Wondering Wednesday "What's the point?"

georgeguy007 · 1ヶ月前

Just want to remind everyone that this is an open discussion! If you have a question, now is the time to ask!

commiespaceinvader · 1ヶ月前

The first major problems with what Grey describes in his podcast when discussing what he terms the "Grand Unifying Theory" is the explanatory potential assigned to said theory. He basically calls a "purely intellectual exercise" with "no application". This reveals that for all the discussions he wants to take place, he neither has a real interest in having said discussion nor does he take the field of history seriously because developing theory in the field of asking why things are the way they are is a very valid application.

Leaving that aside however, we need to differentiate a bit: Grey cites GGS as something coming close to a "Grand Unifying Theory" because it attempts to deliver an explanation of the differences between European and pre-Columbian societies. That to me misunderstands what a Grand Unifying Theory would be in the field of history because the field of history deals with a much wider variety of things but it gives a good impression of what he wants historians to deliver: A theory of why certain societies developed differently from others.

That question is not new and dating back to Kant and the enlightenment has been asked several times before.

One of the most prominent examples is Hegel. Hegel's model of philosophy claims to explain all of reality including its historical development. To simplify it, Hegel posits that the whole of history is about the development of the Spirit of Ideas, the Weltgeist. Historical development is the dialectical development of the Weltgeist reaching further and further throughout human society until the end point of total knowledge is achieved. Different societies developed differently - or in the words of Hegel some are further along in relation to the Weltgeist - because of relation to and ability to perceive and developed reason (as in ratio). Thus the ability to perceive and perform ratio determines the level of development.

Where there is Hegel, Marx is generally not far away, and here too, Marx developed a theory of historical development: Historical materialism. Turning Hegel on his head, Marx argues that all development is determined by class conflict surrounding power over the means of production. For him, the economical basis and the dialectic conflict surrounding it determines the intellectual superstructure of any society. This process for him is working towards an end, which is communist society without the state, money and so forth.

Another one of these theories is Whig History or its more modern incarnation of modernization theory. This assumes that every society will develop in the same manner until they reach modernity using Western Europe as the standard model until the best possible of all worlds is reached. A much broader model than Hegel or Marx, it rests on the same foundations but depending on which theorist you ask, the difference in development is explained through a variety of factors such as urbanization, legal tradition or sometimes flat out racism.

There is a couple of others but the important thing they all share and that GGS shares too, is the heavy emphasis of structure over the historical actors. Structure in history refers to economic relations, technology available, political and social makeup of societies etc. etc. But what they tend to forget is that history is made up of very concrete people, the historical actors. Within Marxist, Hegelian, and modernization theory and even with the geographical model of Diamond, actors are underplayed and only appear as the - as Grey calls them - specifics that are not necessary to deal with in detail. The problem with this is that history is essentially made up of people acting within structures and any theory that fails to take agency into account or just relegates the historical actors to automatons acting what can be considered rationally within the theoretical framework is incomplete. It might be useful but it is far from all encompassing, grand, unifying or all explanatory.

Even if we posit a constant in human behavior such as the need to in some ways get food, we need to take into account that even in the same environments, there is a broad variety of responses to said need. In the Arabian dessert, there are people who stay Nomands and there are people who found Palmyra. There is no unifying human response that in every case will be similar. The wonderful /u/gent2012 and I had a discussion about this problem of structure and agency in r/askhistorians yesterday and they quoted William Sewell, Jr. with "Structures shape people’s practices, but it is also people’s practices that constitute (and reproduce) structures.", and I think this is the most convincing theory of historical development that we have so far, in that it leaves the possibility of variance, does not work towards a specific end point and accounts for differences on the levels of structure and agency. It might leave some unsatisfied as it basically requires you to look into the "specifics" but given how varied human societies and behaviors are around the globe, that might be a necessity.

One more thing: The Civilization Tech Tree.

Grey made reference to it and wrote:

There is resistance to the tech tree metaphor from historical quarters that I have a hard time understanding. Perhaps a 'tech web' (like that awful one from Civilization: Beyond Earth is better, but the development of guns requires not only gunpowder (which is possible to make without a huge amount of tech) but also precision metal working which is much harder.

