From: Don M <dmaddox1@h...>
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2011 06:57:53 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: topic - rewriting (future) history....?
textfilter: chose text/plain from a multipart/alternative Dear List Whenever I consider "future history"-- that is, in the holy of holies of "What-If" history, I remmber whenever I go to the local Thrift Store to peruse the book section to see what has washed up on "The Skull Island" of the vast Sargasso Sea of salvaged cargo of local book collections, I am reminded of the futility of this. Racks and racks of books are to be found with such super-sensational titles liek THE COMING FISCAL CRASY OF 2007! (written in 2000) or "THE COLLAPSE OF THE WESTERN WORLD (in 1992) etc. Now and then a bit of treasure washes up (like a 1st edition of "The Waverly Tales" or a book on some subject like games or backgammon or the like, but most of it is books that really should never have been written. I got my professional training and PhD in History late in life (as a labor of love, not vocation) and I share the traditional disparagement of the "What-If." History is far more complex than that, but it's fun to speculate. When you talk about the future though you are into non-fiction novel land, and like any novel, the characters do and say and feel what the author wishes them to. It's fun so long as you don't believe a word of what you write. Even worse to act in accordance with it. If you don't believe me, talk to the guys who are terribly dissappointed they didn't get "raptured" this year. Human character and human society is far too chaotic, and human minds are far too irrational to be able to live up to any predictability with the "laws of history" (of which I believe there is not one.) You have to take into the conception the very, very very crooked timber of humanity, which destroys all such analysis. Let me give you an example. If you could grab off your library William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or similar history that dealt with the full glimpse of the Nazi Horror including the death camps, and then hopped into your time machine and went back to 1880, and showed it to anyone, they would say that this was the obviously highly detailed but totally insane ravings of a diseased mind and could NEVER, NEVER, happen. No one would ever admit, least of all the Jews themselves that such a civilized nation as the Germans could EVER spawn such a horror. Let me give you one more. In 1996 I was in the American Historical Association conference attending one of the panels because one of my instructors from the graduate program was presenting a paper. All the leading lights of Soviet Studies were there, Tucker, Swett, VonHagen, etc. etc., and the question came up on history and predictions. All of the doyens of Soviet History-- NOW can clearly see the path of downfall of the Soviet Union, but all of them admitted that at the time, just a few years ago, had you come to them in 1988 and said to them how the Soviet Union was going to collapse, they would have called you completely mad. Interestingly as a follow on to this in 2003 I believe, I was at another AHA conference and there was a panel of Russian Historians presenting on new directions in Russian Hisoriography. It was very interesting. The presentations were pretty harsh condemnations of the Soviet System and Communism in particular and several American professors asked (some of them almost pleading with emotionally charged voices, almost in tears, if the Russian Historians could not find ANY positive accomplishments to the Soviet Regieme. I remembe rone pleading "But surely, surely there must have been SOMETHING positive about the Soviet Union! The grave men from the new Russian Academies shook their head and demolished every point people tried to bring up. The point is simple. We predict at our peril and it is well to remember the words of Maceth--"All Oracles Lie!" Otto