Archive for the 'Historical Theory' Category
Friday, January 4th, 2008
This fascinating essay by an archaeologist named Timothy Taylor started me thinking about how I understand history, which is always fun to think about. He wrote it in response to this question:
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?
Mr. Taylor has changed his mind about relativism: he used to be for it, and now he’s against it. “Where once I would have striven to see Incan child sacrifice ‘in their terms’, I am increasingly committed to seeing it in ours.”
He explains how useful what he calls relativism can be in understanding history and archaeological findings, but he finds now that there are limits. “But what happens when relativism says that our concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, kindness and cruelty, are inherently inapplicable?”
Recently, Mr. Taylor and a colleague have been applying some serious science to the remains of sacrificed Peruvian children of the Inca era.
Contrary to historic chronicles that claim that being ritually killed to join the mountain gods was an honour that the Incan rulers accorded only to their own privileged offspring, diachronic isotopic analyses along the scalp hairs of victims indicate that it was peasant children, who, twelve months before death, were given the outward trappings of high status and a much improved diet to make them acceptable offerings. Thus we see past the self-serving accounts of those of the indigenous elite who survived on into Spanish rule. We now understand that the central command in Cuzco engineered the high-visibility sacrifice of children drawn from newly subject populations. And we can guess that this was a means to social control during the massive, ’shock & awe’ style imperial expansion southwards into what became Argentina.
The “relativists,” however, have attacked these conclusions (not the science, of course: it’s much easier to skip that and just attack the conclusions). The archaeologists, these “relativists” say, have revealed only “the inner fantasy life of, mostly, Euro-American archaeologists, who can’t possibly access the inner cognitive/cultural life of those Others.” He finds special significance in that capital O: the Other is always virtuous, and always irreconcilably Other. “Here we have what the journalist Julie Burchill mordantly unpacked as ‘the ever-estimable Other’ — the albatross that post-Enlightenment and, more importantly, post-colonial scholarship must wear round its neck as a sign of penance.”
Relativism, Mr. Taylor concludes, has its use in understanding the past, but it goes too far. “By denying the basis for a consistent underlying algebra of positive and negative, yet consistently claiming the necessary rightness of the internal cultural conduct of ‘the Other’, relativism steps away from logic into incoherence.”
Did you ever think you’d hear me make a defense of relativism? Well, here we go. The problem with Mr. Taylor’s admirably clear analysis, I think, is that he’s confusing two layers of understanding: the intellectual and the moral. I’ll explain what I mean in a moment. I think Mr. Taylor is actually much more of a relativist than he knows, and far more of one than the people he calls “relativists.”
Oddly enough, I see Mr. Taylor’s late epiphany, not as a rejection of relativism, but as a triumph of right relativism over wrong relativism. Wrong relativism is the kind displayed by the people he calls “relativists”: it assumes that all other cultures are basically good and only ours is corrupt and evil. Thus the human sacrifices of the Inca can only have come from the purest religious motives, whereas the Conquistadors alone were greedy, self-serving tyrants.
Now, you won’t find me arguing that the Conquistadors weren’t greedy, self-serving tyrants. Some apologists for colonialism would tell you that they weren’t as bad as they were painted; I think they were, every bit. But the notion that the Conquistadors alone were bad men is not real relativism at all: it is bigoted and uncompromisingly dogmatic absolutism, though a topsy-turvy sort that attributes virtue to anyone but ourselves.
Real relativism attempts to understand a foreign time or culture on its own terms, and allows the possibility that the Other may be as complex as we are, with as much vice admixed with virtue—in short, fully human. This is the relativism Mr. Taylor and his colleagues are exercising when they suggest that the Inca human sacrifices may have been part of a totalitarian empire’s oppression of the masses. They are attempting to understand the culture from inside, to see it not as a monolith but as a complex society made up of groups and individuals with conflicting motivations. This is the real route to understanding history: not to see the objects of your study as uniformly admirable, but to see them as human.
What the so-called relativists are doing, on the other hand, is something like trying to understand American society by listening only to what the White House press secretary says. Presidents and their spokespeople will tell only those parts of the story that suit them. In the not-too-distant past, presidential administrations have even lied to the American public, although we can of course be certain that such a thing is no longer happening and will never happen again in the future. Would we have a true history of the early 1970s if we went only by the announcements that came from Richard Nixon’s staff—at least the ones he hadn’t fired?
So I say that real relativism is essential to understanding history. That may be called the intellectual layer of our understanding. We have to come to that kind of understanding before we can move up to the next layer, which is the moral layer of understanding. Here we stop studying and start judging. This is where we can say that, whatever the culture, it is repugnant to natural law—or, if you prefer David Hume’s term, the “moral sense”—when a government arbitrarily kills to terrorize a conquered population. That, of course, is what was so horrible about the Conquistadors; but if it is horrible in Pizarro, then it must be horrible in Huayna Capac as well. Oddly enough, the peoples Huayna Capac conquered would almost certainly agree with me. In a peculiar way, even my moral absolutism is relativistic, because natural law is universal. People feel injustice as keenly whether they are twenty-first-century Americans or fifteenth-century Peruvians.
