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Historiai

Tag: history

  • The Trump Assassination attempt and Philip II

    Peter Voller

    The assassination of Philip II is one of the most contentious murders in history. While it is certain that Pausanias was the man who actually committed the deed and stabbed Philip, the question of who, if anyone, put him up to the crime is massively debated. This might seem rather odd. How is it that such a well-documented and public assassination, committed in front of hundreds of people, is such a hotly debated topic?

    To answer that question, one need only look at the aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt. This event was committed in an age of cameras, with thousands of witnesses present, with metadata that can pinpoint events down to the second, and yet the precise course of events is already being debated. Already conspiracy theories are emerging: the secret service allowed it to happen, there were multiple shooters, etc. These will only become more prevalent and detailed over time. They are, almost certainly, untrue. But this is besides the point, the point is that we are conspiratorial beings. When events like this happen, simple explanations do not seem adequate enough for us to be accepted. The reality is likely that the Trump assassination attempt happened because of incompetence, but this is not an explanation that feels satisfying, and it does not feel like a complete narrative. The reality is that people commit assassinations for varying reasons and they are often simple: they want to enact a change in politics, they hate the target, or they want fame, perhaps a combination of the three. This particular shooter seems to have been motivated by a desire for fame and infamy. The problem is that, for many people, this motivation is not commensurate with the act. The act of trying to assassinate a president is colossal, a historical landmark of an event, and so we want there to be an equally impactful motivation behind the act. This is why people create conspiracy theories, they are trying to make sense of a situation which they find to be nonsensical.

    In millennia to come there will be historians who analyse the Trump assassination attempt. Those historians are going to be coming across many of these conspiracy theories and the progress of time will have blurred the line between what is fact and what is theory. When considering why it happened, they will no doubt come across the evidence that the shooter acted purely for infamy, but they will also find numerous other explanations: that it was a Democrat backed attempt to kill Trump, that it was a false flag operation, etc. These conspiracy theories will persevere and be preserved for precisely same reason that they are created in the first place: they provide a more “satisfying” narrative. It will be interesting to see how later historians tackle this problem. The conspiracy theories will effectively ‘muddy the water’ making it extremely difficult to get a clear picture of what really happened. After all, how will a historian thousands of years in the future know whether to believe the narrative of their being only one or two shooters? Such confusion is certain, despite us living in the best documented and most information rich period of human history.

    To turn back to the assassination of Philip II, these conspiracy theories will again have proliferated. There will have been countless theories trying to provide a satisfying answer, tonnes of finger pointing, and political grandstanding. Almost as soon as the event happened, the truth of what actually happened was fated to be lost. Just as with the Trump assassination attempt, the one person who knew everything about why it happened, the perpetrator, was killed. It was left to everyone else to try and piece together what had happened and inevitably, they fell victim to the same thing we do today, wanting  an incredible narrative to match the incredible event. This confusion was certainly present in ancient Macedonia. The first few months after Philip’s death were one of chaos, particularly for his son Alexander, as numerous culprits seemed to spring forward from all directions. He would have been bombarded by explanations from those around him about how it had happened, all of which would have been fuelled by their own agendas. The truth was lost to him from the start.

    The same process is happening now with the Trump assassination attempt. So much information and misinformation has already been catapulted into the public sphere that the truth, for all intents and purposes, is lost. No doubt, there will eventually emerge a narrative that is true, that does actually describe what happened and why. But the point is that people will not know which of the many narratives is the true one. The one put forward by official sources will be unsatisfying, it will be about incompetence and a desire for fame. The one put forward by non-official sources will be more exciting, conspiracies and plots. The boringness of the official narrative will mean that it wont be trusted be some, and the conspiracy theories will not trusted by others who think it too dramatic. As a result, the issue will effectively no longer be which of these narratives it the most accurate, it will be which of these appeals to you the most? Just as with Philip II, the truth of what happened became unknowable almost immediately after the assassin was killed.

  • The Historian’s Lie – Part 2

    Peter Voller

    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.

  • The Historian’s Lie

    Peter Voller

    We live in the greatest era of knowledge in human history; it has never been easier to both access and spread information. With just a few quick taps of your fingers and clicks of the mouse you can have access to a depth of knowledge that would have put the Library of Alexandria to shame. In reality, much of this potential is wasted. Humans are fundamentally inquisitive beings, we enjoy learning things and discovering knowledge but, we are also fundamentally impatient creatures. This is a particularly frustrating combo: we want to know things and get the rush of absorbing new information, but we don’t want to dedicate inordinate amounts of time to get that. What we want is for information to be provided to us in easily digestible nuggets that we can consume and process. This, to be clear, is not a bad thing. It is utterly fantastical and unrealistic to presume that everyone should investigate every nuance of something to understand it. I don’t need to know the exact particulars that govern the theory of gravity, it’s sufficient for me to just have a general grasp over the broad ideas.

