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Re: revisionism
Greetings,
> The problem I see is that when a lot of people talk about history, it seems
> to be in terms of "my history", "your history", and they tend to bend history
> to fit their agendas. but I believe that history is about the way it WAS -
> the facts - not any persons perspective on it.
Except that *all* we have is people's perspective on it. We cannot recreate
any past moment; it's gone. All we can do is take available data and try to
connect the dots into a plausible story. Read Eco's _Foucault's Pendulum_; he
illustrates beautifully how you can connect the dots between *any* set of (even
random) facts, and the way in which you connect those dots will be based on
your background. To put it another way, what you think of as "plausible" is
intimately related to what you've experienced. I remember in college we
studied the Cuban Missle Crisis as a case of how history is written. This is
not ancient history where we are trying to extrapolate from a few scraps of
information; this is well-documented modern history, and yet different authors
chose to analyze the events in terms of the actions of individuals, in terms of
the inertia of beaurocratic systems, and in terms of cultural trends. Each of
these histories contradicted no facts. Which was what *really* happened? All
of the above, most likely, I think. Reality is complex. People have many
layers of motivations for their actions. History of necessity is reductionist,
because otherwise it would take at least 100 years to learn what happened in
the 100 years war, and hence will always pick and choose what to emphasize. In
the choosing is the bias of even the most objective historian imprinted on the
story. That's why we have to keep stirring the pot; to make sure we aren't
mistaking our biases for fact.
> I don't get to rewrite it just because it reflects on "my people" in a way
> other than I would like.
Not if that is the *only* motivation, no. But what if that motivation
leads you to find things in the other history that are wrong because
of *that* historian's biases or ignorance?
Challenging thoughts on a Thursday morning. What fun. Well, I'm going
back to studying type 1 x-ray bursts from neutron stars. See you all later,
--
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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