Even if it is a little depressing. Here he comments on a book by Tony Judt.
I had never read so merciless a book. Tony had no use for pieties—no tolerance for invocations of a “Good War” or the “Greatest Generation.” Power reigns in Postwar, often in brutal ways. Tony writes of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust returning to Poland only to be asked, “Why have you come back?” He introduced me to intellectuals, such as François Furet, forced to reckon not just with Stalin’s crimes but with a discrediting of a “Grand Narrative” of history itself. “All the lives lost, and resources wasted in transforming societies under state direction,” Tony writes of this reckoning, were “just what their critics had always said they were: loss, waste, failure and crime.” Early in Postwar, Tony quotes the observations of a journalist covering the ethnic cleansings that characterized postwar Europe. The journalist self-satisfyingly claims that history will “exact a terrible retribution.” But, Tony tells us, history “exacted no such retribution.” No righteous, God-ordained price was to be paid for this crime against humanity. The arc of history did not magically bend. It was bent, even broken, by those with power.
That resonates with me, too. There is no trajectory of history in evolution, either, just a story we tell ourselves after the fact. There’s nothing but chance and a directionless, generation-by-generation stumbling, with no goal but survival, and afterwards the survivors pat themselves on the back and pretend it was destiny that they made it.
It’s also why I have no sympathy for Pinkerisms. It’s all retrospective coronations all the way down, self-defeating reassurances from the so-far successful that the status quo will carry us forward into a glorious future. It never works that way. Every advancement is the product of a battle by those who say “Not good enough!” and who strive to do better.
And sometimes the better don’t make it anyway.
The political sludge of USA is one such example, but Hungary and Poland are even worse. No lessons are learned, the same kind of criminals pop up under different ideological banners.
I agree that there is no real direction to either history or evolution, but there are consequences in both that limit what can happen in the future, and both have instances in which it seems highly likely that certain trends will continue. My impression is that both the consequences of history/evolution and those instances in which some things seem highly likely are much more productively dealt with if those things are not mistaken for evidence of direction or inevitability.
There is no trajectory of history in evolution, either, just a story we tell ourselves after the fact.
History is a construct; its the story we tell ourselves about what happened. That’s all. And, obviously, we seldom agree on it.
I’m not so cynical. Cultural development is not like biological evolution. Because we have language, and especially since the invention of writing, human knowledge is cumulative. It does have a direction — obviously we know more now than we did 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago. Our technology is ever more sophisticated. Even with setbacks from time to time it isn’t lost. We know more about ourselves as well as the rest of the world, and there is, even if it’s not all we can ask for, some justice and some reckoning. For example, the crimes of Stalin have been exposed and the Soviet Communist experience is now almost universally considered a failure. The U.S. abolished slavery and even though we certainly haven’t abolished racism we aren’t going back either. Women can vote everywhere that there is voting. I could go on but to say there is no arc of history seems ridiculous. It isn’t a stochastic process like biological evolution. People have agency, and they can learn.
Carl Sagan got it right on. A demon haunted world
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…”
A cynic (R) might decide to just go along with the ride. To quote “The Producers”
‘don’t be stupid,
be a smartie
Come and join
the Nazi party!’
Ta-Nehisi Coates is more generous than expected. Yes, Judt has a clinically accurate view of historical events, but then Ta-Nehisi writes the following, “In addition to the rise in the cant of efficiency,profits, and the market, Tony saw the plague of identity leading us to this moment. “The politics of the ’60s thus devolved into an aggregation of individual claims upon society and the state. ‘Identity’ began to colonize public discourse: private identity, sexual identity, cultural identity,” Tony writes. “The Vietnam protests and the race riots of the ’60s … were divorced from any sense of collective purpose, being rather understood as extensions of individual self-expression and anger.”” And then calls it an oversight. Whaaaat…??!!
That’s not exactly, clinically accurate. It borders on indifference and sterility, a chasm, not an oversight.
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blockquote>History is a construct; its the story we tell ourselves about what happened. That’s all. – Marcus Ranum@3
Yeah, right. I mean, historians never do any actual research do they? Searching archives, discovering new data sources, applying statistical techniques to their data, that sort of thing.
cervantes@4,
I agree, but I’d add that even biological evolution is not so directionless as PZ likes to claim. On the largest timescales, there were a couple of gigayears when there were only prokaryotes, another gigayear or so, with only those and unicellular eukaryotes, half a gigayear with those plus algae, another half a gigayear with those plus complex multicellular plants, animals and fungi, initially only in water but later also on land, with a considerable increase in maximal behavioural complexity among animals. None of that looks preordained, or purposeful, but the appearance of new kinds of complexity is still a real phenomenon requiring explanation.