No matter how you slice it, no one jumps from stone tools to semi-conductors.

Of course, nobody will jump to the superconductor right away, but when it comes to technological innovation, we also need to take into account such things as agency and also structure in the sense of what societies deem useful. Recently, there was a question over in askhistorians if the Romans were close to inventing steam power and while the answer was more on the no side than the yes side, especially when we take into account what we think when we think of modern steam power, the question also would be, what used they would have had from it. Assuming somebody in ancient Rome invented it, what would a society whose economic relations are built upon agriarian slavery need steam power for given that they don't have any kind of basis to support an industrial manufacturing process.

It also assumes a straight forward development in terms of technology rather than an application of technology that takes usefulness into account.

WearyTunes · 1ヶ月前

Quick list of arguments i've gotten into over the subject:

1

2

3

All of it is best summed up in this comment:

nobody offers an alternative.

Because there isn't an alternative. That's the point.

There is no simple answer to the question Grey is asking. No single cohesive narrative explains it.

That's the reason history inclined people are getting mad at him. He is relying on disproven work to uphold an overly-simplistic explanation. When we tell him that the work has been discredited he demands that we come up with another overly-simplistic explanation as a replacement.

All that aside, I'm glad that we are doing this. I feel like the main problem is that GG&S appeals to a wide audience of people and many of them unaware that the "new ideas" they are having (like grey's insistence on a general theory of history) have actually all been argued to death before most of us were born.

Though grey insists that he poured over every bit of criticism that GG&S has gotten, I can't help but feel like we wouldn't be in this situation if he had done more research into historiography.

yoshiK · 1ヶ月前

To take to opposite route, and explain bad historiography, let me explain what a STEM lord assumes how history should look like, and why GGS is basically the only book that conforms to the expectation.

To start with the expectations of a physicist, there are roughly two important ingredients, perturbation theory and thermodynamics. The idea of perturbation theory is, that one can order effects by importance. To calculate the motion of Earth around the Sun, one would first calculate the motion of the Earth-Sun system, the result is the earth revolves around the sun, then calculate the Sun-Jupiter system and then calculate the perturbation of Earth due to Jupiter, the perturbation is Earth is sometimes circling a little faster or a little slower around the sun than the first order calculation would suggest. (At least if memory serves, it is possible that the Moon has a larger effect than Jupiter.)

The second effect that shapes expectations is thermodynamics, or statistical physics, where there are quite general¹ theorems which guarantee that only the average matters. To illustrate, the link between thermodynamics and statistical physics was established using classical physics, the wrong dynamics for molecules in a fluid, and actually before quantum mechanics was discovered.² An example would be global warming, where the global average temperature is determined by the energy budget of the atmosphere, since for the average it does not matter were in the system the energy sits.

These two combine to the expectation, that there should be a general shape of history in a similar way as they combine in cosmology, where details like galaxies or even super clusters are not important and instead cosmology provides a nice window into nuclear physics and looks like the best bet for probing the smallest scales.

The assumption is therefore that the intuition holds for history and that most of the time one can identify general tropes of history, the closest analogue to such an argument I can think of would be the comparative state of ship building in the early modern era, Europeans have ships that can invade the Americas while no such technology exists in the Americas. Therefore colonialism may be a messy process, but the outcome is ~~sufficiently~~³ determined just by the state of ship building. The task would then be to find similar asymmetries in force projection.

Of course the expectation does not hold, to some extend because the scales that are interesting in history are precisely the messy parts where human agency determines the outcome, for example the outbreak of WWI, I think that the game theoretical situation in late July was sufficiently ugly to determine the outbreak of the war, but the interesting question is, how the European powers got into that mess.

¹ Actually a very interesting question, if they still hold for systems involving humans.

² Never trust a physicist on history of physics, but the timeline strongly suggest that.

