Lessons for Studying History: Withhold Judgment

In my fifth Daughter of Time post, I address the tendency of humans to assign values--as in judgment--to the past.

We judge the past, in large part, because the human condition remains the human condition; we can read and enjoy and even relate to Shakespeare since like us, people back then were members of a complex world. We can understand them, to a degree, because we also inhabit a world filled with philosophy and religion, entertainment and news, families, nature, medicine, survival, love, war, hate, politics, holidays . . .

Deciding that a particular time period was good or bad is...okay, frankly, it is rather normal. I'd rather live now with roads and cars and antibiotics and the right to vote than during the medieval era.

Still, value applications to the past have a limited shelf-life, especially when their primary purpose is to place the past in a compartment labeled "good terms that I apply to periods that I approve of and glamorize" or "bad terms that I apply to periods that I despise and blame for stuff."

Either approach is remarkably unhelpful when it comes to true understanding.

In Medieval Bodies, author Jack Hartnell makes a similar argument to C.S. Lewis. In several books, C.S. Lewis argues that the medieval world was not a completely different entity from the world of the Renaissance. The popular idea is that one day, the world was all plagues and bossy popes and bad ideas. And then, voila! everyone woke up one morning to better art and Protestantism, and the beginnings of science.

In contrast, Lewis points out that ideas that flourish in one era began in an earlier one. Like Rodney Stark, he asserts that the medieval world was not "worse" simply because we know less about it than other eras.

Jack Hartnell writes the following:

We cannot patronize this seemingly distant moment in time simply to make ourselves feel better. Rather, in order to truly grasp any aspect of the medieval world we need to engage with it on its own terms...A move into something resembling the renaissance did not happen overnight. The kind of changing ideas, actions or artworks that signaled to some that a paradigm shift was under way in Italy...might have only come into fashion a full century later in London...Historical change is, after all, a human thing. It does not sweep uniformly across regions in an instant. (my emphasis)

Hartnell goes on to make the point that cultural "givens" like religion would have been part of the fabric of thought--not separated out as some kind of "look how medieval we are!" behavior. He compares the acceptance of religion in the past to our modern acceptance of science:

We do not go around slapping each other on the back and congratulating ourselves on the existence of gravity, constantly expressing gratitude and awe that Newtonian physics stops us from floating off the earth's surface into space. Rather, it [scientific discovery] is a baseline for how we see and understand this world, its past, present and future.

His point is not that all medievals had all the same ideas about religion, any more than we all do about science; rather, religion was a common reference point. His book addresses how medievals saw the human body through a differing mindset than our own. Without defending the lack of antibiotics--that's not his point--he makes the case that the medievals brought as much care and thought and precision to the problem of the physical existence as we do--in their own way.

The problem with attaching valued judgments to historical periods is not just that it wipes out real understanding (or the desire to understand). The problem is that it also turns the people of the past into villains or heroes in our narratives. How much better to see those people of the past as fully human! As engaged as we are. As passionate as we are. As varying as we are. As much products of their current situations and views as we are (and as we are not--things do change). As curious as humans have ever been.

In the end, it is all about the individuals of any historical era because it is the individuals that make up the human experience. As I wrote:

Certain eras certainly had certain points of view, not to mention certain attitudes, ideologies, and problems, many of which I'm glad have faded away. Certain eras are, to be fair, better than others. But deciding, for example, All women before 1920 were meek and mild and bossed around by their husbands shows a complete lack of understanding of the human condition. Women had far fewer rights in the past (in some places, none at all), but there were bossy wives and meek wives and loving wives and hateful wives and tough wives and commonsensical wives and flighty wives just as there were domineering husbands and mild husbands and amused husbands and destructive husbands and protective husbands and indifferent husbands and dimwitted husbands. In some ways, "historical" romance novels are more accurate than many academic essays!

People of the past deserve more than our applause or ridicule. They deserve to be embraced as fully human: part of their world and entirely themselves at the same time.

Lessons for Studying History: Life is More Than the So-Called Experts

There are those days when I discover that a true wise person agrees with me--or, rather, I wrote something that agrees with ideas that a  truly wise person has been tackling for years--and I feel like a hundred bucks!