KG@#8:
Yeah, right. I mean, historians never do any actual research do they?
What a perfectly stupid thing to say. Of course they do. But research does not allow the historian to assemble some kind of objectively accurate view of the past – it always has to be assembled into some kind of narrative and that is a creative process. Besides, the sources a historian researches are also the narratives of the people who created them – a historian has to decide (again a creative process) what is fact, fiction, or omitted.
What, do you think historians go down into the reality mine and break off chunks of pure facts then polish them slightly and present them with perfect clarity?
KG@#8:
applying statistical techniques to their data
At best, but rarely. It’s mostly inference and assumption. For example: how many Persians and Greeks were at Thermopylae? Some people said “so and so said that it was a great fuckload of Persians!” and someone else said “that many Persians couldn’t feed themselves so it must have been around half of that” and another guy said “bollocks, the Persians had good logistics…” but it’s not like someone found an order of battle – and even if they did, was it exaggerated by the Persians or the Greeks and who wrote it and why?
Yes, it’s all stories. They are based on facts and sometimes they hew closely to a current interpretation of the facts – but the fact that someone is taking the time to assemble the story means they have an agenda (unless history is entertainment) – we try to learn and understand the stories of humanity but it’s creative construction all the way down.
“It does have a direction — obviously we know more now than we did 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago. Our technology is ever more sophisticated. Even with setbacks from time to time it isn’t lost.”
You’re like the happily fed turkey marveling over its lovely life … the day before Thanksgiving.
All of that will come crashing down as global heating ends human civilization.
“The U.S. abolished slavery and even though we certainly haven’t abolished racism we aren’t going back either.”
LOL!
“Women can vote everywhere that there is voting. ”
Been to Texas lately?
What I understand as the directionless of history and evolution is that in both we have a limited amount of knowledge. In history, we have the selected parts we use to tell ourselves to help us understand now and then, and the events that happened we omitted or did not not notice their significance then or now.
In evolution we are forced by the lack of anything like a complete record to extrapolate what is happening and how which turns out to be rather complicated and based on many simple things.
the one thing that is true in both is that we are not the center or the inevitable result nor are either finished.
Humans are not the pinnacle of evolution nor is any nation culture or ideology the culmination of the arch of history.
It has often turned out that something that seemed less important even insignificant at the time was in fact far more significant and even pivotal looking back
I have a few books dealing with post war Europe ,
Poisoned Peace by Gregor Dallas ,
The Long Road Back by Ben Shephard ,
Savage Continent by Keith Lowe ,
But I think the above deal with the early post war .
Might a get a second hand copy of Postwar ,but I have spent all my
pocket money for this week .
@5 Wrote .
Carl Sagan got it right on. A demon haunted world
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…”
Fuck me ,change America to Great Britain ,and he could be describing how things are on this side of the pond .
Coates implies that Judt in Postwar is telling us that history exacts no retribution in general, but what Judt is specifically speaking to in that passage is the journalist’s claim that the forced resettlement of the German populations of Eastern Europe was a crime against humanity, and Judt then notes that the 13 million Germans expelled “were resettled and integrated into West Germany with remarkable success”. Judt then noted that it is a bit jarring to read this when just a few months earlier the world had learned of the Holocaust. So this particular claim Coates is making isn’t supported by what Judt wrote.
FYI, Judt in Postwar does delve into the de-colonization that happened after the war as Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal lost their former colonies around the world. Coates’ in his essay also mentions that Judt didn’t talk about European colonization in general in his history of postwar Europe, but this seems oblivious to the fact that Judt was strictly dealing with the 1945-2000 period, not the centuries before that. Judt wasn’t writing a history of the world.
Now, about history being a construct, that’s not saying much. What history tries to get right is an accurate and well-supported accounting of the past. What matters then isn’t any particular historian’s personal point of view, but the facts and reasoning they make in support of their history. Consider the historical revisionism of the U.S. Civil war by southern historians in support of it being about states rights instead of slavery, and then subsequent revisionist historians who successfully challenged that and demonstrated that slavery and its expansion up to 1860 was in fact the real cause of that war. I hope we can agree on that, rather than cynically retreat into thinking that history is all merely a matter of conjecture so who is to say who is right and who is not?