So I say this to Mr. Taylor: Don’t abandon relativism so quickly. You still do need to understand a culture in its own terms, and you’re already doing a better job of it than the so-called relativists are doing. But do make the distinction between intellectual understanding and moral judgment. Both are necessary, but they are separate operations, and one precedes the other.
Posted in Historical Theory | 2 Comments »
Sunday, December 30th, 2007
Oh, I love getting unexpected gifts in the mail. Especially when those gifts are books, because I especially love books. And particularly especially when those books are sloppily printed, cheaply bound rants by conspiracy theorists. As my long-time readers already know, I have a particular affection for conspiracy theorists.
For Christmas, someone I don’t even know (how did he know my nickname was “Resident”? Only my closest friends call me that) sent me National Sunday Law, a long rant by a splinter Seventh-Day Adventist that shows how the Papists are conspiring with the United States Government to make you stop working on Sunday, in spite of the fact that Saturday is the real Sabbath. Satan is behind it all, you can be sure. (You can read it on line, but nothing can duplicate the experience of holding the actual foul-smelling newsprint pages in your hand.)
Personally, I’d be in favor of a law to make me stop working on Sunday, as long as it was understood that it was merely the first stage in a long-term plan to make me stop working on Saturday, Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday, and Monday as well. This working stuff is terribly overrated. But according to the book, it stops at Sunday, which I agree is wrong. A law that places one religion above another has no place in our (theoretically) tolerant society.
This book is such a classic combination of conspiracy theory and eschatological speculation that I can’t help myself. I have to read it, and I have to tell you about it. If I get a rant for Christmas, you get a rant for New Year’s.
There are just so many amazing things about this book. First off is that the national Sunday law is an imminent danger. It’s happening any moment now. And that’s still true in the newly updated edition of the book, even though the first edition was published in 1983. It doesn’t look like we’re any closer to a national Sunday law; in fact, it looks as though the idea of Sunday as just another shopping day has become firmly institutionalized. But, in the immortal words of Dick Martin, That’s what they’d like you to believe! Like every conspiracy theory, any apparent disproof only makes the theory stronger. The diabolical forces must be really diabolical, because they hide their work so well!
I hardly need to tell you that the book of Revelation gives our author most of his best material. Every generation reads Revelation and sees its prophecies coming true in our own time. This book follows the standard pattern. We start out with a standard description of how much more awful our age is than the ages before it were. Lots of stories about horrible murders and perversions lead up to this amazing declaration:
“Crime doubles every ten years.”
This, by the way, is probably the most perniciously evil statement in the book. As far as I can tell, it’s just a bald lie; but it’s exactly what many people, perhaps even most people, believe. We make our political decisions based on perceptions like this, and your freedoms are always in danger of being eroded by them. Habeas corpus? Innocent until proven guilty? Maybe crime has spiraled out of control so much that we can’t afford such luxuries anymore.
Think for a moment what it would mean if the crime rate, usually measured as a percentage of the population victimized, doubled every ten years. Suppose we start at 5%, which was about the property crime rate in 1973. Count with me: 5%, 10%, 20%, 40%, 80%, 160%—it takes less than sixty years for there to be more victims than people.
I’ve written about this kind of PLS before, but here’s one of the clearest examples of it I’ve ever seen. The truth, by the way, is that crime has gone way down; for real crime statistics, see this page from the Department of Justice (“Since 1994, violent crime rates have declined, reaching the lowest level ever in 2005”; “Property crime rates continue to decline”). And then notice how, while the actual crime graphs go down, the generic graph icon for “Crime facts at a glance” shows a line rising steeply upward. That’s how firmly the impression of rising crime is planted in our minds!
Of course, the updated version of the book adds the September 11 attacks, painting terrorism as a new level of horror never experienced before. How easily we forget that the 1970s were the golden age of terrorism. Here in Pittsburgh, the Weather Underground tried to blow up the Gulf Building; radical groups of all sorts terrorized Europe. The September 11 attacks killed more people at once, but terrorism was actually more of an epidemic thirty years ago.
Shortly after that, the number of the Beast is decoded: one of the titles of the Pope is found to add up to 666 in Roman numerals, if we completely ignore the order of the numerals (so that IV denotes 6, for example) and count the letters that aren’t numerals at all as 0. Then we find that the mark of the beast is observing the Sabbath on Sunday rather than Saturday, and from there the whole Apocalypse falls neatly into place.
But even after the apocalypse, we’re not done. There are thirteen appendices devoted to individual subjects (numbered 1 through 12 but including a 1A). You can always count on appendices in conspiracy books. As the author gets deeper into the conspiracy, more and more things fall into place, and there just isn’t room for all of them in the main body of the book.
