The Rise of Post-Literate History
compactmag.com
compactmag.com
Thucydides wrote an “inquiry” into the events of the Peloponnesian War, one of the world’s first histories. It is an excellent book and a masterpiece of literature. However you can’t help but wonder as you read it: how could simply writing what happened have been something so novel?
Throughout the book he makes clear his methods and objectives, almost as if to directly contrast them with some kind of default of the day. You get the sense that people of his day didn’t write history so much because if one were to go through the trouble of writing something it should be trying to advocate a specific conclusion for its readers. Something like a moral lesson or to elevate a specific polis.
Anyways, in the end Thucydides did end up advocating a specific conclusion but it’s one that could only be done through history. It’s subtle, detailed, balanced, and self-critical. I don’t know how to explain it other than history does something different to your brain, and in the end that is very worthwhile as literature.
However, after this new literary genre had been established, it’s not like the whole world suddenly changed. It certainly made a dent among those who read it, but I think everybody else sort of continues to operate under some set of default principles about what the point of a book should be, similar to what I described in Thucydides’ time. Even now, most people who cite Thucydides, for example in the news but also often in academia, don’t seem to have read the work in its entirety, at least based on the conclusions that they’re advancing. So it seems that things aren’t really so different from his time.
It’s a shame though because it really is something entirely new, and Thucydides proved, to me at least, that a careful account of the facts can be just as dramatic and entertaining as the best fiction.
There is no such thing as "just the facts." There is always a human hand in selecting the facts and how they are presented. That is bias. That is intent. Subjectivity. Humanity.
Pardon? I don't think I said anything like that.
This is a problem where historians look at what they're saying more as being a part of a continuing debate, where they can say revisionist stuff to sound more original in their field, with an understanding that their interlocutors will know the basics. There are many ridiculous views in public which form when historians effectively say "for a long time we have been thinking A <the basic thing about the subject>, but on the second/third order, if you look at it sideways, in some cases B". The whole part besides B gets cut off, because people stopped actively writing A 50-70 years ago. Now A is completely boring and passee and even suspicious to younger audience. But B can serve as fodder for video essays, tik toks, blog posts for us ancient peoples etc.
I think this might also explain much of WW2 revisionism. Of course knowing that especially for this period it can be ideologically motivated in some cases, and in the extreme can lead to someone like David Irving. This also isn't new.
Also, in general if a field of scholarship advertises consensus more than sound dispassionate methodology, then of course various randoms will think of having their own "consensus" because why not.
I don’t think most historians have a problem if you argue that by “dark ages” you mean that the amount of primary sources decreases significantly due to a range of societal and economic factors. However, this is not what is meant by the vast majority of people who talk about dark ages as a period of backward evolution and human regression. Most of these people go to the other side of the purely ideological coin, and proceed to show their complete lack of understanding of what the Roman Empire or the early medieval period were in Europe.
So yes, when you start talking about dark ages you paint a target on yourself. It does not reflect very well because it means that either you are accepting that uncritically, or that you know better but are trolling.
It’s not very difficult to see why that could cause a somewhat unsympathetic reaction. It’s not persecution and it is not a cabal.
I'm out of the loop, what is the controversy about the dark ages?
I'm assuming the WW2 controversies is the 'right' sugar coating Fascism, what is the dark ages angle?
You might have seen a largely shared picture showing "Scientific Progress in the West" which shows "progress" vs time. It goes dramatically up during Antiquity, dramatically down between 400 and 1500 and exponentially up afterwards. Even without the ideologies on both sides it's easy to see that defining an entire millenium (and the Renaissabce) as underpinned by a single concept is simplistic.
It's a lot of teenage atheists vs people with alt-right-like views and right-wing Catholics.
Interesting is that a similar debate was already there at the time ("back when we were pagans we didn't have troubles with Germans pillaging Spain and Tunisia", vs the positive retelling of the Fall of Rome in a Christian light by iirc Augustine).