In my fourth Daughter of Time post, I wrote the following:

Whenever I'm sitting in a meeting where people start throwing their pet experts at each other to support their pet political positions, I think of Tey. "My expert is really smart," one political advocate yells at the other, "and everybody agrees with my expert--even the press says so--see these selective news reports that I got from my favorite radio or television pundit--and if don't believe me, the world will fall apart tomorrow--I'm the ultimate Chicken Little, and the sky is falling. Listen to me!!"

I am currently reading Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society. In Chapter 2, he addresses this problem of experts, specifically the difference between special knowledge (held by experts) and mundane knowledge. His ultimate point (I am heavily paraphrasing) is that more people have mundane knowledge--on the ground, day-to-day, eyeball-to-eyeball information--than people have special knowledge.

Thomas Sowell argues that people in general know more (as a society) than experts or people with special knowledge, which is why democracy and capitalism are still better systems than tyranny and socialism, despite the prior systems' flaws. The business man in the local neighborhood is going to make a better decision about his needs than the intellectual experts sitting in Washington.

Sowell goes on to criticize so-called experts who stray out of their specialized areas and those who use their special knowledge to justify already determined political decisions (rather than to honestly critique them). These so-called experts often believe that lots of special knowledge (central planning) will give a society a clearer road than finding out what is going on in people's actual lives:

"Many major economic decisions are likewise crucially dependent on the kind of mundane knowledge that intellectuals might disdain to consider to be knowledge in the sense that they habitually use the word" (13). 

("Argue" and "criticize" are the wrong terms, by the way. Thomas Sowell's critique is utterly devastating; it is accomplished entirely by the writing equivalent of hushed tones. This is not an angry guy.)

Here's where I decided that I will love Thomas Sowell forever:

"The idea that what [intellectuals] don't know isn't knowledge may also be a factor in many references to 'earlier and simpler times' by people who have made no detailed study of those times, and who are unlikely even to suspect that it is their knowledge of the complexities of those times that is lacking, not the complexities themselves." 

In Daughter of Time, Detective Grant rejects More's superficial narrative of evil Richard III, despite More being (1) an intellectual; (2) the considered expert on Richard III. Grant's objection is that More was operating on hearsay (Grant is right--as a policeman with mundane knowledge about his job, he knows what he is talking about).

Sowell's additional reasons to be wary of intellectual "experts" also applies. Thomas More may have been smart. And principled. And big on utopias. And an okay writer. That didn't make him smart about politics. Or history. Or anything outside his narrow purview. Just because he could delineate complexities in one area didn't mean he could even comprehend them in another.

Especially since he was probably using his smarts to satisfy his Tudor masters. Oh, sure, no conflict of interest there!

Lessons for Studying History: The Power of Cultural Assumptions

In a prior Daughter of Time post, I address the issue of age in the Middle Ages:

Warriors in the Middle Ages started quite young. Edward, who became Edward IV, was leading wars at the age of 18...Since the average life expectancy was about 40, 18 obviously meant something different than it does now although this is complicated by math. So many children died in childbirth, 40 is low almost by default. However, the fact remains that nobody took for granted the expectations of our modern age regarding life and death. On the other hand, sources have pointed out that members of the merchant and peasant class did not treat 18 as adulthood in the sense that reaching 18 automatically meant ALL the accoutrements of adult life. Outside the upper classes, people in the Middle Ages actually did wait to get married until their mid-20s, mostly for financial reasons. As far as Shakespeare is concerned, Romeo and Juliet truly are as young as we think they are.

In other words, the operative difference between how age was treated in the Middle Ages and how it is treated now is not that people in the Middle Ages weren't aware of prepubescence, pubescence, and full adulthood. One reason Henry VIII was able to annul Catherine of Aragorn's marriage to his brother and marry her himself was that most people believed Catherine's assertion that  Arthur had not reached the point where he had matured enough to consummate anything.