    This same motive (wanting the satisfaction of the thing without committing a lot of time to it) is why we’re so amazed by works of art. Creativity is a natural human impulse, but it takes a lot of effort to produce something genuinely creative. Who hasn’t listened to the Rolling Stones, Slipknot or whoever, and thought “man, in another life I would have shredded on the guitar”. Or read a particularly good book and though “I really must get around to writing that awesome book idea I’ve had for years about that teenager in a dystopian future who rebels against the machine in order to break it” (please don’t, we have enough of them). But we don’t get around to writing that book, and we won’t have another life. So, we satiate those needs in other ways, we admire art, music, books, paintings, whatever medium you like, we admire these things because we are able to live vicariously through that artists creativity. We admire their ingenuity and inventiveness and that stimulates our brains in a similar to way as if we ourselves had created the thing. It’s a shortcut.

    This puts an incredible amount of power in the hands of those few individuals who actually do dedicate their lives to the process. A musician is more than just a person playing an instrument well, they become, in some way, an extension of their audience. When someone accuses your beloved Pirate Metal band (genuine genre) of sucking, you take it personally. It feels like an attack on you yourself, because it kind of it is. You are living vicariously through that band, you identify with them, you imagine yourself being like them, so an insult to them is an insult to you. We use these artists as a shortcut for creative satisfaction and so we become deeply attached to their music. A similar mentality is at work when it comes to history.

    Studying history is a years long process requiring endless hours of effort and dedication, involving all kinds off weird minutia. For example, let’s say you want to study Alexander the Great. A good start would be reading the primary sources, right? Well, first you’d have to understand what those primary sources actually are. A lot of people are going to say that the primary sources are the likes of Arrian, Plutarch and Diodorus. These people are wrong. Those are secondary sources, the primary sources are the likes of Ptolemy, Lysimachus and Callisthenes. So, first you have to understand those guys and the period they were writing in, so that you can then appreciate why they were writing what they did. Then you need to look the secondary sources (Arrian, Plutarch etc.) and study what their motives are. Are some of these guys even historians in the first place? What was the purpose in their works? Etc. All this stuff takes time, it takes effort and knowledge. We don’t want to go through all at, we want just want the end product. This is where the modern historian comes into play. They are our shortcut historical knowledge. At least, they should be.

    Our conception of what a ‘historian’ actually is though, is a bit odd. If you ask people, they’ll generally give a definition somewhere along the lines of “someone who studies the past”. An awkward thing here is defining exactly what people mean here by “study”, and if pushed, people will generally agree that someone who writes/speaks about the past is a historian. Kings and Generals are historians, Historia Civilis is a historian, some random bloke who reacts to historical content is a historian, and so on and so on. Spoiler alert: they’re not, and very few ‘historians’ on YouTube actually are.

    Already, some people reading that will think I’m being elitist. Perhaps I am, but I don’t mean to be. Reporting what happened in the past is not being a historian, that’s being an annalist. There is a very particular detail that separates historians from annalists, and the clue is in the term ‘history’. ‘History’ derives from the Greek, istoriai, which basically means “to question/enquire”. So, a historian is not someone who records the past, a historian is someone who asks multiple sources what happens and then determines which is more accurate. Fundamental to that is the idea of the historical method, the process of working out what sources should be considered more reliable than others. If a person is not doing these things in their work, then it is not history, even though the subject matter might be historical.

    Some examples will be useful. Let’s go back to Alexander again. There are five Alexaner ‘historians’: Arrian, Diodorus, Plutarch, Curtius Rufus and Justin. Arrian and Curtius Rufus both get a pass as historians: they tells us who their sources are and why they are preferring them over others. Diodorus is a bit debatable: he does mention some sources and there seems to be a method behind his work, but there’s some compelling arguments that he was basically just copying the work of earlier historians, not doing the method himself. Plutarch, by his own admission, was not a historian, he was a biographer. He was not interested in telling the most probable or reliable version of events, he was interested in using historical figures as moral exempla. He doesn’t really bother doing source analysis, because he’s not really interested in whether the information is correct or not, he’s interested in what that information reveals about his characters. Justin is not a historian; he is an epitomiser. What does that mean? Very simply, it means that Justin was just writing a summary (an epitome) of a bigger work (written by Pomey Trogus). It’s similar to a Wikipedia synopsis of a book’s plot: the writer of that synopsis is not themselves an author, similarly, Justin is not a historian.

    Let’s take another, more well-known example: Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote a number of historical plays, such as Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, and we know that he used Plutarch as a source. So, we’ve got someone who is telling us what happened in the past and is even using a source to do so. But no one considers Shakespeare to have been a historian, right? Why is that? Because he didn’t do source analysis. He didn’t look at multiple sources and then use historical methodology to determine which he considered more likely: he used Plutarch because Plutarch tells good stories.

    This difference between a historian and ‘non-historian’ is one that we do in so many other aspects of our lives. We don’t, for example, consider a cinema critic to be a director, or a food critic/reviewer to be a chef. They obviously know about food, they’re talking about food and communicating information about food to the public, but that doesn’t make them a chef. When we think of a ‘scientist’ we don’t think of someone who makes videos about science, we mean someone who practices the scientific method, someone who is actually doing the research. An excellent example of this is the wonderful Potholer54. His channel focuses almost exclusively on scientific matters, but he is very upfront and honest about the fact that he himself is not a scientist, he is reporting the work of scientists.