Another factor here is the lack of sources, making a lot of things hard to understand. Wars and political instability are one reason, but also for example the fact that a lot of less-important paperwork was written onto some kind of papyrus, which generally doesn't age well outside of dry deserts, contrary to the better, but much more expensive parchment.
What I am talking here about is this. Most historians are aware of ground level facts like: decline of urbanism, trade, loss of a bunch of literature, political chaos, and Eastern Roman and Arabic world overtaking the former Latin part of the Empire that used to be at least nominally dominating. That's why I precisely indicated my geographic scope by the way. 'Western Europe' does not equal 'humans' by any means.
And on top of that you can have some kind of correction and nuance, where you say well, actually it wasn't completely catastrophic, some institutions survived, there were complex social factors and transitions, there used to be oversimplified narratives by Humanists and Enlightenment and so on. Then you have people who only get the correction and nuance part, because this is more recent and in some ways more interesting, and you get to "destroy" some people on the internet with your fresh facts and logic.
But really all that correction part does not erase the basic fact of the matter that this was a decline by most metrics that we can check. Less sources doesn't mean something like 'dog ate them', it was just a society less capable of creating sources, which says something by itself. And as I mentioned, we still have archeology.
The standard rebuttal to your sort of denialism is https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/ and its followup https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/17/highlights-from-the-co.... Its central thesis:
> The period from about 500 to about 1000 in Christian Western Europe was marked by profound economic and intellectual decline and stagnation relative to the periods that came before and after it. This is incompatible with the “no such thing as the Dark Ages” claim except by a bunch of tortured logic, isolated demands for rigor, and historical ignorance.
As persuasively argued in those essays, this is supported by mainstream historical understanding of the late Western Roman Empire and the early medieval period in Europe; it is nearly universally agreed among historians that, in Christian Western Europe, this period (0500–01000 CE) showed long-lasting declines in wealth, population, urbanization, large-scale infrastructure, technical innovation, and literature, not just surviving primary sources. (The author has inserted notes in them to link to corrections where he turns out to have been mistaken.)
______
¹ Nowadays, though, the term "Dark Ages" is commonly defined to end several centuries before Petrarch.
I did not realise I was denying anything. Could you explain what? What I wrote is that reality is more nuanced than "everything was absolutely terrible", which is the sort of things that people during the Renaissance wrote to feel better about themselves.
> The guy who invented the term "Dark Ages" was Petrarch, and he certainly didn't mean that the amount of primary sources had decreased significantly. He didn't need primary sources to learn about the Dark Ages; he could just look around¹.
The good thing is that our understanding of things improved quite a lot since Petrarch, and he hasn’t been cutting edge for a few centuries now.
Anyway, it is natural that a lack of things like written records and monumental architecture would lead someone to conclude that the most likely explanation was systematic decline. Since then we’ve had primary sources from elsewhere, and archaeology techniques that had no equivalent back then.
> The standard rebuttal to your sort of denialism is […]
I did not say that there was "no such thing as the Dark Ages", just that the lack of primary source does not imply general decline (and certainly not intellectual). Though yes, otherwise I am in pretty much complete disagreement with this paragraph. This sort of opinion is absolutely not representative of our current understanding of the period.
If you are interested in good vulgarisation, the series that starts here is far more convincing: https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f... . There certainly was decline in different areas, but the aspects and consequences depend on the location and was not generalised. And how we got there was much more complex than barbarian invasions.
Unfortunately, by being "pretty much in complete disagreement" with my summary, you're also in complete disagreement with Devereaux's series.
Misrepresentation of WW2 history has been common long before the Internet and social media, see the enduring popularity of the Wehrmacht and some of its leaders, particularly in the U.S. That's not really a problem per se, either. Things get very, very iffy when alleged historical facts are used as justification. But in most cases, that issue won't go away if we had a way to be absolutely certain that we get the facts right and present them objectively. The past is just too different.
What happens if we apply this analogy about crusaders to modern times?
That's precisely what the author is doing. He’s drawing a parallel between “appealing storytelling” history and “rational analysis” history as applied to the crusades, to 21st century interpretations of 20th century history.
What major flaws would you assert the author has made?
