The Historian’s Lie: Part 2.

As a follow on from last weeks post, I want us to consider how odd the way we often receive history actually is. It’s firstly important to establish why we should care about this in the first place. I made the point in my last post on the topic that “historians “are ‘shortcuts’ to knowledge for the general public, but I perhaps did not articulate well enough why this is a potential problem.

Whether you are aware of it or not, much of your perception of the world will be rooted, in one way or another, in history. Whichever country you come from, I can guarantee that your idea of what being a citizen of that place means will be tied to history. As a Brit, for example, we have an ingrained sense of resilience and independence (an idea that goes back to Boudicca, through the numerous Civil Wars to overthrow the tyrannical monarchy, and on to the Battle of Britain). There is a certain idea of ‘British exceptionalism’; that we are not like the other European countries. To be clear, I’m not endorsing this idea, I’m just saying that it exists. This notion, true or false, was an important factor in why the Leave vote won Brexit: they appealed to this idea of British exceptionalism, which is in turn rooted in historical narratives.

The same can be said for America. America has granted an almost legend-like status to its founding fathers, and their deeds and struggles have been mythologised accordingly. George Washington, particularly in his younger years, shares more similarities with pseudo-historical/mythical figures like Romulus and Lycurgus, than he does with true historical characters. The fable of Washington and the cherry tree is as much a nationalistic fable as Romulus being raised by wolves. Moreover, consider how the American Revolution is often presented to the American public: an almost ethical crusade against tyranny, overthrowing a corrupt and dictatorial monarchy, the resilient American everyman defeating one of the word’s greatest Empires. This ignores the historical reality of the British monarchy not having significant constitutional power for over a century (the Brits having seen to that themselves), and the fact that the Revolutionary War was far more a proxy war between Britain and France than is often admitted. The ideas of American exceptionalism, of America as land of the free and home of the brave, these ideas are all propaganda no different from the Romans considering themselves the sons of Mars, and Roman culture being superior to all others. And these narratives undeniably still carry weight today. When American politicians appeal to these traditionally ‘American’ values, they are appealing to a historical narrative.

Examples like this abound. Every single country in the world has an ideal of itself and other countries, and those ideals are inextricably linked to history. Communicating history to the public is therefore a weighty responsibility, because it gives the ‘historian’ a level of power and control over how people view the world. Consider this analogy. Human history is like a book full of interesting characters, themes and chapters. When you’re born into the world, you’re effectively injected into the book somewhere in the middle. This is a confusing position to be in. You’ve opened the book in the middle and there are all these characters, places, conflicts, etc. that are appearing in the narrative, but you’re not sure who they are, where they’ve come from or what they’re wanting to achieve. Of course, the only sensible way of understanding where you are in the book (and where the narrative might be going later) is to go back and read the earlier chapters. There’s an awful lot of pages though and some of them are confusing and perhaps even lost entirely. So you, very sensibly, look for a synopsis of what has happened so far. The person who gives you that synopsis is therefore going to be crucial in how you understand the book. Perhaps they didn’t really like one particular character and so don’t give them a lot of attention, perhaps they loved one particular story arc and give that a lot of weight, and so on. How you understand the book so far, the characters around you and where it all might be going, is therefore very dependant on who gives you the synopsis. Enter the YouTube historian.

 It is such an odd thing when you really think about it. When we want medical advice, we find a doctor, if we want legal advice we find a lawyer, if we want to understand physics, we find a physicist. Why don’t we do this for history? The honest answer is that people are trying to do that, but they’re being misled. When someone wants to find out about history, they watch a YT history video with the understanding that this is an expert who is communicating this information to them. Sometimes this is correct, sometimes it isn’t. These channels often have large team of writers behind the scenes; some of these are people with an M.A. or PhD in some historical field, others aren’t and have zero relevant qualifications. The scripts then get looked over by an editor, usually someone with at least an M.A. in history. Upon initial glance, this might all sound pretty good, we’ve got people with qualifications in history talking about history, so what’s the problem? The problem is that experts, almost by definition, are niche. I can write a really good script about the history of Macedonia, but if I were to write about the history of the Inca, for example, it would be no better than any old bastard who researches the topic and writes a script about it. My having qualifications in history is only relevant to the areas of history which those qualifications pertain to. It does not give me universal knowledge of all areas of history. It is entirely possible for a script to go from writing to publication without anyone who has studied that time period even coming close to the script. Inevitably this leads to serious errors in the historical narrative.

I want to be clear here, I don’t think that this is nefarious or malicious. I don’t think that such channels and the people that work with/for them are actively misleading people. I think that those who research and write the scripts would honestly think that they have done good work and good research. The problem is that in order to identify whether or not your research into a historical topic is good or not, you need to have a level of familiarity with that subject. It’s the Dunning-Kreuger effect. How is a scriptwriter with no education in an area of history meant to be able to tell if they’ve written a good script or not? And how is an editor, who also has no idea of that time period, mean to tell if it is accurate or not? Again, sometimes the script is written by someone who is educated on a particular topic, but how are you, the viewer, supposed to work out which is which? If a video gets put up on ancient Thebes, how is the audience to know if this is one of the scripts which was written by someone who has knowledge of the subject, or one of the ones where it’s just written by, effectively, some random person? The audience obviously can not do this. And so any mistakes that are made in the video go unnoticed by the majority of viewers.

Again, consider the power and impact of this. Lets take our example of ancient Thebes. For most people, they’re not going to know anything at all about that subject. Whatever a channel says about the topic will be, for many people, the only information they will have on that matter. Without the knowledge to know if it is correct or not, they will accept it as true, making the assumption that the people behind the channel are well-read on the subject. Let’s say that there is a significant mistakes in the video. That mistake is now going to be the truth for most people who watch the video. And we’re not talking small numbers here. A large history YT channel will generally get over 100,000 views after a day. That’s more than the entire population of Andorra that now has a wrong understanding of Theban history. Larger videos can easily exceed 5 million, roughly the entire population of Ireland or New Zealand. The most popular can get near 20 million and be written by someone with no education at all on the subject. 20 million people, more than the entire population of Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Iceland combined, have been taught about an area of history from one person, a person who has no education in the field at all. Think of the power, the influence, that this one person has had: for millions of people, their understanding of a crucially important period of history comes down to just one individual. And we’re not talking about an induvial historian. We’re not talking about someone who had oversight from someone who knows about the subject. We’re not even talking about someone who has an education in the topic. We’re talking about the equivalent of a random person that you bump into at the pub. That is the person who controls that historical narrative for millions of people. And that is a terrifying idea.

Does it really matter if people don’t have a good understanding of Theban history though? So, what if some errors are made there? A mistake about Theban history might be a small thing to you, but what about a mistake about American history? What if they said something about something you care about, which you knew to be untrue? Imagine the frustration of seeing something which you love being disrespected in such a fashion, and the annoyance at knowing that now there are tens of thousands of people who are misinformed about the subject. So yes, you absolutely SHOULD care about inaccuracies in Theban history! Because it’s not just about that inaccuracy, it’s what that inaccuracy reveals: the lack of research, of oversight, of responsibility, and this will bleed into all areas of history. Again, think back to what I said at the start of this post: people’s views of the world as it today are informed by historical narratives. The person next to you in the voting booth is voting with a world view and ideology in mind that is, to some extent, informed by their understanding of history. And that understanding is often reliant upon the understanding of someone who has never even studied the subject. And so the narrative is twisted and misunderstood. And it’s not being twisted by people actively out to mislead you, it’s being twisted by that ever so dangerous a person: someone with good intentions but poor knowledge.