³ Too lazy to write the footnote to justify the use of "sufficient."

visforv · 1ヶ月前

Part of the problem is that everyone wants concise and easy answers to things, they're easy to learn and very repeatedable. We want things to make sense on a grander scale and we want to assume that everything happening in the past purposefully led us to this better present. That's why some high school history books say Hitler was elected to become SUPREME FUHRER OF ALL OF DEUTSCHLAND by the German People rather than the slightly more ridiculous set of circumstances that lead to his power.

The way we've seen history has an effect on what we do today. I mean I was just arguing about it but the whole 'Discovering America' thing is rather interesting. In my high school history book I distinctly remember that the overall impression was "native americans should feel lucky we gave them free land and didn't slaughter them all, why won't they just assimilate already?" The way some write about it makes it seem like the conditions on reservations are all their fault. Earlier still in elementary and middle school we got 'Americans found Native Americans, the Native Americans were really nice and gave Americans free food and taught them how to survive. Americans were grateful and tried to be best friends with the Native Americans. Then the Native Americans started killing them for some reason. :'('. Since I live right near some reservations, I get to watch interesting debates between city councils and tribal authorities debate about putting a highway through a reservation that won't even be able to use it. The debate basically boils down to "we gave you plenty of land, stop whining, let us have this little piece".

Then, in the South you have the whole 'The CSA fought for States Rights and most of them disagreed with slavery! Here's an out of context quote from Lee and the CSA's constitution to prove it!'. This was something I learned there. In the 90s. (Granted it was in Deep 'Bama) There was a certain narrative that people had, and it's become so embedded in the culture itself that it's become a very hard thing to challenge when on their home turf.

We want a grand unifying theory because I think people basically want to be able to look at all the terrible things that happened and go "this was all just leading up to the good stuff of the present and the better stuff of the future", while also being able to streamline human development.

tl;dr The narratives given to the past have an extremely important impact on the future. Also Grand Unifying Theories are basically a version of the modernization theory. Also Hitler still sucks.

GothicEmperor · 1ヶ月前

This holistic approach of history seems very outdated to me. I remember Hackett Fisher saying many unkind words about it in Historians' Fallacies, and that's almost fifty years old now, although that's mostly in opposition to more philosophical arguments.

This on the other hand seem to be more the result of introducing concepts from the natural sciences that don't exactly apply to the field of history.

georgeguy007 · 1ヶ月前

What are the pros and cons of trying to do a grand unifying theory?

Grand unifying theories are currently untestable and presentism.

By untestable, I mean we do not have a control group, or even another group to compare the earth too. We cannot rerun the world, and we cannot explore avenues of what-if. This means that any Grand Unifying Theory is unfalsifiable to an extent. Think about it, how could you disprove our notion of gravity? Drop 2 different objects in a vacuum and one hitting the ground first is a good place to start. Continuing this, how would you disprove:

EurAsian empires became a dominant force because of their access to cattle, minerals and geography favorable for growing civilizations.

Think about it. The only way to disprove this is to make another 'starting location' have those factors and see what changes history. No, the "well look around you, isn't that proof enough. World society has been greatly influenced by Europeans. They 'won'" isn't evidence. That is presentism, where you take an outcome and work backwards. Using this logic, I can proose my own Grand Theory:

Nations whose cultures involve wearing wigs, or are near cultures who wear wigs, are much more likely to become dominant world powers in the 1400s to 1900s.

Try to disprove that. And remember, cause I am creating a Grand Theory of History^{^tm} , any evidence you use against me can be refurted by saying "Hey I'm just looking at the Big Picture^{^tm} so I don't really care about ____". If Grey was looking for an alternative Grand Theory, here it is.

KingToasty · 1ヶ月前

I think this is, and will continue to be, the biggest question the field faces. The question is only going to get louder in the coming years, as tuition increases and jobs for history majors get rarer.

Why is history important?

On a personal level, history is my passion. It's the greatest story ever told. Exploring it keeps me going.

But objectively? It puts your life into a greater context. But explaining what that means and why it's important gets difficult without sounding like you're coming up with excuses or being pretentious.

I don't think there's an single simple answer here. Which is a shame, because single simple answers are what CGPGrey and his like (no offense to them) view the world through.

smileyman · 1ヶ月前

How does theory influence our interpretation of the past?

