, fed into a series of multiple view geometry programs, can produce a mesh of the object in three-dimensional space. If one would understand any particular aspect or era of history, the more snapshots one can take of it, the better the mental rendering of the matter will be.
There is usually a massive gap between the past events that historical documentaries narrate and the present we are currently living. World War II, as covered above, is the one that sticks out the most. While WWII documentaries present soldiers fighting overseas, or high-level analysis of military strategies, the present-day experience of living domestically in the United States is a far cry from this perspective. It is apples and oranges. Even those who are in the armed forces currently may a hard time aligning the individual viewpoint of their own circumstances with the broad stories told of past wars. I'm disappointed there aren't more historical documentaries that take this into account, because the fact that the life experiences of our ancestors weren't terribly different than our own is a useful perspective. We can't imagine living as citizens within the conflicts of the Loyalists and the Revolutionaries, the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans, the Yankees and the Confederates, and so on, even if the experience of the citizen largely matches our own, because these events are presented as high-level chronological events that gloss over the low-level conflicts of the time by homogenizing all individuals on each side of the conflict into a kind of average historical persona.
While I would love to see a series of historical documentaries that compare the average daily lives of the social milieus past and present in the manner as the "Daily Show" clip linked earlier, it may be there is extremely limited interest in such a thing. The pedantic historian can bash his head against a wall, frustrated that people at large don't understand history the way it really happened, but instead remember a series of events that fit into a mythologized version of the past with which they are more comfortable. Perhaps this is a matter of cognitive burden, because simple and inaccurate will usually win out over complex and accurate, and only the historian has the mental energy to allocate to such matters. I suspect this comfort is more a matter of psychological need. Human beings are consistently refining how they see themselves, and our own pasts, both collective and personal, are a major part of this. Some people prefer to regard the history of the United States as presented in the 1619 Project, while others might read Ben Shapiro. Some prefer Howard Zinn while others read David McCullough. It is all well and good to quibble endlessly about what the facts are, since such debates are our nation's Original Sin from the pre-Revolutionary days, but what should be understood is that one's own preference speaks volumes about who they think they are or who they wish themselves to be.
My interest in any subject matter is largely from the perspective of human psychology. I study the Bible on a regular basis, but for psychological reasons and not religious ones. Ask a person who knows scripture what their favorite stories from the Gospels are, and you'll learn something quickly about who that person is. People have difficulty articulating their values succinctly (if they even know what they are), nor can you pry open a person's head and get an understanding of what's going on in there. One can only pass light into one ear and observe what kind of light emerges from the other side, and deduce from this, indirectly, what kind of refraction is happening. Something nigh-universal like the Bible is perfect for this; cultivation of religious belief or attitudes is simply a matter of curation between conflicting statements. The old question of "What Would Jesus Do?" is actually a perfect Rorschach test, a blank canvas onto which one can project the most revered parts of themselves, and this is a short-circuit to learning who another person is without being too invasive. This principle can be extrapolated from the individual to the masses. There is always a gap between the actual events of history and the way that large groups of people remember them. This is not willful ignorance but some form of wishful self-actualization of a collective identity. One cannot determine how the minds of the collective function, but understanding the chasm between truth and belief offers a glimpse into the polarizing filters at work.