On History and Truth

History may flow chronologically, but our understanding and interpretation of it do not.

Truth is a complicated idea. You can try and simplify it to core factual assertions, with names and actions and dates, but that doesn’t get at the whole truth. Even if you have all the information, including what every actor was thinking and their deepest thoughts and inclinations, there still would not be a single synthesis for questions such as “who started WWI?” I suspect the best we can do is gather enough information to draw reasonable conclusions and lessons from history that still apply today. There is a lot to learn about history, and often the way it is simplified can invert truths that may have seemed very clear to the subjects. A more robust information set should paint a better picture, but often it serves to obfuscate.

This Russ Roberts quote from his show EconTalk stuck with me; it was possibly the most emotional I’ve heard him from the episodes I have listened to. The context was about students wanting simple answers to history, like is so-and-so good or bad when the answer is much more complex.

The problem I have is the whole idea of unbiased history. What the heck would that possibly be? You can’t create unbiased history; you cannot create an unbiased search engine. Almost by definition if it’s to be useful it’s discriminatory. It’s by definition the result of an algorithm that had to make decisions…the problem for me culturally is that we have this ideal of unbiased search engine. That can’t happen, so we should be teaching people how to read thoughtfully…you start to get people not knowing what the facts are… they assume most things are true if they agree with them. This infantilization of the modern mind is the road to hell, this is going to be difficult for democracy.

I like complexity. Truth has complexity, and I would like to imagine I’m sincere om searching for it, while I suspect someone is lurking around the corner with a Jack Nicholson-from-A-Few-Good-Men-sounding speech ready to tell me I’m not actually ready for that. It’s not searching for a single answer, but to better understand the world around me. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is good! So I might use this blog as a vehicle for fleshing out some synthesis, and theories about what it means, and the intersection between history and everything it tries to encapsulate. Everything is a part of history, and history is always through the lens of the first, then second, then millionth filter.

I think history also provides an insight into humanity and the greater world. It shows what echoes and what changes. Hypotheticals grow endless, but the historical record is truth. Or is it? Revisions to history start as soon as history is made, or even before if someone is setting the stage. The Soviets were already talking internally about how they were going to be “liberating” or “protecting” the Polish from the Nazis before they even invaded Poland in 1939. The examples are endless, but with enough information there is truth to ease out and synthesize.

I’m not much of a writer, and I’m not a historian. I’m not a philosopher or social scientist or theologian. But I know putting thoughts down on paper (or a whiteboard, which I swear immediately makes you 50% smarter) is the start to organizing and synthesizing information and history is a cornucopia in that regard. So this is where I’ll start.