    So, this raises obvious questions about what I do: am I a historian? The answer, I think, is that it depends. At times, yes, I am being a historian. For example, when I’m writing my thesis or articles, I am engaging with the sources, explaining why I am preferring one source over another, all that good stuff. What about when I wrote scripts for Kings and Generals? In that capacity, no, I don’t think that I consider myself a historian. To be clear, I did do a lot of research for those scripts and I did do source analysis, establishing which narrative was the most likely. However, especially in the series about Julius Caesar, I did not include these details in the actual script. The audience is often not being made aware that there are conflicting sources and that I have selected a version based on a number of factors. As I matured as a writer, I tried to include more transparency in my videos on Alexander, for example, trying to show that there were multiple sources and explaining my analysis of them. I’m still hesitant to say that I was writing as a ‘historian’ in that capacity though. The reason for that is that I tried very hard in those videos to avoid giving my own opinion or analysis of events. I wanted to provide the viewer with an overview of what had happened historically and what some of the modern historians thought about them. I was reporting what others had written, I was not giving my own analysis. I was doing to history what Potholer54 does for science.

    This is the case for the vast majority of ‘historians’ on YouTube: they are either simply describing the past, or they are reporting what scholars have written. Neither of these things is being a historian: it’s more akin to historical journalism. Most of the people who describes themselves as ‘historians’ are not. They might have an interest in history, they might talk about history, they might even tell you what scholarship says about history, but they’re not historians. A vast majority of them are not trained as historians either. They’re information analysists, business managers, etc. Some of them might have a BA in history, but just pause and think about that. Imagine if I had a BA in music theory, and I did videos reviewing music. Does that make me a musician? No. Unless I’m playing an instrument and actually making music, I’m not a musician. Apply the the same logic elsewhere. My sister has a BA in astrophysics and can talk very knowledgeably about space. That doesn’t make her a fricking astronaut. If you were on trial and asked for a lawyer, you’d be rather annoyed if you were provided with someone with a BA in law who just made videos reporting on various legal outcomes.

    Why does any of that matter though? Who cares if some people call themselves ‘historians’? It matters because these people are our shortcuts. These are the figures who many people entrust with the incredibly powerful tool of informing them about how the past happened, and they are being imbued with a false level of authority and credibility. Most of these people are literally no different than talking to someone to some random person at the pub about history. Maybe they’ve done a bit more reading around the subject than most, but they’re not authoritative.

    This is painfully transparent when given a bit of thought. If you’ve ever met a genuine historian, I mean someone who publishes research about a certain time period, they will be – by their own ambition – niche. They will be excellent at a time period or culture, but outside of that time period and culture, they’ll be little better than any vaguely intelligent person. An ancient historian has no more clout talking about, for example, the Crusades, than a zookeeper who reads medieval history books in their spare time. Yes, the historical method is constant across all time periods, but the amount of knowledge and background that is needed to talk intelligently about any one bit of history is basically a lifetime dedication. If you can think of someone who is apparently an expert in Roman, Mongolian, American and French history, I’m sorry but they’re chatting shit. I remember going to see a talk about Ptolemaic Egypt from Prof. Toby Wilkinson, one of the leading Egyptologists alive. A member of the audience asked Prof. Wilkinson a question about Hellenistic Macedonia, and he immediately responded that he was not a Hellenist and would not be able to give an accurate answer. And yet it is so easy to find ‘historians’ on YouTube who can apparently talk knowledgeably about all manner of cultures and time periods.

    The benefit they have is that the audience is usually ignorant. It is, surprisingly, worryingly, dangerously, easy to appear ‘expert’ in history to a non-expert. This sounds mean to the audience, no one likes being called ‘ignorant’, but it’s true, and I include myself in that. I am painfully ignorant about most areas of history. I’m great at a couple of select time periods and cultures, but I couldn’t tell you jack or shit about, for example, ancient Egypt. Give me a week though, and I could swat up on some stuff, read some articles and make a video that sounds like I do. And if I call myself a historian, are you, the viewer, going to know if I actually know my stuff or not?

    Of course not, I’m your shortcut! I’ve provided you with your nugget of information, and you get the benefit of feeling good that you’ve learned something new, and you trust me to have communicated that knowledge accurately. Why though, why do you trust me? I’m just some person on the internet. You trust me, because I’m a ‘historian’. And I can get away with claiming that title, because most people don’t actually know what a historian is supposed to be doing. I’m talking about the past, I’m telling you what happened, and I might even have a couple of quotes from sources. I’m now as much a historian as Einstein was a scientist or as Kurt Cobain was a musician.

    And with the title of ‘historian’ I graduate myself from just some person on the internet, to one of those shortcuts. Through me, you live vicariously and learn about areas of history you always wanted to, but never quite had time to. Who cares if all I do is repeat other people’s analyses? Who cares if I don’t explain why I use this source over that? I am your gateway to the past: I choose what areas you know about and which you don’t, I choose how you understand things to have happened, I choose what characteristics historical figures had, I choose all these things. Because I’m a historian…right?