In the thread about Bletchley Park, Dunc made a comment about the “foreshortening effect of living in a country with less history.” That reminds me of two stories about history, that my dad told me.
One of my dad’s colleagues, who was a notable professor of American History, had a Chinese graduate student. One day, Professor F asked him, “How did you wind up interested in American history, anyhow?” and the student replied: “I’m lazy and there’s so little of it.”
Another time a colleague was doing a lecture at Oxford and was introduced by the chairman of the Political Science Department, “The American ‘experiment’ is one that we, here at this university, have been watching closely since it began.”
I love academics, because I grew up around them. As dad also used to say, “the fights are so fierce because there’s so little at stake.”
I want to scream whenever someone talks about “the end of history.” Of course, it’s not really that they think history will end, they’re claiming that Marx was wrong and that the Hegelian view of history, with its inevitable course, was not as Marx claimed. I guess calling a book, “Well, Duh” probably wouldn’t be as good. But, the whole idea that human civilization has some kind of end-state that will eventually be reached – it’s silly. It’s tantamount to saying that evolution also has a design-goal built into it, as well.
The “fights are so fierce .. so little at stake” is almost certainly someone else’s witticism. Wikipedia lists it as Sayre’s Law [wikipedia] but since I heard it from my dad, that origin is stuck in my mind.
Obligatory Eddie Izzard clip:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV2PbKpsMRk&w=560&h=315%5D
We used to have fun with the American graduate students at Oxford, and their appreciation of history. I think my favourite moment of this sort was when one of them started talking about how Harvard had a distinguished history that pre-dated the American War of Independence. We took great relish in pointing out that Oxford pre-dated the Aztec Empire, the conquests of Genghis Khan and the Crusades.
Canadians were even better – the cutlery on High Table in the dining hall was older than their country, as were most of the portraits.
The modern historians also came in for our scorn. I remember one particular Warden’s Research Forum at my college where our little clique of Classicists and Medievalists (and one student of nineteenth century Irish history who we let in under sufferance) sat with some bemusement listening to a talk on academic culture in 1950s Romania. We were very polite at the time, but afterwards we just looked at each other and shrugged. “Where’s the history in that?” we asked. 1950s academic journals are secondary sources at best to us – some of our supervisors remembered writing them! When you’ve spent the day squinting at badly written Latin on thirteenth century sheepskin or reading articles by obscure Victorian philologists you get a rather dismissive view of those whose primary sources haven’t even had time to go mouldy yet.
Haha. This reminds me of talking to a historian who had been hired to give a talk on “history” to some people (who, of course, were Mormon) in Salt Lake City, UT. He started out by saying, “Ignoring the first 50,000 years of the history of this region, we’ll begin with Brigham Young…” because of course, that is what those people thought of as “history”. They did not actually care about the history of anyone except other Mormons.
Which is too bad… history is fascinating.
Sunday Afternoon@#1:
Obligatory Eddie Izzard clip:
(Laughing out loud) I remember one kid who came with us on a visit to Carcassonne, who said “the whole town is a castle!”
Yeah, they had to build their shopping malls tough in those days.
cartomancer@#2:
We took great relish in pointing out that Oxford pre-dated the Aztec Empire, the conquests of Genghis Khan and the Crusades.
That really is pretty sobering.
Wandering around Northhampton last week, I often had time to ponder that my farmhouse, which is one of the oldest in my area, is from a whopping 1805. I’ve stayed in places in Europe where the plumbing is older than that. Way older than that. Comparatively, some of the stick-built “McMansions” I’ve driven past are “temporary shelters.”
“The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.” –Earle Hitchner
(We’re worse in Oz — ‘historic’ is anything more than 3 generations old)
I’m reminded of the article printed in McClatchy some years ago about the sun expanding to consume the earth some 10 billion years from now. Commenters argued that this is why we should move now to leave earth for other planets. I pointed out that in 10 billion years, if there is any organism alive which is recognizable as “human” it would be proof of a living god. Humans have only existed for some 2 million years, and Homo sapiens perhaps 250,000. If there is life in the universe in 10 billion years, it won’t be recognizable as “us”.
There will be an end-state to human civilization. The good news is that if you and I are lucky, we won’t live to see it.
To be more precise, by definition we won’t live to see it.
I’ve long been intrigued by American (or rather, colonial European) perception of your own national history, and of general “western” history.
My own country, Finland, has very little written or built history by European standards. However, there is a strong popular narrative that our ethnicity and “nation” has been essentially the same at least since well before written history, possibly since first settlement after Ice Age, which for practical purposes might as well be “always”.
The truth, of course, is more complicated. There have been repeated linguistic and cultural upheavals in prehistoric times, actually continuing into historic times, although the physical population has pretty much remained the same. And of course, the construction of modern national identity is very recent process.
I attended school in a country, which was founded in 1918. I didn’t get the joy of short history lessons though. My history textbook started with Homo erectus. The fact that there are some 800 years old buildings in the city where my school was located didn’t help shorten our history lessons either.
And, yes, we had to learn about human evolution in history lessons and about the evolution of other life forms in biology lessons. It’s great to grow up in a country where everybody believes that evolution is a fact.
But, the whole idea that human civilization has some kind of end-state that will eventually be reached – it’s silly.
Is anybody seriously making such a claim? I know that such claims were made in past, but nowadays everybody should be educated enough to instantly dismiss it.
In his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama famously argued that:
He did indeed seem to be serious, and was not instantly dismissed. In fact, he was quite widely celebrated for it.
@12 Dunc
Re: Fukuyama
I’m not even an historian but he sound like a idiot at the time.