@13: I was unaware that women are not allowed to vote in Texas. You’ll need to provide a link for that.
@12: Climate change will cause a huge amount of damage, but it won’t cause us to forget everything we’ve learned in the past 30,000 years. And even if it did, that would not mean that up until that moment, history did not have a direction.
Whether we’re better off now than we were 10,000 years ago is a matter we can debate with Ted Kaczynski, but that there has been a definite direction of accumulating knowledge and technology is indisputable. To claim there is no directional arrow in human history is simply preposterous. Note that you are posting your claims on a web page over the Internet, using a computing device.
Human history has been two steps forward ,one step ,sometimes three backwards .
Don’t think history is the right word ,maybe civilization is a better word .
But the things we face in the future are like nothing we have faced before .
If the dimwits in power can get their act together ,we might have a chance
of surviving climate change ,or not .
Take a look in the mirror. Here’s what you said @3 (emphasis added):
“That’s all” is what you said. And it’s stupid, self-important crap, as so often when you pontificate in areas you clearly know fuck-all about.
Is it “objectively accurate” that, for example, the European powers colonised much of the world between the 16th and 20th centuries, and transported millions of slaves across the Atlantic? Of course there are elements of creative interpretation in every historian’s work, but it is simply absurd to deny that they also investigate matters of fact, and that in particular disputes some are right and others wrong.
” I was unaware that women are not allowed to vote in Texas. ”
There are clearly a lot of things you aren’t aware of, including the meaning of my comment and the political reality that underlies it.
“Climate change will cause a huge amount of damage, but it won’t cause us to forget everything we’ve learned in the past 30,000 years. ”
You don’t seem to understand how civilization–and more and more, advanced technology–are responsible for the preservation of our knowledge. Those things will end due to global heating (“climate change” being a vague description of its consequences–thanks a lot, Frank Luntz). And “racism is bad” is not the result of 30,000 years of accumulated knowledge, and readily reverts (and that reversion is quite active in Europe and the U.S.).
“but that there has been a definite direction of accumulating knowledge and technology is indisputable.”
Did you forget about the turkey?
“To claim there is no directional arrow in human history is simply preposterous.”
I didn’t do that.
“Note that you are posting your claims on a web page over the Internet, using a computing device.”
Note that you are incredibly dense, and appallingly intellectually dishonest.
You are obviously an idiot. There’s no cure for stupid.
KG@#20:
“That’s all” is what you said. And it’s stupid, self-important crap, as so often when you pontificate in areas you clearly know fuck-all about.
And you decided to interpret my “that’s all” as implying that historians don’t research. Don’t go off the rails, misconstruing what I said and acting as if you’ve caught me pissing in your punch. “It’s a story” is a simple observation of the truth – now if you want to argue about how that story is assembled, you can join all the other historians (including the history professor who raised me with my love of history) – “a story” doesn’t mean “a fiction” or not purely; I thought the way I phrased that captured it nicely.
And as far as:
“That’s all” is what you said. And it’s stupid, self-important crap, as so often when you pontificate in areas you clearly know fuck-all about.
Oh so is this just the sound of some angry ankle-biter who disagrees with a comment I made elsewhere, trying to savage my socks now? First off “pontificate”? No, I offer my opinions as confidently as you do, little shithead. The difference is that I can defend them and I don’t need to misconstrue your yappings so I can slap you down. You know nothing about what I do or don’t know about history and how history is done and there’s no need to head to a research library to know that.
Is it “objectively accurate” that, for example, the European powers colonised much of the world between the 16th and 20th centuries, and transported millions of slaves across the Atlantic? Of course there are elements of creative interpretation in every historian’s work, but it is simply absurd to deny that they also investigate matters of fact, and that in particular disputes some are right and others wrong.
Again you misconstrue me. Stories are also built on facts. Sometimes they are the foundations of it. Of course I don’t deny there are objective facts in history – that would be absurd. So don’t go stretching the words of my comment until they snap. I said what I said and maybe you don’t like how you interpreted it but there the ignorance and error is yours, not mine.
Trying to imply that I might say something as stupid as that colonialism was deniable… when I talk about it often on my blog? Fuck me, but that’s a stretch. However: the very change in attitudes toward colonialism over time supports my comment that the story of history that we tell is a matter of interpretation. Elsewhere I’ve referenced Howard Zinn’s view that history is often as much about what we leave out as what we put in – I agree with that, though he certainly caught some flak for saying that. I already gave an example of how changing interpretations of facts (there were Persians at Thermopylae, but I don’t expect all of them called themselves that) affects the story we tell ourselves and call “history.”
