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Re: cs lewis

I wish people would stop throwing around the term "revisionist history".  First
of all, *all* history is, by definition, revising the story in the light of new
techniques or new data, so the term is redundent.  Secondly, it implies that
there is some Platonic version of the Truth, from which any revision will cause
a deviation, but *any* story is necessarily a distillation and abstraction of
what *really* happened, and so will necessarily reflect the biases and
priorities of the storytellers.  There is no reason to assume that the first
version of the story (or the one that we are more familiar with) is necessarily
the more accurate one.  Indeed, often the more recent one is more trustworthy
(modulo the winds of the Zeitgeist), because there is more information
available.  Not always, but often.  For example, within the last ten years or
so, thousands of top secret documents from WWII have been declassified.
Wouldn't you think it would be important to "revise" the story that was
constructed by people who didn't have access to those documents?  Historians
prior to the 19th century didn't have access to archaeology; should we not
revise the histories they wrote?  Thirdly, the term "revisionist history" is in
practical terms something of an ad hominem argument.  Since all history is
revisionist, it cannot be argued against, and takes the discussion out of the
(potentially) rational plane of correct/incorrect into an emotional realm that
precludes discussion.  I am reminded of something Screwtape said about getting
people to avoid talking about something's truth or falsehood; get them to talk
about its modernity, or hipness, or some other character that has nothing to do
with whether it's right or wrong.  "Revisionist history" is a smokescreen; a
distraction.  He have tools for evaluating the strength of historical claims
without needing to set up some version as intrinsically authoritative.  We can
find that the "holocaust deniers" are generally wrong, and the people who tried
to develop the Enola Gey exhibit at the Smithsonian were generally right.  Both
were slapped with the label "revisionist", but that label is inflammatory,
political, and non-rational.  It ends discussion by fiat, not by a convincing
argument.

Sorry for the rant, but that has always bugged me.
-- 
Don Smith                    Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                          http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

The Iron Chef in The Matrix:       "I know Kung Pao!"       "Show me."


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