What if our entire view of history today is misguided or very much incomplete because of similar events that occurred in the past when there was hardly any redundancy of information?
Hmm. I'll need to think about this one. I can see what you're saying... It's probably true but it definitely messes with my (and everyone's) tendency to see history as a series of monolithic happenings.
It’s probably good to look at everything you think you know about history through that filter. History is a small number of people trying to build coherent stories from a random assortment of source material. 99.99% of everything that happened is left out of the stories, and what is left is told through those few people’s personal lens.
So, it sounds like you would dismiss all historic knowledge, including written history, even from multiple sources? That doesn't seem like a very good approach to learning about the past. Skepticism is fine, but, really, we have to work with the data we've got. We can put modern interpretations on that data, based on new knowledge and understanding of science, but disregarding all of it it seems rash.
I will quote something another historian, Alessandro Barbero (who is getting quite popular in Italy), often likes to point out when asked about similar "unanswered questions".
For any historian, even just determining what happened in the past requires a lot of work already. Finding primary sources that clearly describe facts, are reliable, and not too biased is hard, and reconciling contradictory sources is even harder.
Explaining why these things happened, or what would have happened if something else happened differently is much harder still, because you must use this incomplete information to establish causality or (even worse) simulate an actual alternate reality.
Just try for a second to ask yourself what would 2021 look like had 9/11 never happened. It's a daunting task, even though we have a massive amount of information about that time period (having literally lived through it). Doing the same with remote history with historical rigour is essentially out of reach.
I'm going to have to disagree with the premise of this and the last post regarding history. History is fun, but not ultimately particularly useful. It's fun in that the "whys" provide narrative value to the facts of history, but as to why it isn't that useful, consider three points.
1. All history that you know is viewed through the lens of biased historians. Historians are extremely biased. All of them. Unlike the sciences where there is a reasonable control on bias (that is, experimentation and truth), in history there is no such control. The field becomes swept up in fads and memes and patterns, and looking at each one individually you would never know that it isn't just Truth. Since historians are the only ones who delve deep into the facts enough to have opinions, but there is no control on their opinions and biases, you essentially can't use any of their output for decision making today.
2. The devil is in the details. Almost always, the lines of implication and causality between two events that are connected (the "why") are extremely subject to minute details that are ultimately unknowable at this point in time. Identifying which of them are the true ones and which are only apparent is an exercise in futility, and creates a ripe environment for bias to exercise its magic (keep in mind that most humans are essentially rationalization engines, and are essentially blind to contrary evidence when faced with ambiguous data sets). The devil being in the details also means that any given scenario that you are faced with will differ very, very significantly from any prior scenario in thousands of details. History only operates at the level of the broad stroke, the gross events that have a literally incomprehensible number of details that could be important or not.
3. Lots of things happen due to chance. More things than people are willing to admit. Humans are wired to seek out patterns. Often this means humans find spurious patterns. Basing your decisions on things which are unknowably determined by random events is dumb.
I doubt if this will convince many of you, based on the responses these posts have generated, but at least keep in mind that your time is valuable, and learning the details of history may just not make your life one iota better.
I think that future generations may forget most details of our way of life. However, as you said, it won't be due to lack of a historical record, but instead it will be due to a lack of interest in uneventful details combined with a plethora of information. I think with history we often have no clue about certain details even though the evidence is right in front of us; it's just not something we find interesting.
There would be countless historians now who wish they had access to more past writing than they do! And that includes the minutiae that we think completely uninteresting today.
history is composed not only of what our best guess is of what happened, but how that guess came to be and changed over time. my experience of studying modern history is that the biggest missing piece seems to be knowledge of where intellectual and political trends originated from and how they propagated. the information is there, but it is buried among many primary texts and largely ignored by "story centric" history. I don't blame historians for doing this, they must make history sexy or risk being considered irrelevant.
Similarly the idea that history is merely memorisation, as if we had access to perfect information about the past which we can completely understand despite our entirely different context.
It is remarkable to see (in this age of the internet) the huge gap between what the media believes about the present vs. what is more likely based on the far deeper amount of information made available on the internet.
Society is made up of many parallel subcultures, and only a very small group of them keep journals, write, or otherwise record history. That group appears to be mostly disconnected from the nuts and bolts of what is actually going on technologically, politically and economically.
It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past.
Then ought not we ask, are we contented with a selective reading and understanding of all those that have preceded us, especially those of small repute and those that had insignificant impact on that history?
And following from that, the factors that contributed to that insignificance in the first place - things like scant media exposure, lack of coverage by mainstream outlets being just two of a whole slew of other factors we may never fully capture or fully grasp.
I guess in the end we are posed with the question, are we okay with that "process of loss and compression."
reply