History Must Be Curved
popehat.com
popehat.com
Humans want to see things in terms of stories, of drama, heroes, and so forth. Even if the underlying history doesn't fit the narrative, allowance will be made so that it does. The story wins out over all else.
This is why the internet meme is so powerful. Nobody steals your kidneys and leaves you in a bathtub, but it makes for a helluva great story. Bill Gates isn't giving away money for emails, but wouldn't it be awesome if he was? I could probably put together a list of 100 Hollywood movies that purposefully destroy the truth just in order to sell more movie tickets. And people love it. (sidebar: "Big Fish" is a great movie about this topic) Movies will even go to great lengths to reassure you that they are telling a true story -- then bullshit the hell out of you.
People know that they're stretching and murdering the truth, but guess what? They don't care. A good story is much more interesting than what actually happened, or some cold collection of facts.
And I think 3 centuries is being generous. Most times this begins way before the people involved die. There are many people alive today trying to restore in the public's mind what actually happened, instead of what the public believes happened through consuming some terrific story.
Would you emphasize the Dada movement over World War I? Would you focus more on the discovery of nuclear fission, rather than World War II? (For that matter, could you?)
We record everything, we store everything. We have videos of everything.
Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and many others became legend through the retelling and deformation of their stories.
Will Barack Obama, Albert Enstein and others become legend 5 centuries from now?
Will there be a funding myth of the Gods giving the internet atop of a mountain to the prophet Berners Lee?
Would Cleopatra be a legend nowadays if we could browse her teenage posts and selfie shots on facebook?
I think myths exist to fill the gaps in our knowledge, in this case our knowledge of what actually happened to Charlemagne and Arthur. If we had detailed and completely trustworthy accounts of what those people did on a daily basis back then, with photos and videos to prove it there would be no myth, I postulate.
We do record a lot of data today, and it might be enough to give a (pretty) clear picture, if you sift through it all, but I don't think that necessarily is enough to prevent misinterpretations in the future.
Gangnam Style has more than a billion (with a b(!)) views, and if I were a historian in the future, arguably probably a bad one, I would easily attribute a lot of value to this. You could call it some sort of selection bias. What is left behind, doesn't always represent the state of things, and if it does, things are still open to interpretation.
NB I get quite a thrill mentioning the Y Gododdin as I can look out the window from my desk and see Edinburgh Castle - the Din Eidyn where the warriors feasted and drank mead for a year before doing battle.
Even with a lot of information on both, legends are forming.
Update: the big and important stuff is likely to remain unscathed but as we see in the thread about Malcolm Gladwell we already have instant myth making on a time period of only a few months or years.
Albert Einstein may or may not be legend five centuries from now, but he's a legend today, and we've got plenty of documentation of him (including a ritually-preserved blackboard that he filled when lecturing -- he was considered a legend before he died).
Heck, we have "myths" even in any mid-sized group or company. Or even smaller ones. I work in a 15 person company that is less than 20 years old.
There are arguably "myths" surrounding certain acts and people in the company's past that have arisen through retelling by people who themselves no longer work here. Some of them would have been trivially disproven by talking to the people who were there, or checking source control.
But it doesn't happen; the myths keep getting retold.
Ok that sounds a lot more absurd than I intended, but it also seems absurd to me that in five centuries there will still be normal humans around telling oral myths.
Did you hear that vaccines will give your baby autism?
This marvelously addresses the current HN thread Should We Stop Believing Malcolm Gladwell?.
Just because X is bad (I'm assuming you think religion is bad) and Y facilitates/rehabilitates/resembles X doesn't mean that Y must be wrong. Just because science historically hasn't been the perfect antithesis of science doesn't mean that science is religion, nor vice versa. It's just an inevitable consequence of the fact that people aren't perfect.
History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) is often criticized by hardcore atheists like Dawkins, because it draws attention to similarities and relationships between science and religion, throughout history and sometimes even in the modern age. Yeah, that can be a bit embarrassing to some. But it's not the historians' fault that a lot of European scientists in the early modern period casually crossed the boundary between science and religion every day. Whatever religious beliefs they had does not lessen the importance or correctness of their discoveries in any way.
If you don't like someone telling you a true story because your opponents would love to tell it, too, that's your problem. Lots of dictators also hate it when people tell true stories about them, but we tell them anyway because the stories are true.
It's not that I think they have any real chance of success with these tactics, but I do find this behaviour insulting. No good historian thinks such simplistic nonsense about the Galilean episode. Any good historian is well aware of the progressive simplification of the past. It's not that these specific points aren't all true, it's way they're used, the subtle insinuations, that I find slimy.
As for Feyeraband, well, again he's a favourite of the religious pundits - doesn't matter that none of his critiques of science really had an impact - again the suggestion is that hey, knowledge is limited, so all these scientists who like to think they're purveying ultimate truth are so silly, and maybe hey this religious stuff isn't all bad? Again it's insulting - any good scientist is highly aware of the limits of reliable knowledge - and anyway, just because there are some limits on the reliability of knowledge, doesn't mean we can't at least try and distinguish between more and less reliable knowledge. The religious pundits don't want us to do so, of course, they would rather that we get shocked over the hubris of prideful scientists, and walk around "knowing" that everything is relative, nothing is really knowable... Helps them out.
This is all textbook religious propaganda to me, the more so because it's so benignly packaged.
Historians of science need to stay away from both extremes: (a) the religious pundits who claim that science is just like religion, as well as (b) simplistic views of science that paint it as more objective and value-free than it really is. If every historian flocked to (b) just because they got annoyed of having their work co-opted by (a), we'd end up with an understanding of science that is just as unrealistic. Without a solid understanding of how social, psychological, and even religious factors influence science, how do we even go about trying to reduce such influences? You don't solve problems by pretending they don't exist. Who cares if Jerry Falwell's ilk use it in their propaganda, they bend and use everything in their propaganda anyway.
You inadvertently prove the point of the entire essay, which is that we all oversimplify and distort our stories of the past to serve our modern purposes. If you oppose religion because you think science and facts, however inconvenient, should be our guides, don't you have even more obligation than religious folks to avoid this kind of mistake?
Sure, the more random variations they came up with, the less credible the Ptolemaic model became. Occam's razor and whatnot. But the conclusive blow came much later than you might expect. Parallax was only verified in the 19th century, long after most scientists already gave up on geocentrism.