The "barbarian invasion" is quite easy to prove. Crusaders destroyed Byzantine empire. Hell, they even sacked christian cities at Dalmatian coast on the way there.
This unbalance is the historiographical mistake, as would be (according to the article) the lack of attention for the Baltic or Albigean Crusades, hitherto considered not-much-more-than-local events which were given a religious stamp of approval for various political and financial reasons and thus not "real" crusades.
History is about facts, not feeling. How bad it makes someone feel is irrelevant. Pretending that things were different to make someone feel better is wrong, in the same way as making someone pay for their ancestors’ ancestors acts is wrong. We should be able to discuss facts and understand why they happened rather than use history as a tool in an ideological fight.
Empathy is more important in the way History is vulgarised (to avoid glorifying or victimising people who have nothing to do with what happened) than in History itself.
It's not really a thing.
It's something invented by people who want to claim they are the ones who truly hold the empathy mantel or who are truly enlightened.
Any historian, not to mention any political scientist, would undoubtedly be staggered to gain your insight that the only benefit of historical perspective was as "a convo topic", fettered as they are by their illusion that the universal principles governing human events continue their operation today just as they have for millennia.
What podcasts and social media provide access to may be democratic (though I seem to see a pretty egregious Gini coefficient in podcaster subscriber numbers and Twitter follower counts) but history it ain't.
Another approach is "making science accessible". Here in France we see this at the Collège de France, with short-tenured professors providing free high-level classes and ongoing scientific research. It can be more or less easy to follow depending on the subject and professor. The easier lectures are something like Timothy Snyder's widely broadcasted lecture on the history of Ukraine.
This is not a necessary feature of popularization, but it is a necessary feature of the sensationalist, pathologically amnesic media we are discussing: podcasts and so-called "social media" like Twitter and Facebook.
Hard Core History is a podcast, and fairly accurate.
Even HBO shows like The Pacific, while dramatized, didn't have anything obviously 'wrong'. While being dramatic can help people put themselves into the situation, and help understanding. It doesn't just have to be a book of figures.
I think you are conflating that 'real' history books must be dry, with 'dry' being 'correct'.
But other forms of media can also be used to present accurate information.
Or to restate, accuracy isn't dependent on the form of media.
"Dramatized" is a euphemism for "faked". Once you've accepted "dramatized" evidence, accurate and correct information—though it can of course be illustrated in a "dramatized" way—inevitably get replaced by information that is completely false but more entertaining, such as ancient-aliens nonsense. Since the nature of the medium cuts viewers off from the evidence, they can't tell the difference between a narrative supported by evidence and a narrative completely contrary to all the evidence.
"Dry" means "badly written". History does not need to be badly written to be correct or to be corrigible; the article points out that well-written history used to be common. But it does more or less need to be written.
I'm missing something. How can 'Correct and Accurate' not be enough? I'm assuming there was 'evidence' in order to affirm the 'correctness' and 'accuracy'.
History book with 'Evidence', I'm assuming Evidence is the thousands of citations, footnotes, appendix, etc... etc... Does that constitute 'Evidence'? I think even this could be picked apart if we wanted.
And then, why can't other forms of media supply citations, and appendix, and evidence?
The History Book can say "then the soldier fired at the enemy", and provide a citation.
But a fictionalized account showing an actor on set doing "then the soldier fired at the enemy", that is false?
You're bar for history is a lot higher than just 'ancient aliens'.
Or you're just saying, it is a slippery slope, watch HBO's 'The Pacific', and pretty soon you'll be believing in Ancient Aliens?
Accuracy is meaningless without precision. For some precisions, it is entirely accurate to say that the earth is flat.
Truth and Falsehood don't really exist in anything except math, philosophy, and theology. History, like sciences, deals with the real world, where there are no proofs but there is evidence and further investigation can improve our understanding.
Not any philosophy or Religion I've seen.
There is a lot more truth in History like "Japan Bombed Pearl Harbor", than Religion and "The universe rests on the back of a giant Turtle".
As for countering misinformation, parents should also teach their kids critical thinking so that they can think for themselves and find valuable sources, instead of dismissing these valuable tools.