The USA was in a euphoria because the USSR had collapsed and they “knew” their system had “won” And, clearly most American press writers knew nothing about real history. Or, the possiblity of technology advances ?
Fukuyama’s statement was a bit like “the war to end all wars ” mantra from WWI. There was not a full-blown World War for about 20 years–ignoring a few post war conflicts and minor disputes like China.
It may have just been a ‘clickbait’ title. I don’t remembering reading more than a few excepts from the article but he was almost right. Without checking closely, I don’t think there was a really serious international war in 10 years or more.
Ideologies are another matter but I don’t know if Fukuyama considered them—as I say I have only read a few excerpts. What I mean, is it depends on whether you could start a war dated at the first shot or at the time of the evolution of a warring ideology.
jrkrideau@#13:
I’m not even an historian but he sound like a idiot at the time.
Yes, I recall thinking that Mao or Chou En Lai would have had something brilliantly cutting to say about his silly book. Probably something about how short-sighted eurocentrists are.
Dunc@#12:
He did indeed seem to be serious, and was not instantly dismissed. In fact, he was quite widely celebrated for it.
There are often books that trade in deepities that are quite popular for a short time, and which are later recognized as unintentionally funny or outright stupid. Popenoe’s Eugenics comes to mind. [stderr] Or The Lexus and the Olive Tree or pretty much anything else by Friedman. Or Deepak Chopra. Or Ray Kurtzweil. etc.
He appealed to the pseudo-intellectual Washington elite, who are always happy to be told how awesome they are.
Ieva Skrebele@#11:
Is anybody seriously making such a claim? I know that such claims were made in past, but nowadays everybody should be educated enough to instantly dismiss it.
Yup! It’s basic social teleology: we’re all going to evolve into homo capitalensis, which is to say that most of us will mow lawns and perform services for the 1%, and that’s a good thing, too!
siwuloki@#8:
I pointed out that in 10 billion years, if there is any organism alive which is recognizable as “human”
Indeed! Whatever it was and called itself, it would look back on us with a mix of emotions similar to how we feel about pikaia gracilens. Actually, pikaia would be a closer ancestor to us, than we would be to them. So, by reduction, they would look back on pikaia as being more or less as close to them as homo sapiens.
That’s all nonsense, of course, because in that distant a future, they would still consumed with the debate over whether silicon-based life was intelligently designed, or whether it had somehow evolved from rocks.
I love Sayre’s law. Of course, anyone that thinks academic politics is the apex of triviality and therefore viciousness has clearly never belonged to a homeowner’s association.
*snort*
Have you read Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children (I think that’s the right book)? It’s just one small scene, but that actually is in there.
(Or am I thinking of the sequel Neptune’s Brood?)
Or rather, not exactly the same thing.
OK, now I have to search for it…
This is what I was thinking of
Owlmirror@#19:
Have you read Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children (I think that’s the right book)? It’s just one small scene, but that actually is in there.
Yes, and now I remember that scene. Doubtless that was where I got that idea – served up by my bubbling unconscious. I even remember chuckling at the bit about irreducible complexity. So I appear to have accidentally plagiarized Stross. I’m not sure what’s the right thing to do in that situation, other than to acknowledge it <----------- and put down my shovel and walk away from that hole.
Has anyone here read Yuval Noah Harari’s books? I can’t decide if he is a troll, a trader in deepties or someone with the occasional true insight that had to be enhanced with trolling/deepity stuff in order to have enough stuff for 2 books. He mentions Kurtzweil positively (I haven’t finished the second book, but it looks as though his claim is that unless someone does something about it the 1% will go trans-humanist on us and that would be the end of human history as we know it).
anat@#22:
Has anyone here read Yuval Noah Harari’s books? I can’t decide if he is a troll, a trader in deepties or someone with the occasional true insight that had to be enhanced with trolling/deepity stuff in order to have enough stuff for 2 books.
ArrrrgGGH!! Now you’ve doomed me to having to read some of his stuff!! (waves fist in the air!)
I wrote a bit about him [stderr] My first take is that he’s a vacuous dealer in deepities.
He has written a book on Jewish Magic which appears to be about pre-Kabbalah ritual. That’s a bit eyebrow-raising, to me. Unfortunately, it is pretty expensive even on Ebay and I don’t want to have to even pretend to give a shit about religious rituals qua cultural artifacts.
I did just order a copy of his Homo Deus – I’ll do a mini review of it when I get a chance. My “to do” pile is daunting.
Bruce Keeler@#18:
has clearly never belonged to a homeowner’s association
Wasn’t that what Lord of the Flies was about?
@ 14 Marcus
Probably something about how short-sighted eurocentrists are.
In this case, I am not even sure we are talking about euro-centrists. I really suspect it was a US-centric view. I would expect any European politician or historian to discount the analysis; heck, even if based on nothing but their family’s experience in the 50 or 80 years experience before.
A friend of mine once mentioned that her father had five passports. However he could only account for why he had four. I will note that there was a good chance that her father was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire which makes this more likely.
Someone like Churchill would probably dropped his cigar and brandy glass at this analysis.
One of the oddities about US history is that while the USA is relatively young, the US government is one of the oldest in the world in terms of continually functioning under a single constitution or plan of government. There aren’t many governments on earth that have been operating by the same basic rules for well over 200 years.
I think the fact that the US Constitution is almost as old as the US itself helps strengthen the perception that the Constitution is a core component of US national identity, perhaps the core component.
jrkrideau@#25:
Someone like Churchill would probably dropped his cigar and brandy glass at this analysis.
Nonsense. The cigar, maybe.