I'm actually going to address this one a bit I think, because it's an important question. Historians like to say that they're not presentist when doing history, but I think it's unavoidable in the field of history. Everybody who writes history is a product of their time, and thus the issues of the time and the attitudes of the culture they're in will have an impact on the type of history that they do.

In the 18th century we saw the rise of Whig thought in politics and social life and history. The authors who wrote in the mid to late 18th century were certainly influenced by Whig thought, even if they were writing in deliberate opposition to it.

The most famous example of a Whig historian from this time period is Edward Gibbon, who started to publish his massive "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" in 1776.

Today there's a strong push in the historical community to look at the lives of common people and to integrate them more. This is a social "bottom-up" look at history that's very much a product of the time we live.

This "bottom-up" look at history first hit in the 70s, but has become extremely popular since the 90s, and much new history focuses on it. So much so that there have been angry "Get off my lawn you damn kids!" types of letters written by eminent historians in the field^¹ (e.g. Gordon Wood).

Personally, I think this is a good thing. But that's a reflection of my personal political and social standards. I think women, and people of color, and the poor and LGBT* people should be more represented in our history. This means that the type of research I'm likely to do is going to end up being more focused on those types of people than on the 1%ers of history.

I think the thing to avoid when doing this is to make sure that the history that ends up getting written is as un-biased as possible in it's final form. No shortcuts, no editorializing, no leaving out data because it doesn't fit your model. This, of course, is very tough to do.

Also, I think I'd like to talk a bit about the various types of historiography that the American Revolution has seen. Generally speaking, this is how the historiography of the Revolution plays out:

Revolutionary Interpretation

This is the history written in the first years/decades after the Revolution by those who participated in it. Mercy Otis Warren's history (which so offended John Adams that it almost cost her his friendship) would fit here (it was written in 1805).

Loyalist Interpretation

These are the histories written by those who were loyalists. For example, Loyalist Peter Oliver wrote a history of the Revolution called "Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion" which was published in 1781. He'd fall squarely under this heading.

Whig interpretation

In the 19th century (especially the early part) there was a rise of Whig histories of the Revolution. The histories tied in with the idea of manifest destiny and the inevitable conquering of the continent by Americans.

Town histories

I'm not sure that this is a distinct historiographic field but I'm including it as well. Throughout the 19th century there were numerous histories published by amateur town historians. These historians interviewed people who were alive during the Revolution, or interviewed those who knew the people who were alive. Some of them used letters and other documents from the participants, but most rely on untrustworthy oral sources. As such they provide many great and entertaining anecdotes, but have little historical value.

Imperial Interpretation

In the early 20th century a school of history rose which looked at the Revolution from the British imperial perspective. The focus here is on British policy and economic decisions, not on the moral outrage of a tyrannical government (which tends to be seen in many of the 19th century Whig histories).

Progressive Interpretation

At the same time, there also began to be the first progressive look at the Revolution. In 1909 Carl Becker wrote "The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776". In it he posed the question "The first was the question of home rule; the second was the question . . . of who should rule at home.", which is an early look at a sort of "bottom-up" history.

Historians like Merrill Jensen and Charles Beard took the idea even further, with Jensen saying that the American Revolution was ". . .an internal revolution carried on by the masses of the people against the local aristocracy."

Consensus Interpretation

The 1940s and 50s saw a pushback against the radicalism idea. The main school of thought here is the idea that the Revolution was an event of commonalities, rather than a radical revolution by the lower class against the upper. Some examples pointed at to bolster this interpretation include things like the prominence of Locke's thought in the Revolutionary participants. Or the idea that there was a strong equivalent to a middle class before the Revolution.

Neo-Whig/Ideological Interpretation

This school of thought argues that the American concerns about liberty were real. That they were political beings and meant what they said. One of the more important works in this school is Bernard Bailyn’s "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution". Bailyn examines hundreds of political tracts published between 1765 and the end of the war to look at the political thought processes involved. He argues that there was no counter-revolution (as many had argued before him^{^2.} Pauline Maier was a student of Bailyn's, and her work "From Resistance to Revolution" carried on the tradition^{^3.}

New Left/Neo-Progressive Interpretations

This is the era of the "bottom-up" history, which has taken many forms. Robert Grossman's "The Minutemen and Their World" is an early example of this (published in 1976). Howard Zinn probably fits into this school. The book I'm reading now "The Unknown American Revolution" is solidly in that camp.