The differences lie not in supposed medieval stupidity (oh, they thought child were little adults!) but in the underlying assumptions of how children and adults should be treated. As I state in the original post:

What strikes me in any overview of the Middle Ages is the sheer expediency of the ruling classes: the kid looks old enough to be married even though he hasn't hit puberty? Hey, let's marry him to a princess. The young man can lift a sword, so give him an army.

In sum, a major part of understanding history is understanding the questions and issues that don't get asked, don't get raised. Why didn't medieval people send their kids off to craft camp? Or give them Montessori-type educations?

I currently completed a response to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopia novella Herland (1915). I was struck by two of her assumptions (one modern; one medieval):

(1) Gilman promotes childhood as a time of growth that contains specific characteristics, characteristics that should be nurtured and allowed to thrive.
(2) Gilman believes that children can be formed by education.

Gilman was right about the specific characteristics. She was chillingly wrong about "forming" children to a theoretical outcome. That is, Gilman wasn't promoting education in order to give kids basic skills (go forth and do whatever you want!) but, rather, to make those kids into certain types of people. Keep in mind that Gilman, like many progressives of her era, believed equally in "breeding."

The idea that children are "blank slates" that can be formed/pressed into proper adults is an incredibly medieval idea.

It is also the fundamental problem of any utopia: the confidence belief that the system can override normal human tendencies and idiosyncrasies--as His in Herland addresses.

Another fundamental problem with utopias is the lack of awareness regarding actual work--see Fruitlands. But then Gilman was a woman of the upper classes and appears to have made all the usual assumptions of her class when it came to servants.

Assumptions of any class/time period are incredibly powerful, so powerful we might not see them until aliens show up and are shocked--shocked, I say!--by our weird tendencies to assume that children should interact with other children or that babies should be carried or...whatever. It isn't so much how society raises our children that tokens the time period but all the things it never occurs to that society to do--

Like, "Hey don't give that kid a sword and put him in charge of an army!"

Lessons for Studying History: Remember, People Don't Think Abstractly

My favorite Last Man Standing episode is "Renaming Boyd's School." What makes it such a fantastic episode is the reason that Vanessa (Nancy Travis) doesn't want to change the school's name.

The argument: Clark Elementary School is named after Clark of Lewis & Clark, and he owned slaves. The argument against keeping the name is that Clark wasn't the greatest role model when it comes to diversity and understanding the modern world. The argument for retaining the name is that Clark was a product of his past--lots of people (including George Washington) owned slaves--plus changing the name will cost money.

Vanessa Baxter doesn't want the name to change because changing the name could lead to the school painting over the Lewis & Clark mural that she and other parents painted years earlier--it is part of her legacy.

She makes the clever argument that the name "Lewis" should be used instead--which would lead to the mural being preserved. The name is PC because Lewis was gay--or not.

But the real reason for Vanessa's argument is the mural. She's invested in it; she wants something she worked on, her legacy, to survive.

Encapsulated in Vanessa's argument is the reason that Marxism failed: People don't think in the abstract. Ultimately, familial, religious, and local concerns and needs matter more than any amount of "poor people will rise up against their overlords" theorizing.

In the previous Daughter of Time post, I address how Tey's character Grant reduces the War of

the Roses to a local affair. He is wrong (not all of the book's history is accurate). However, while the messiness of brawling royal families hurt everyone from farmers to merchants (the ramifications weren't limited to a group of cliquey aristocrats), the short-term politics of the war had sudden and explosive ramifications for the aristocratic families involved--the ones who invested themselves in one dynasty or another by trying to marry their children into particular families or by backing a particular power-broker. 

Pick the wrong side in modern-day America, and you have to wait four more years. Pick the wrong side then and wave goodbye to your entire family.

The point: people back then (and now) didn't think in philosophical terms or theoretical terms or historical terms. They thought in terms of what the leaders and battles and wars meant to their current needs, wants, goals. As Spike says in Buffy about the vengeful Native American ghost, "You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better? It's kill or be killed here. Take your bloody pick."

Bad behavior can result from Spike's mindset, but the underlying reality--people care about stuff--is not inherently greedy or evil. It's normal. And everybody does it, even people who think they are above it all. As I tell my students, "Everybody has a bias because everybody has an invested interest."