Plus, history being a topic of conversation, considering I am not a historian. Not sure where your obvious contempt for me is coming from. It's not like I will sit down and talk about the glory of Rome or Genghis Khan as a daily topic of conversation.
Kids whose parents teach them critical thinking will be able to see that podcasts and social media are not valuable sources for history. But that's not because "not everything online is accurate"; I've already explained that it's because of the special advantages of podcasts and social media (sensationalism, emotional manipulation, and organizing mob violence) and their structural deficiencies in verifiability, corrigibility, etc. It's not about one or another piece of misinformation, but about destroying the intellectual fabric that makes it possible to distinguish misinformation from truth, which is difficult at the best of times.
I am not a historian either, but I often find my perspective on current events is changed by what I know of Rome's empty glory and Genghis's historical impact.
I'm not arguing with you, but I'd like to understand that lay interest better.
Is it just people pissing everywhere to mark territory? Is it an expression of curiosity? A sign of some level of commitment to certain subjects? Something else?
This is a self-serving conclusion. Entertaining writing and accurate writing are not mutually exclusive. In fact, to some extent, writing is not accurate if it is not entertaining. If your writing fails to connect with your audience, they lose interest, and you fail to communicate the facts.
Walther blames this vaguely on a decline of literary culture--which is to say that he implicitly blames the failure of history communication on readers. Nothing could be further from the case. People read more now than ever, but they don't read pretentious web magazines and they don't read people who use words like "casuistry" and "imbroglio". The failure to communicate is not caused by readers, it's caused writers like Walther who refuse to use their audience's language, instead expecting the audience to learn the writers' language.
I don't know anything about Compact Mag--maybe Walther is writing for his audience there. But that just begs the question, why did Walther choose to write for that audience? Walther complains that history isn't reaching the general public, but his writing is clearly not written for the general public.
Walther, you're part of the problem. If you want people to read what you write, write for people.
EDIT: I've noted elsewhere on HN that some ideas are inherently complex, and therefore require more work from readers to understand, no matter how much work the writer does to make the idea clear. That's not what's going on in this article. The following sentence:
> His career—as far as I am aware, he has no plans to publish a book on Nazi Germany—suggests that we are no longer faced with a gap between specialist knowledge and what remains of the reading public, to be spanned by belletristic popularizers; but one between historians who write without any hope of reception, much less wealth or literary fame, and a very different, more or less post-literate audience who would prefer that whatever historical edification they might receive come via podcast or even tweet.
...could have been:
> Cooper's popularity suggests that the problem of communicating history to the public is no longer collecting specialist knowledge into big-picture descriptions. Now, historians interested in accuracy are failing to reach audiences that consume history in modern forms like podcasts or tweets.
This isn't communicating a less complex idea, it's just removing the pointless babbling to sound smarter.
Have to agree. The article came of needlessly obtuse.
History doesn't have to be page long sentences with 14 citations, in order to be accurate.
It is possible to be historically accurate in the vernacular, and in different medias.
Of course, I also accept that maybe the current vernacular is degrading. But, both can be happening. Maybe readers have less patience now, and a lot of historians aren't great story tellers either. And also, an entertaining story, can also be accurate.
Sure, that's possible--but all the evidence I see is that humans can perform incredible feats of communication with the most strict limitations on language. "Using language my audience understands" is a strictly easier task than "using language my audience understands and also keeping iambic pentameter", and Shakespeare did that harder task across 39 plays. Language has evolved since Shakespeare, but it has evolved to become more capable, not less, and the current vernacular is evolved to fitness for current communication.
And sure, the current vernacular is evolved for fitness to the average user's needs rather than for history specific communication, but as with any jargon, you simply define your jargon terms in the vernacular and then you can use the jargon terms. It works much like this[1].
EDIT: for that matter, any history anyone has written in this style?
Like something that can keep someone's attention, by writing in easy to understand vernacular?
Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin?
Sapiens, Yuval Harari?