Founder Chic

Only sort of a historiographical field, this is the recent resurgence in popular, massive biographies of the sort done by Ron Chernow, David McCullough and J. Ellis. No new research is generally done on these biographies, instead they're compilations and distillations of previous work.

Right now I tend to think that the New Left and Founder Chic schools are most popular within the field of the American Revolution, but I'm probably influenced by the fact that I look for books that I'd like to read and they tend to be of that variety.

1.) Talking specifically here of Early American studies.

2.) The issue I have with Bailyn's argument is that he's studying the issue from a limited data set. He's already self-selected for the relatively few people in colonial society who could both read & write and who had the time and the money to publish. This is the same group which would naturally be opposed to the sort of radicalism that was on display early on in the American Revolution.

3.) I think that Maier probably drifted away a bit from this school towards the New Left intrepretation by the end of her career and life. She did publish work which pointed out the numerous "declarations of independence" that were written before the July 4th one, and that's somewhat anti-thetical to the neo-Whig thought. Her work on the Constitutional ratifying process highlights the divisiveness of the debate process, where a neo-Whig would probably be more likely to focus their efforts on the commonality of the ideas being expressed.

MindOfMetalAndWheels · 1ヶ月前

Hi /r/badhistory

Just so you know, since the podcast epidose I've been having a back-and-forth with /u/mmilosh that starts here and ends, so far, here that I think is approaching what I view as the core of the disagreement.

JFVarlet · 1ヶ月前

Why do people want a grand unifying theory of history?

Because it lets them present themselves as really smart and informed about many widely different and diverse topics. Being potentially interesting to as many people as possible gets you more attention and sells your stuff more.

atomfullerene · 1ヶ月前

When I was in grad school studying biology, people often talked about two ways of doing biology: "hypothesis-based biology" and "Natural history". "Hypothesis-based biology" was what you should be doing, though if pressed most would admit that yes natural history is important and has it's place blah blah blah you won't get grant money for that.

Anyway, the main difference here is that "hypothesis-based biology" was about finding patterns that explain why something was happening. Natural History, on the other hand, is more about understanding the specifics of what's going on in a specific instance.

For example, consider some islands off the coast of a continent. They've got birds on them.

The natural history approach is to go document which birds are on which islands, which are found near the coast on the mainland, dig through the fossil record to see when they arrived and which species once lived there and died out. If possible it would make note of how the birds got out there--maybe one species is known to make long flights over the ocean, one first showed up after a big storm in 1910, etc.

The hypothesis-testing approach would be something like "I'd hypothesize that islands next to the coast should have more species, because they get colonized more easily. And larger islands have more species because it's well known that species go extinct more slowly if the area they occupy is larger". Then the researcher would go out and count the number of bird species on each island, compare sizes and distance to the mainland, and see if this idea holds true. It's worth noting that these sorts of theories aren't intended to explain everything, but rather to provide a baseline against which the real world can be compared to. For example, if an island is found with many more birds than predicted by theory, it's a pointer that something else is going on (eg: perhaps a land bridge once connected the island to the mainland)

Now, I personally tend to think along the lines of the natural history approach (and think it should get more grant money), but I can definitely see the value of both. Seems to me that most historians (naturally enough) are doing something roughly equivalent to the biologist's "natural history" approach. That is to say, looking at the specific chain of events leading up to a particular thing that happened or is happening. At least, when I see historians discussing agency or narrative, it seems to fit in this approach. In our example above, the natural history approach would care about the agency of the birds first flew out to the islands, if we had any way of thinking about that for birds.

