Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

I love history but I'm just a layman.

I get quite angry when people get reductionist about history, usually because of story or narrative (pre-templated story patterns re-applied over and over again)

The beauty of history is that the same event can have multiple, conflicting, powerful narratives associated with it. Looking at these narratives challenges our understanding of our own humanity. If we're smart, we end up realizing as Solzhenitsyn did, that "...If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?..."

And then we _really_ begin our study of history, humanity, wisdom, and the rest of it.

It's far too powerful to buy into a story and get blinders on. I think it's probably a great thing when beginning your journey, but you should never stay there. And if you're a historian stuck in a version of a story I'd argue you don't know your own profession.

There's nothing wrong with stories, either in history or elsewhere. But good vs evil stories are bad history and almost always bad writing too. Reality is almost always either different shades of gray or blue and orange morality.

If you can't get beyond your own personal view of morality to be capable of understanding a different perspective, you're probably incapable of doing good history or creating good fiction because you're inevitably going to end up writing unbelievable comic book evil kind of characters for your villains.

I generally agree.

As I learn more, I realize how much we teach kids younger in their lives is oversimplified, bowlderized BS, no matter the topic.

I think that's unavoidable. You have to learn some comic book version of, say, physics before you're ready to talk about the Kuhn and paradigm changes and so forth. But there's also a real danger here: whatever your dumbed-down version of a topic is, it had better be a positive one, one that engages and challenges students to learn more.

Negative stories and narratives have the self-destruction of passionate learning built into them. It's poor-quality pedagogy. If I teach a class of fourth graders that clowns are evil, have always been evil, circuses are the work of the devil, and so forth? I can guarantee you that nobody in that classroom will ever become an expert on the fascinating history of circuses, animal shows, clowns, and so forth. It's extremely tough to get students wound up enough to spend a huge amount of time diving in somewhere, but it might take ten seconds to turn them off to an entire area of future study.

And frankly, those simplistic good-vs-evil stories are not only bad history, they're boring. They make consumers dumb. They make for idiotic public discussion. (Like I said, I tend to rant. I feel that we are cheating an entire generation out of the deep and beautiful vista of the humanities in our endless search to sell stuff to one another)

It doesn’t have to be oversimplified baulderdash. As the whole “ELI5” thing has shown, skillful reduction can preserve the truth and spirit. It’s just not easy.

(It’s actually a lot of fun as a parent trying to do a good job of this)

> There's nothing wrong with stories

I disagree. When there's pressure to piece together a story, it can easily become a search for facts to fit a narrative, motivated reasoning. Data that doesn't fit that narrative must just be outliers. New details not substantiated by facts enter the picture because they improve the story. Stories tend to lose some truth. That's dangerous.

Stories convey insight, not truth.

It’s a tool of abstraction, I think? If you study almost any major historical event in detail, I think you inevitably discover deep layers of nuance and complexity. But we can’t really manage such depth and breadth at the same time as hoping to eke out meaningful lessons to be propagated into the future. So a moral is distilled and committed to story and song.

History is written by the victor… or the bard.

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