>Yuval Noah Harari ... is 100% correct that [the AI class divide] is going to be the biggest problem we are going to face later down the line in the 21st century and it's not going to be rosy. He and Moldbug at least.
From Comments on The Superfluity of the Masses https://archive.ph/ngu66
I get very skeptical when people make superlative claims like "100%" and "biggest" about large, complicated things like "problems we are going to face later down the line in the 21st century". The largest effects of AI at this point are that a lot of AI creators are getting rich and a preponderance of easy fraud--I'm not sure any of the underwhelming uses of AI have yet proven themselves enough to make users of AI a privileged class.
Frankly i'd hoped someone would look at the other comments there, e.g. "Donald":
https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/the-superfluity-of-the...
I don't agree with it all, but what he has going is a preference for first-order thinking: helping out the poor smart kids NOW, over lowering taxes so that entreprise will not be disincentivized (pardon the econspeak!)
[You might also be entertained by the historiography from "Anirudh"]
The thing NOT to learn from Sweden is how to award prizes. Certainly, the Fields Institute in Ontario (where Hinton built his career, btw) have their priorities at a more reasonable tilt vs Stockholm when it comes to building the future vs trying not to miss out on a piece of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_tradition
>Outside his academic historical writing, Hobsbawm wrote a regular column about jazz for the New Statesman (under the pseudonym Francis Newton, taken from the name of Billie Holiday's communist trumpet player, Frankie Newton). He had become interested in jazz during the 1930s when it was frowned upon by the Communist Party.
The gentrification-skeptic before the gentrification!
> "Mary Mapes Dodge, who never visited the Netherlands until after the novel was published, wrote..."
This misses the point: if you want to know why readers aren't connecting with written history or written anything for that matter, ask readers, not writers. Anyone can write something they want to write--that's not skilled, useful, or admirable. Writing something other people want to read is the difficult, useful skill. Writers like Walther are writing what they want to write and complaining that readers don't want to read it. It's like leading a horse to salt water and then complaining the horse won't drink.
> EDIT: for that matter, any history anyone has written in this style?
The Social History of the Machine Gun or The Serpent and the Rainbow (the book, not the movie).
> see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox
Is your point here to argue that entertaining, accessible writing and accurate historical writing are mutually exclusive? Why would they be? Do you have any reason at all to believe this to be the case?
(and I wouldn't wish to discourage anyone from being accurate and writing for a small-circle[0] audience; just as there are people who make pop music, and people who make music for musicians, in the internet age only a mass market publisher should decry history for historians)
In particular, entertaining usually involves telling something story-shaped and I'm not convinced —although I'll dig a bit into these recommendations[1]— that "what happened" always, or even often[2], has an entertaining shape.
[0] in particular, note the very different reception of the "10 bits/second" paper on HN and on Lobste.rs, https://lobste.rs/s/5hjq6v/unbearable_slowness_being_why_do_... ; it would appear the target audience was much closer to the latter than to the former.
[1] my hypothesis going in was that longue durée helps with having "story arcs" that, as they treat generalities, are not beholden to having any particular facts lining up with them, although Team of Rivals looks like it may be a counterexample?
[2] then again, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42094214 on 'interpretation', for the relative ease of trimming down non-story-shaped material to something story-shaped, simply by omission.
That selection criteria is bad because it implies that more entertaining things can be less accurate, which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid.
The selection criteria I'd like to propose is transmits accurate information to intended audience. If it's not entertaining enough to engage said audience, it doesn't matter how accurate it is, and if it's not accurate enough, it doesn't matter how entertaining it is. Or put another way, entertaining > threshold and accurate > threshold.
> (and I wouldn't wish to discourage anyone from being accurate and writing for a small-circle[0] audience; just as there are people who make pop music, and people who make music for musicians, in the internet age only a mass market publisher should decry history for historians)
Of course! In fact, I have no problem with writing for no audience at all, I do it myself often. But I write it in my journal, and on the rare occasions I post it publicly, I don't whine if nobody reads it.
> In particular, entertaining usually involves telling something story-shaped and I'm not convinced —although I'll dig a bit into these recommendations[1]— that "what happened" always, or even often[2], has an entertaining shape.
