History - Uses, Misuses, Writing

 This post jams together two previously unrelated articles. I think history is the most important subject possible for people. It is the story of us; it explains the good and the bad and the ugly of humanity. 

How it is written and how it is interpreted is not perfect.

From Ian Leslie's Stories are bad for your intelligence; How Historians (and Others) Make Themselves Stupid:

I doubt that Bulstrode set out to deceive. My guess is that she came across a few suggestive fragments in her reading (the ‘cousin’ of Cort travelling from Jamaica to England) and wanted so badly to make them into a story which fitted her ideologically determined prior - that the British stole ideas from those they enslaved - that she got carried away, fabricating causes and effects where none existed.

It’s one thing for a young and passionate academic to make mistakes; it’s quite another for a series of experienced academics to let her make them. The paper had two anonymous peer-reviewers (Bulstrode thanks other historians in an endnote, though they may not have read the paper). Even to an ignorant reader like me, the paper just smells funny - it has the aroma of the fantastical. How on earth did these experts read it without becoming suspicious? Why didn’t they double-check its remarkable claims?

My guess is that they were also seduced by story. It’s not just that Bulstrode’s storytelling mind went into overdrive, it’s that the master-narrative into which her paper fits now exerts such a grip over some historians that they will blind themselves to anything which undermines it. According to this narrative, Britain’s Industrial Revolution was not the product of ingenuity or the free exchange of ideas, but of thievery and exploitation. The British stole, not just the labour and materials of black countries, but their ideas too. If your paper fits that narrative, it’s more likely to get published, even if it has holes in it; even if it is nothing but holes. The discipline, or a sub-set of it, has become helplessly in thrall to one of the archetypal narrative forms: Good vs Evil. Naturally, the academics are on the side of the Good.

***

Stories are indispensable, nourishing and delightful. They are also attacks on the rational immune system. TED Talks are, famously, all about stories, but when the economist Tyler Cowen did one he used it, rather subversively, to warn against “story bias”. Cowen argues that any time someone believes in a story they are effectively subtracting ten points from their IQ (by which he means, broadly speaking, their analytical intelligence). That’s a deal we will often take willingly, since stories can bring pleasure and meaning to our lives and deepen our understanding of the world. But let’s be clear about what the deal is.

 From David Scott's C. L. R. James’s Radical Vision of Common Humanity:

C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins was first published in London in the summer of 1938 by Secker and Warburg (later that year it would appear from Dial Press in New York). Born in 1901, James had moved from colonial Trinidad to metropolitan Britain only six years before, in March 1932. Initially a self-consciously literary man oriented vaguely toward Bloomsbury modernist realism, and with no more than an incipient sense of anticolonial, let alone socialist politics, within these six years he had more or less abandoned his commitments to writing fiction and established himself at the center of both the Marxist debate about the Soviet Union and the prospect of a new international left, and the anticolonial debate about national and Black self-determination. These would form interlocking axes shaping the analytical and political framework of The Black Jacobins.

***

Writing history, for James, was an endless, recursive process of revision, of recontextualization, of asking again and again what the present circumstances enabled him to see or urged him to emphasize of the past he was recounting.

I see the antidote to  Leslie's trap of a story in that last paragraph quoted from Scott's essay.

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