History. Old charts, drawers full of weathered documents, and stories passed down from grandparents to children. Usually, we think of history as a constant, a totality, a truth. History tells us what happened 100 years ago. If it's wrong, we find a new history that isn't. Overall, we'd like to think that we know what happened in the past; this is the 21st century after all! We might not have hovercars and jetpacks, but we can damn well figure out what happened on May 8, 1945. Right?
So, we take serious issue when official stories, the thing that should be a definition of historical truth, aren't right or complete. People love a good conspiracy theory. "They" hid the fact the moon landing never really happened. "They" are the secret force that runs the world. A man was able to fake his way to the post-game press conference at the Super Bowl in order to tell us that "they" were the ones who actually perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. Whoever "they" might be (the government, the New World Order, Reptoids), "they" are powerful. "They" thrive wherever the official story is not adequate.
When the official story is not complete, we seek the truth for ourselves. Think about the way perceptions about the American Civil War change as you grow up. From a young age, we talk about how it was "to end slavery," the North stepping in more or less from a moral high ground to end this atrocity. Then, you hit your teenage years, you start rebelling against the authority (internally and externally), and you reject this simplified story. In your mind, your elementary school teachers were sugarcoating a war that was more about states' rights and other factors in order to sell this story of good vs. evil that children love. Time goes on, you live with this idea, but eventually, you read up on it some more. It hits you; it really was about slavery. Sure, elementary school did sugarcoat it too, states' rights do play in too, but the war simply could not have happened without slavery. The whole thing is absurdly complex. Neither the original truth nor your rebellion were correct. You started close to, but not exactly at, the answer. You swung away in search of the "real" answer that teachers were "hiding" from you, only to swing past the answer and away from it again. And that's just the norm as its taught today (in the North).
So, this brings up an important point. When you compile a history to relay the truth of the past, you will cut out data, stories, and information that could potentially be relevant. There isn't enough space in the world to put it all together. So, how do you choose what you cut out?
Let's look at another example of history being twisted. In modern conception, it's become popular to almost fetishize a view of Nikola Tesla as a brilliant and put-upon genius. He was downtrodden by Edison, he was overshadowed by Edison, but ultimately he was so much better; Edison electrocuted an elephant! I mean, he literally hooked up an elephant to AC current in order to convince people that AC was dangerous! Tesla never killed any animals. This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Most of the stuff this guy is talking about is, more or less, correct. But he's also not talking about a considerable amount of stuff that would make Tesla look pretty bad. He was a eugenicist. He didn't believe in subatomic particles. He thought Einstein was incorrect with his theory of relativity. He was convinced that at one point he received a transmission from Mars. So, in effect, we have essentially two very different people, who shared a name, story, and body. One was the guy who was the underdog to the goliath Edison, and one was the guy who was born in 1856 and died in 1943. (If this section interested you, you'll probably like to watch this).
So, how do we deal with this? Should we even deal with this? What does this all mean? In physics, we have what is known as the uncertainty principle, which specifically states that the more one knows about the location of a particle, the less one knows about its momentum, but which is commonly referred to as stating that the act of observing something changes it. More importantly, as someone who sets out to write a history, or some historical account, how do you deal with the fact that you will categorically be unable to tell everything that could be relevant to the story? And that by trying to tell it, you may very well be affecting perception of it to the point of creating a new, false version of it?
Say you set out to share with the world a presumably true story from the past, but as you go along, you realize you have come to an impasse. No matter how you tell the story, there will be things you leave out, leading to two problems. Firstly, what we saw in the Civil War example might occur, where your simplification or leaving out of data will lead someone to assume the entirety of your story is not correct and they will conduct their own, misguided research to find out what you were keeping from them. Alternatively, you might experience the Tesla example, where your simplification or leaving out of data will lead someone to (and this is very important) BEYOND YOUR WORK compose ON THEIR OWN an image of a story that, as it grows in popularity and notability, diverges more and more from the truth, until eventually it doesn't even seem like you're talking about the same thing anymore. How do you deal with this?
If we look specifically at the "Uni history" example we talked about in class, there was information "hidden" (or perhaps better said, "not disclosed") on official channels. However, nobody knows exactly what the truth is except those directly involved, which is probably for the best (it's their private lives, after all). In the absence of some "absolute truth," we swing away from the "official story," try to decide our own truth, and then we cause this two-Tesla separation between the real figure and the one in our heads. When somebody completely separated from the story looks in (say, an alumnus who is Facebook friends with somebody still in the school), they're shocked at the developing, being-created story, when, if they were here, it wouldn't be anywhere close to as big a deal as it seems on the place most of us use to vent our worst feelings about a sensitive issue.
The truth is, there exist things, stories, and ideas we'll never know fully. We have to settle for "close enough" at some point, and sometimes where we settle that is unsatisfactory. Further, if we try to push beyond "close enough," there's huge risk for those involved to be harmed (airing of dirty laundry, etc.). At the same time, this doesn't mean we can't or even shouldn't look beyond what we're told; what it means is that we should be careful not to be sucked into either the "it's not what they told me, so clearly it's ridiculous" or the "it's not what they told me, so clearly it's right" mentalities. Isn't that disappointing?
But what if that "close enough" ends up silencing a major and significant part of the story? What if that silencing leads to a flawed interpretation of the past (and present)? More vexingly, how do we even know how "close" we are if there is no "thing" against which to measure our proximity? The questions just keep coming.
ReplyDeleteYou're right that, at some point, we simply have to go to war with the stories we have, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld. We can't just decide not to have a history, or to view it all as a complete fabrication. But the fact is, in the traditional iteration of American triumphalism and progress (which is still a very-much-alive metanarrative, repeated all the time by politicians and car commercials), we CAN say for sure that many voices have been left out of the equation, and this is a shortcoming that can be amended (and in many ways HAS BEEN) by revising that history to include unrepresented perspectives.
As for your Uni example, yes, private lives are at issue here, but to follow the analogy to government--the stories behind the official pronouncements are clearly of relevance and interest to the population at large. Many would argue that a healthy democracy depends upon such buried stories being brought to light: the press as the defender of democratic freedom and all that. A certain skepticism toward official pronouncements is virtually a requirement. Often--especially when dealing with government and administration, where decisions made at the higher levels affect the lives of all citizens--this renders the behind-the-scenes stuff even MORE important than the surface stuff.
(As your opening comments imply, however, it also sends us easily down the path of conspiracy theories and paranoia. But isn't a certain degree of paranoia necessary? How do I KNOW I'm paranoid? Maybe you're all really out to get me . . . )