[ExI] jarring change

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 4:59 PM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 14, 2020 at 11:41 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> I hate history because there were no theories presented to try to make sense of the things we were supposed to memorize.  I can remember ideas just fine:  names, dates, places, not so much.  Huge waste of time for something one can always look up.
>
>
> You didn't have a good history teacher if there was no overarching theme to tie it all together.  I love history as a complete hobby at this point, but a great history book (or educator) will tie it all together somehow through their particular lens.   I will admit that I generally try to read histories written before 1960 (give or take) because I find anything done beyond that point frequently has an overt agenda behind it (and I don't mean that in the positive way I mean it above).   I still read newer histories as well because they are frequently updated with the latest archaeological knowledge which may change things greatly, but it's very easy to see any bias in newer works.   Of course, even the older works have their own biases but I generally find the quality in general much higher in terms of writing and framing.

With your comment on how history -- historiography -- gets updated, I
recall a friend of mine wondering why after reading Thucydides I'd
bother to read Donald Kagan's multi-volumed treatment of the same war.
He wasn't aware of the 'recent' archaeology (Kagan started writing
this work in 1969; I started reading it in the late 1990s*) that'd
been done -- much less centuries of debate on Thucydides and other
ancient sources. I bring up Thucydides because he's often seen as
modern in the sense that he tries to explain events by broad causes:
Why did Athens and Sparta clash? Because they were bound to clash
because both wanted to be hegemons, etc. He's actually fairly overt
about this and sees self-interest in all undertakings. Yet many people
treat him as if he didn't have an agenda. (One has to be especially
careful with ancients too because we often lack other sources,
especially rival contemporaries, writing history was something carried
out by very few, and what survives isn't a random sample but faces the
biases of selection between now and then. Probably just about every
history written in the modern period will survive. Most ancient
histories haven't.)

As for your particular claim, yeah, having a broad theme to tie things
together makes for a memorable and enjoyable account. But then the
problem is the historiography is biased by that criterion for
selection, no? (Grade school history in my experience often did that:
teaching a few broad things that happened: civilization rose and
spread (Mesopotamia to Rome), there were dark ages (fall of Rome,
Vikings, Mongols, the Black Death), then a resurgence (Renaissance,
Reformation, Columbus, Enlightenment) and here we are was the basic
thing I was taught. It's kind of understandable: to keep kids'
attention and the teachers probably didn't know more than that
anyhow.)

Regards,

Dan
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