To my mind, GGS is an example of the other approach. Boiled down to a straightforward statement, it is NOT a "grand unified theory" any more than my bird example above is a grand unified theory of biology. If I remember correctly, it's a collection of several different hypotheses but the main ones would be something like "agricultural technology spreads more easily in an east-west axis direction due to similar climates" and "cultures with a greater diversity of animal power are likely to become militarily dominant over those with less animal power". Whether they turn out to be true when tested, I don't know. Another example of this approach would be this paper.

What I'm interested in is whether historians find value in this approach to history in the first place, and if so, why or why not.
Not specific criticisms of particular theories, and not about grandiose claims of all of human history, but the more specific approach of looking for looking for these kind of theories in the first place.

EDIT: Or to sum up from another persons comment: Does it ever make sense to do history like an empirical science? (bearing in mind that even "empirical science" doesn't work that way all the time)

Clovis69 · 1ヶ月前

OK...whats badder history? GG&S or Carnage and Culture?

LandslideLyndon · 1ヶ月前

I of course have a strong dislike of Grand Unifying Theories, but sometimes I think there is a place for GGS and the like. I don't think they can be taken for what they were meant to be--explanations for much, if not all of, historical change--but rather as a quick tool to explain some developments.

The example I'm thinking of is if you had to explain to an uncontacted tribe why your people had so much stuff (almost exactly Diamond's original situation except the people he spoke to were of course contacted), or why you identified with an enormous nation and not a smaller group like a community or a tribe, or how your "nation" got to be so big in the first place. You might start with something like GGS, explaining the effects of agriculture and animal husbandry and so on. I think Diamond specifically went wrong when he made the jump from answering someone's relatively mundane question to trying to address an age-old academic debate.

I personally think history is important because it reminds us that what is Now is not all there ever has been or could be. On of the most frightening things in the world to me is when a society suppresses the study of history and other social studies, because they assert that all the questions answered by those fields can already be answered by their ideology (see, the USSR and ISIL, among many others). We do it as well. Does anyone remember when Oklahoma tried to reject AP US History for not being patriotic (or nationalist) enough? We need to be able to imagine other ways of living in order to be able to critically analyze our own.

spinosaurs70 · 1ヶ月前

Does Jared diamond's followers have a good explanation have a good explanation for why Jamaica and Puerto Rico both islands of similar size,with mountainous interiors both in the Caribbean sea ended up so different?

Also,as a highly amateur history enthusiast.I find grand unifying theories of history more lazy than anything , they just allow you to get out of the complex questions of historical interactions and Free will.Instead just say that it caused by geography,natural laws of human nature, or cultural superiority of certain groups.

Thus giving you a get-out of jail free card.

Spartacus_the_troll · 1ヶ月前

I am curious about legit academic historical opinion of "big history" of the Sagan/Brown/Walter Alvarez type. I must admit it has a certain allure to me as someone in earth sciences, but I kind of shy away from it as only marginally historical. Is history from before writing or known oral history actually history? Is humanity's past and present relationship with the Earth, it's organisms and environment a part of history, even without a record of people's interpretation of said environment and events? I kind of like the idea of unifying the concepts of natural history and history, but that may just be me tying two thing together simply for featuring the same word.

frezik · 1ヶ月前

Why do people want a grand unifying theory of history?

This comes down to people wanting to simplify the world down to a few rules. Lots of people have this internal idea that there's just one thing about their life that's preventing them from being a millionaire, or fixing their worst personality flaws, or otherwise from becoming successful. Conspiracy Theorists take this even further, saying that the whole world is being controlled by this one shadowy group, and we could fix all of society's ills if we could just break their control.

Some disciplines can unify things that way. Physics still expects to unify Quantum Mechanics and Relativity. When it comes to people, though, unified theories tend to fall apart. The human social world is just a whole lot of flawed but mostly well-meaning people doing their own thing.

Happy_Bridge · 1ヶ月前

G,G & S has been largely discredited by the historian community

Links and material to read please?

TitusBluth · 1ヶ月前

This looks more like an exam with essay questions than a discussion thread.

What are some previous attempts at doing unifying theories

Seriously?

badhistory

Wednesday's Topic: What event should be turned into a movie, series, or novel and what shouldn't?

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