Each of us cares about something: reputation, paying the rent, kids, getting funds for this particular program, a house, a car, a garden, a piece of art. Cats. We care about the next ice cream social or the next religious service or the neighbors next door. We care about the coffee shop we want to save or the building we want to preserve, the television show we really love or the traditions that have helped us and our family. We invest in a particular recipe or website or leader or brand. 

Claiming abstract motivations (I want the world to be a better place! I want to save the nation!) sounds good, and the human brain works overtime to make such abstract claims sound good. And I'm not throwing out the possibility that people are motivated by virtues and empathy and bigger pictures (I think they are).

The point is that no amount of abstract belief will wipe out the things and people that humans attach themselves to. As sociological analyses show time and time again, people join causes and religions and political rallies through word-of-mouth and family ties--personal investment--and very rarely through abstract argument.

We are social animals, whether we want to be or not. We are wired to care about what's in front of us, not to robotically (my apologies to robots) unravel the present into relativistic non-being.

There's a reason that philosophers like C.S. Lewis believe that the present, now, is the closest tie to eternity. Imagine the future all you want--the present is where thought and belief and the physical, material world in which we invest ourselves actually come into contact. 

Lessons for Studying History: Be Wary of the Narrative Arc

In a series of prior posts, I discussed Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time mystery novel in terms of the historical principles/research problems that it raises.

These second series of posts are those posts reposted and edited with supplemental material about research and history in general.

In Daughter of Time, policeman Grant discusses the type of history told in tidy, compartmentalized stories:

This, after all, was the history that every adult remembered. This was what remained in their minds when tonnage and poundage, and ship money, and Laud's Liturgy, and the Rye House Plot, and the Triennial Acts, and all the long muddle of schism and shindy, treaty and treason, had faded from their consciousness (p.25). 

Grant is referring to how "we" (meaning me and other people) remember something like the American Revolution in terms of Paul Revere. The Boston Tea Party. Crossing the Delaware.  Discrete, compartmentalized events.

And I defend this--after all, people should have some idea of the order of history, some starting point. I even point out that sometimes the streamlined "easy" story turns out to be kind of true. Yes, more people than Paul Revere headed out to warn colonists that the "British are coming!" But modern scholarship reveals that Paul Revere's efforts had greater impact and spread the message to more people than either Dr. Prescott's or William Dawes' (see Gladwell's The Tipping Point). Longfellow's choice of hero carries a core of truth.

I also complain about well-educated adults who confuse the Middle Ages with the 1700s (I'm not kidding). Or don't realize that people were emigrating West before the Civil War (and after). So knowing the order of events in history can be useful.

However, in this revised post, I want to focus on the need to question the narrative arc, whether conservative or progressive. It is surprisingly difficult to convince adult people that a narrative like, "Women wanted the vote but men tried to stop them" is far too simplistic. In truth, many women wanted the vote and many men helped them. And a large number of women opposed the suffrage movement and although they were linked to men, the anti-suffragists were surprisingly independent from men (though they used men when convenient).

A good example of my own experience with narrative arcs being upended is Rosie the Riveter and WWII. The narrative arc I learned growing up is that women didn't work before WWII. Then the war came and women went to work.

Actually, no. The war came and women were able to get well-paying manufacturing jobs.

Women were already working outside the home. The suburban homemaker of the two-parent/one-income family is fairly exclusive to an extremely small portion of American women and to, well, all of history (taking into consideration that for much of history, men and women worked out of the same location--and yes, they were both bringing in income; check out Martha Ballard).

The nature of work changed over the years, but again, many of the women who went to work in the factories were women who were already working outside the home. They liked the jobs because they paid well, they paid for schooling, and the women often mastered them very quickly. When the war ended and soldiers came back, the propaganda machine said, "Okay, women, go back to your children." But these were women who already belonged to two-income households or were the sole breadwinners of one-income families. They didn't go back home. They went looking for another job.

Conclusion: Be careful of the narrative that insists that once upon a time, EVERYBODY was like THIS.