I don’t know what I said to you in the past that pissed you off, but this is not the first time you’ve made personal digs at me in comment threads. I hope it ruins the rest of your week when I tell you that I completely don’t mind you at all; you’re insignificant and slightly silly and you’re not hurting me in the slightest, speaking of self-importance who are you? Are you perhaps an eminent historian whose corn flakes I peed in? (My comment about history being a story is something I learned from an actual eminent historian, so…) anyhow, you’re just wasting your time.
Is it “objectively accurate” that, for example, the European powers colonised much of the world between the 16th and 20th centuries, and transported millions of slaves across the Atlantic? Of course there are elements of creative interpretation in every historian’s work, but it is simply absurd to deny that they also investigate matters of fact, and that in particular disputes some are right and others wrong.
If I had said that, I’d be wrong.
You chose to misconstrue what I wrote as saying that and then you got all in a froth about it. You’re either being dishonest or you’re just a random asshat, I can’t tell which and I don’t need to. Now, I suppose you’ll savage my ankle whenever I comment here?
I tend to prefer Tainter’s view of history as cycles of the birth and collapse of civilizations. Is a civilization an ecosystem? In theory, an ecosystem only survives if it is in balance with the environment and resources around it. Our complex civilization is not. All, but extant, civilizations eventually withered or collapsed. I am not an evolutionary biologist, so I am intrigued by the observation that thoughtless evolution yielded a kind of increasing complexity, up to a point – multi-cellular organisms with large brains. Thoughtless evolution seems to have hit a glass ceiling, what several 100,000 years ago, when humans neanderthals appeared?
Our current complex civilization, especially industry and technology, seems to be due to a number of coincidental factors including a stable climate and clever access to high-density energy in fossil fuels. Where I earlier observed Judt’s oversight of the weight of tribal and racial identity and human rights is exactly where we continue to be kinda stuck.
Marcus, you just proved his point.
Whoops, “when neanderthals appeared.” Not humans.
I think there is an overall trajectory to history that is entirely consistent with evolution. Just as science has flourished since we invented the scientific method, human societies have progressed whenever we invent writing and keep records of past events. Sadly we also lose that social progress to war and destruction on a very consistent basis.
Modern historians write very differently from the ancient historians, mostly because the history they wrote was commissioned by a wealthy patron with their own bias and an ego that needed to be written into history. Facts were secondary to power.
Quibbles aside, I’m pleased to see Coates remind us of Tony Judt, and heartily recommend Postwar to anyone interested in what happened in Europe after 1945. Judt very much cared about history, including the overlooked history of eastern Europe under the Soviet sphere of influence, which was much more controlling than that of the U.S. over western Europe.
that is more confidence in “our civilization” then I can muster, seems I have read about former great civilizations and empires who are long gone and all of their learning went with them. this time the catastrophe is likely to be global in scale and the events of jan 6 illustrates very clearly things can get devolve very quickly driven by superstition, ignorance and violence.
Do you think that learning will be preserved and built upon without a gap? Or more likely rediscovered in the future like europe rediscovered Greek knowledge after the crusades.
The difference is the global nature of the coming catastrophe
Marcus: I thought your point about history was a valid one, and Thermopylae is a telling example. The pop version is that 300 Spartan hoplites somehow defended, to the death, Greek freedom/democracy against the Persian/Asian hordes. Almost total bullshit, of course.
As a kid, I was a fanboy of Sparta until I learned how it actually worked. It was a fucking nightmare, and as antithetical to democracy as possible. And at Thermopylae, the number of helots and Thespians who died far outweighed the number of Spartan hoplites. But that doesn’t make the Hollywood cut, and I doubt most people have a clue. Shame.
Rob Grigjanis@31–
Yep, the Spartans as we know them had an awful culture. I am amazed when anyone talks of them with admiration (with exceptions for specifics, such as their famously ‘laconic’ speech). One thing in their defence: pretty much everything we know about Sparta was written by its enemies (Sparta had a cultural prohibition against written laws and records, so it’s their own fault that they left no primary documents). This of course does not exculpate modern admirers — after all, it’s the smeared version of Sparta they admire.
As for Sparta forbidding written records: that’s cultural suicide. No doubt they thought that reading is for the weak. But Time was stronger than them.
