[EAS]Inventing History
pjk
pjk at design.eng.yale.edu
Thu Oct 5 22:01:35 EDT 2000
Subject: Inventing History
Even the history of technology itself has not been left untouched
by this trend. We are all living in someone else's Adobe PhotoShop
file. --PJK
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(from NewsScan Daily, 5 October 2000)
http://www.newsscan.com/newsscan/hs.html
WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE INVENTION OF HISTORY
Keith Windschuttle warns in "The Killing of History" that
today each historian makes his own history.
"History is an intellectual discipline that is more than
2,400 years old. It ranks with philosophy and mathematics as among
the most profound and enduring contributions that ancient Greece
made, not only to European civilization, but to the human species
as a whole. Instead of the mythical tales which all human cultures
have used to affirm their sense of self-worth and their place in
the cosmos, the Greek historians decided to try to record the
truth about the past. They did this even though they knew their
stories would expose how fragile was their existence, how their
heroes could not guarantee their victories, how their oracles could
not foretell their future and how their gods could not ensure
their fortunes. The greatest of them, Thucydides, revealed how the
fate of people was entirely contingent upon human actions and
social organization. Myth had been comforting, but history was
bracing. For most of the last 2,400 years, the essence of history
has continued to be that it should try to tell the truth, to
describe as best as possible what really happened. Over this
time, of course, many historians have been exposed as mistaken,
opinionated and often completely wrong, but their critics have
usually felt obliged to show they were wrong about real things,
that their claims about the past were different from the things
that had actually happened. In other words, the critics still
operated on the assumption that the truth was within the
historian's grasp.
"Today, these assumptions are widely rejected, even among
some people employed as historians themselves. In the 1990s, the
newly dominant theorists within the humanities and social sciences
assert that it is impossible to tell the truth about the past or
to use history to produce knowledge in any objective sense at all.
They claim we can only see the past through the perspective of our
own culture and, hence, what we see in history are our own
interests and concerns reflected back at us. The central point
upon which history was founded no longer holds: there is no
fundamental distinction any more between history and myth."
See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1893554120/newsscancom/
for Keith Windschuttle's "The Killing of History: How Literary
Critics and Social Theorists Are Killing Our Past." (We donate all
revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy action
programs.)
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