I don't think "entertaining" necessarily involves telling something with a story arc. More often, I think, it involves making an argument, i.e persuading your audience why what you are telling them matters.
[also, I may be overly cynical, but I think making an argument already puts us well over on the accuracy side — you and I might enjoy that sort of thing, but in the grand scheme of things I see arguments as being only slightly more popular than the My Dinner With André video game adaptation]
Have you see Gonick, Cartoon History of the Universe (1990)? I find it entertaining, and (to the extent I recognised them) think he does his sources justice at the same time. However, it did take him a dozen or so years to produce...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27141538
Note that YC have defended vigorously the accused in question..
Lagniappe: https://wildedecadents.wordpress.com/2012/10/07/the-serious-...
come to think of it, maybe my fascination with Linebarger's Psychological Warfare is because (delicately speaking of the indelicate*) he argues high-brow theories whose subject matter is convincing people via low-brow rhetoric?
> "Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. ... Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever." —Lady AB
* I'll have to check De Oratore because Uncle Google certainly isn't confirming this belongs to that most famous of the garbanzo-noses?
>he argues
Before that happens here, I now prefer "feedback" to persuasion but of course that is still usually poorly taken as ADvice (by yours truly, at least) if we leave out the "Ciceronian"
Personal social feedback that the People want, take that, DomGPT!
(A drop in replacement for the Man in the fight against (co)solipsism sans dang's assist)
(is the opposite of DomGPT RanGPT or SubGPT?)
* tho judging from the commentary at https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/RemRoc.sht... comedies of manners, despite my prior belief in their accessibility, may be much more on the accuracy side and less on the entertainment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2746721*
Cicero might beat the Julians (incl. MEZ) by notwinning, as time approaches MMM!
Not separately, vibing that Victorian and Edwardian phases may be separated by labor cost vs ___.. (how gatekeeping becomes the only game in town, so that even the insufferably curious have to try to gatekeep as a form of wisdom, tangping no longer viable as a matter of taste)
*save the subs
RanGPT may turn out to be useful for analysing Cicero's long term odds (provided we accept that we can't find out how it was for him)
Revised weights for lobste.rs!
And herein is one clue of many to resolve, as a microcosmic start , the nerd-jock dichotomy in academia (thank you for "the ressentiment of ions"!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment#Girard
Placeholder for subsequent vibes around "ataraxia", aka Epicurean Mechanics: https://donaldrobertson.name/2016/05/20/cicero-on-epicurus-a...
The language posturing of academia is actually part of why I've never pursued academia. Your [1] link is missing.
> Low-brow AND accurate[0] feedback is where it has 100% always been at, do that & put both lobste.rs & HN outta business?
If you're saying that low-brow and accurate "is where it's at", i.e. low and accurate is what you like--fine, but I care nothing at all about the browed-ness of communication. The only reason I'd ever use highbrow language is to communicate with an audience that won't listen otherwise, and that's usually not worth the effort.
If you're saying that low-brow and accurate exists, of course it does. That's a big part of my disagreement with Matthew Walther--he seems to think it doesn't exist when it obviously does.
One thing I'll point out here: I don't care that your communication here is lowbrow, but I do care that it's not clear.
the big part where you surprised me (nicely, I should add) right there is pointing out that what I should not have left implicit was:
Low-brow ">" entertaining
Finally, sometimes it's the subject matter that is poorly understood.[cheap] humour can even point a laser beam at that cat.
We don't have to blame the language, but it helps!
On reflection, I'd like to clarify that this is not an invitation to a Grundyfest*. I was genuinely pleased that the effectiveness gap between low-brow and entertaining isn't as clearcut as I'd thought. That may be worth thinking about
*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14225033
[note here that applying the low-brow sustainably may require a more active management of surprise than is typical for "entertainments". (Orthogonal to the accuracy aspect, but not to the audience targeting)]
Edit:
Today's (01-12): Avocado of not being such a dick!
(Wsmith knows his etymologies, but (maybe) not gradschoollife!)