Now, what are we to make of all this? I think the message here is that we live in a state of permanent apocalypse. This book has been predicting the imminent arrival of the tribulation for almost twenty-five years now, and it claims “32 million in print.” I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m predicting that, in 2033, it will still be in print, still announcing the imminent tribulation, and with no excuse offered for the fifty-year delay. Meet me back here in 2033 and see if I’m right.
A more important lesson, though, is that we need to be very suspicious when things start falling neatly into place. Our minds are designed to see patterns; that’s how we learn and survive. But our pattern identifiers are quite capable of going slightly mad. If I told you that you were being pursued by a secret cabal of Masons in blue Chrysler minivans, you’d laugh at me. But the next time you went out driving, you’d begin to notice how many blue Chrysler minivans there are around you, and how many of them seem to be right behind you, and how many of them have Masonic symbols on their license-plate holders. Not all of them would have the Masonic symbols, but that just shows how clever those Masons are. Now, if you’re thinking rationally, you’d realize that Chrysler makes the most popular minivan, and blue is a very popular color. But that pattern-recognizing part of your brain is always working, tempting you to see patterns in random events.
Oddly enough, that ability of ours to see patterns has given us some of the world’s best fiction and some of its worst. The Walter Map Lancelot cycle sees the whole story of Arthur and his knights as a giant allegory of sin and redemption, the whole human experience. Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code sees a pattern of conspiracy in the same Grail stories. In each case, the brain of the author has imposed patterns on certain events; the result is a masterpiece in one case, a shoddy mess in the other. I leave it to you to decide which is which.
Posted in Historical Theory | 3 Comments »
Thursday, November 22nd, 2007
Nestled among the multiple copies of Dan Brown’s masterpieces in the clearance section of a local bookstore, I found—no, wait a minute, that sounds like I was nestled among the copies, etc., which is not a position I would put myself in. Let me start over, without taking the opportunity to bash poor old Dan Brown, who, after all, has been the target of a lot of ill-natured abuse these last few years, and only has a billion dollars to show for it.
While I was looking through the clearance books, I found a book by one Giles Morgan with the pleasingly utilitarian title The Holy Grail. For the small price I could afford to take a chance on it, even though the author’s other credits included writing for the Fortean Times, a magazine devoted to the belief that the world is inexplicably weird, or weirdly inexplicable, I forget which. I was surprised to find the book a mostly sensible and balanced history of the Grail in legend, literature, and popular entertainment. It’s a small book and a huge subject, so it skates lightly over the things The Grail Code dwells on at length: Walter Map and Thomas Malory get about a page each. But it presents a good overview of the whole story of the Grail in culture, and it doesn’t dwell on the kind of tabloid-friendly “mysteries” that make up the bulk of most Grail books.
Now, why did I say I was “surprised” to find that the book wasn’t loopy? Partly, I’ll admit, it was just the mention of the Fortean Times on the jacket. If you haven’t experienced the peculiar kind of intellectual loopiness that grows at the Fortean Times, I can’t honestly say that you ought to, but I do sneakily admire it from a distance. Charles Fort, the eponymous founder (don’t you just love the word “eponymous”? Eponymous eponymous eponymous), spent his life searching out odd phenomena that were difficult to explain—a rain of frogs, for example—and cataloguing them in charmingly rambly books (The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, Wild Talents) whose basic theme seems to be that the world is really weird and scientists are deliberately covering up the weirdness. It’s like paranoid conspiracy theory without the invective. Fort’s followers keep up the tradition, searching the world for unusual phenomena and grinding their brains down to the corpus callosum to come up with reasons why all scientific explanations fail. You can probably imagine what sort of Holy Grail book I might have expected from a Fortean.
But the Fortean connection wasn’t actually the main reason I was surprised. I was surprised because, without ever really thinking about it, I’ve learned to expect that almost every book about the Holy Grail will be full of hooey.
It’s almost impossible to find a book about the Holy Grail that doesn’t ignore all history and logic in the most cavalier manner imaginable. There’s something about the Grail legends that brings out the wacko in everyone. Mike and I wrote The Grail Code precisely because almost all the other books about the Holy Grail went so wildly off the rails, and none of them showed much interest in what we thought was the most interesting stage of the development of the legends: the magnificent allegories spun out of the Grail legends by great literary figures like Walter Map. We had to write it because it was the book we wanted to read.
What is it about the Holy Grail that makes nutters of us all? I’m going to start right off by admitting that I don’t really know the answer, so all you’ll get from me is a bunch of speculation. Which is all you ever get from me on this site anyway. Stay tuned: in the next installment, we look at what it is that makes the Holy Grail legend the greatest legend of all.
Posted in Archaeology, Historical Theory | 8 Comments »
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