And as for progress in evolution, I have good news and bad news. The good news is, the hominids of the far future will be superhuman in their wisdom, intelligence, resilience, and compassion. They will have kick-ass immune systems, and will be genius-level literate and numerate from a very early age. They will have many other extraordinary talents. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they’ll need all of those extraordinary talents and virtues in order to survive long enough to reproduce.
@22 Project much? I’m vastly more intelligent than you are, cervantes, as that cowardly and stupid sputtering response shows. Go read https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/12/the-autocrats-are-winning/620526/
Human technology has advanced and become more complex over the history of our species, but the culture and physical infrastructure that makes that possible is under threat from global heating. That there is a trend does not mean that the trend will continue indefinitely, as illustrated by the well fed Thanksgiving turkey (an example from Bertrand Russell).
What sort of cretinous point-missing imbecile responds with “note that you are posting your claims on a web page over the Internet, using a computing device”?
BTW, my own personal history is deeply entwined with that technology … I started programming in 1965, was hired by Steve Crocker, recent chair of ICANN and inductee into the Internet Hall of Fame, to help develop the ARPANET at the UCLA Comp Sci department, my supervisor there, Charley Kline, was the engineer who performed the first remote login ever, from UCLA to the timesharing system at SRI, I worked alongside Vint Cerf, co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols, and Jon “god of the Internet” Postel, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and editor of the RFCs, I have a minor mention in RFC 57, I am co-inventor of several network infrastructure patents (e.g., US-8572208-B2) … I know the workings of the mentioned technology inside and out. I don’t need some point-missing twerp to “note” where and how I’m posting the claims that he’s too stupid to understand.
I interpreted your “That’s all” as meaning “That’s all”. That’s all.
Well, the fact that you’ve devoted several comments to the matter rather conflicts with the claim that you don’t mind me at all. It’s the intellectual arrogance indicated by your tendency to the grand pronouncement (as here), and the dismissal of at least one entire discipline (psychology*), apparently because you found your undergrad psychology courses unsatisfactory, that I find obnoxious. But I’m glad that you don’t adhere to the extreme subjectivism that is the obvious interpretation of your #3.
Believe it or not, I don’t read your blog. So I’m judging you by what you say on blogs I do read. But in any case there are many on the left who, when they are discussing specific issues, will implicitly assume there are objective facts about past events, but when they turn “philosophical”, will adopt a subjectivist position.
QFT.
On cervantes vs. Jim Balter,
Yes there are real historical trends, one of them being the accumulation of knowledge (which is more nearly monotonic than you would think if you only drew from the standard western history curriculum). Yes, such trends can (indeed, at some point will) end. Will global heating end it? We don’t know, and it may still be up to us; we should certainly behave as if it might be.
*Actually, what comes under the heading “psychology” is so diverse, and so riven with fundamental disagreements, that it’s better regarded as a loose collection of disciplines, overlapping with other loose collections such as sociology, anthropology and economics.
All of their learning? That’s quite a claim. Which specific civilizations and empires were you thinking of? And how do we know how great they were if all of their learning went with them? For many African, pre-Columbian American, Australian and early Eurasian cultures and civilizations we have no interpretable written records, but that very fact means we know little about how extensive their learning was, or whether they included “empires”. Of course we know they could make the artefacts that have survived, and can to varying degrees reconstruct how they made them. In quite a few cases (e.g. Assyria, Babylonia, Sumeria, Mycenae, the Maya) their written records were once lost or uninterpretable, but have subsequently been at least partially recovered. How much learning would survive a near-future global collapse in a recoverable form is very hard to know.
Of course. cervantes continued to stupidly flail at this strawman despite my never saying, implying, or hinting the contrary.
Which was my point that cervantes stupidly fails to acknowledge.
We don’t know a lot of things, but Bayesian analysis gives us a pretty fucking good idea what the odds are.
Who is “us” and “we”? I wasn’t at COP26 and couldn’t have done anything if I had. And what was the outcome?
https://www.zmescience.com/science/climate-crisis-cop26-14112021/
https://www.indiatoday.in/science/story/cop-26-summit-climate-change-fossil-fuel-paris-agreement-1867061-2021-10-20
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/oct/14/climate-change-happening-now-stats-graphs-maps-cop26
Fools like cervantes are in denial, and won’t even consider the possibility of something that is almost certain. The rate at which the globe is heating is increasing, and nothing out of COP26 will stop that, and certainly nothing we personally do will.