What Even Is History? [Trenchant Edges]

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes, 8 seconds. Contains 2229 words

Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, the newsletter that exists now. Again. Yay.

Let’s get back to some basics: It’s Trenchant as in cutting & forceful. And edges as in the unreliable parts of the map. We’re not interested in gossip here. We’re looking for the deep stuff, in the mud and muck.

There’s plenty of discussion of appearances out there. And we will too. Since you need to know what something looks like before you can look closely enough to see what it is.

But our goal is not to stop there. We want to get good and inside and see what makes it all work.

I’ve been pretty vague so far and that’s because our, uh, territory is pretty broad.

Let’s start with some basic assumptions:

Another way to put this is history is written by the victors, as Napoleon and genocide enthusiast Winston Churchhill both said.

It’s not just that winners are in a better place to write history, they’re also quite capable of destroying conflicting evidence. Let’s not be abstract here.

In the 19th century, Euroamericans constructed an elaborate theory of pre-native settlement by great white people who built huge burial mounds. This theory was used as part of manifest destiny rhetoric: We’re not conquering, we’re taking back what was already our own.

But also this was a lie and it was conclusively proven to be so before the end of the century so what did White America do? They destroyed *thousands* of irreplaceable archeological sites.

Some hired bullshit is like Virgil’s Aeneid, a piece of raw propaganda bought by the Emperor to glorify the empire. And sometime it’s mercenaries or the like destroying contrary evidence.

It’d be easier if this was purely a European habit, but there’s plenty of evidence of similar behavior by a variety of people around the world. Just to pick an example because it’s on my mind: The Contention of the Hundred Schools of Thought during China’s Warring States period, an intellectual rennisance that was brutally crushed by the rise of the Qin dynasty.

There are varying degrees of similar things happening around the building of both the Hebrew and Christian canons and even the Quran. I’m not going to unpack any of that history here, as it’s complicated and contentious and there’s a TON of misinformation around in it. If y’all want me to go into that, ask for it.

But I think I’m getting ahead of myself here.

What The Fuck Even Is History?

A surface-level answer is “You know, all that stuff that already happened.”

But that’s misleading.

My view may be a bit contentious because at first glance it’s dismissive. But I don’t think of it that way so bear with me.

History is the accumulated body of knowledge about humanity’s written record. Oral history isn’t history until it’s written down.

That doesn’t mean that oral histories are necessarily less accurate or true than written ones, but that the methods of history really only work on texts. Living cultural memory isn’t history, though it’s often more reliable than history because it’s less prone to letting the powerful reframe all the past.

A good example is the contention between White scholars and Native Americans over how long they’ve lived on North America. The predominant white theory is a landbridge about 20,000 years ago between Russia and Alaska. Where Native Americans by large say they’ve been here since time immemorial. My understanding is we’re slowly finding more evidence that the landbridge is, at best, incomplete if not outright wrong.

Mind you, whatever qualifications I have to speak about history from my meandering study of it do not extend before the historical record. I’m woefully unprepared to make meaningful judgments about life before there’s a lot of written evidence.

So while my focus is on the written record, I don’t privilege that over oral accounts of the past. In fact, those are the best sources. For example, I strongly recommend anyone interested in the history of slavery in the US spend some time with accounts from surviving freed slaves collected in the 1930s.

It’s a trove of insight from people telling their own stories and those told to them.

One of the reasons “Hired Bullshit” takes up so much space in the historic record is writing is expensive. It takes time to learn, money to buy supplies, and considerable effort to preserve. All that takes resources that have to come from somewhere.

As I implied, those records also need to survive anyone’s desire to destroy them. Probably the canonical example of this action in modern times are the Nazi’s famous book burnings, most notably the Institute of Sexual Science.

But history has lost uncountable swaths of information about unknown numbers of subjects whose book burnings happened before print media could record it or whose instigators were more successful than the Nazis.

The visible part of this mass are lost documents mentioned in surviving documents. Aristotle, the first modern philosopher (sorry not sorry Plato), has surviving works mostly consisting of what we believe to be his lecture notes and technical documents for educating his pupils rather than his finished works for public consumption.

Another example in the western tradition are various Gnostic documents we mostly know of from their debunkers such as Irenaeus of Lyons.

To take an example from outside that tradition, one of the things I really like about Islam is how precise their textual studies of both the Quran and the Hadith are. They very clearly recognized the messy textual history of Christianity and sought to avoid it.

Disclaimer: The following story is based on reading & speculation I did years ago and I don’t have time to look into it. So, you know, grain of salt.

When I was looking into how the canonical Quran developed, I found something very interesting. Before Muhammad’s death, he was easily available to fact-check and interpret the scripture he’d transcribed. So until after he died they didn’t make a rigorous attempt to control what verses from the Quran were circulating around because they could go to the source for verification.

So there was a 20 period between his death and the compilation of the Quran we know where there were some heretical verses going around. Caliph and companion of the prophet Uthman ibn Affan in 650 CE.

Note: This is the Sunni view, Shia Muslims claim Muhammad compiled the Quran formally in his lifetime. Both use the same text. I figure the Sunni view is most likely correct because it’s less persuasive for their position and denial makes more sense.

When reading about it, the sense that how much nonstandard Quran was lost seemed to be minimized. IE: There may have been more significant verses just as valid as what survived that history has covered up.

This is MUCH less messy than the Christian version, which took 200-300 years to coalesce around the canon approved at the First Council of Nicaea. Unlike popular claims from people like Dan Brown’s the Da Vinci code, it does look like the Bishops at Nicaea were more or less in agreement over what books were really canonical already.

While the dead sea scrolls and other compilations of gnostic texts provide a lot of insight into lost traditions of divergent Christianity in the mid-Roman Empire, none of them appears to be anywhere near as old as the four Gospels or even Paul’s letters.

The point of all this is that History is like Jazz: The notes that didn’t survive until the present are as important as the ones we have. Identifying blind spots in the historic record is a critical part of any historiography.

(Historiography is the study o the methods of historians)

Another complexity that I’ve glossed over so far is language barriers, which come in a wide variety of forms. From simply not knowing anything about the language a written record is in to mistaken cultural references to regular comprehension errors. There’s a ton that makes translations unreliable.

The paradox of expertise is especially nasty here: If you don’t have enough knowledge to evaluate claims of merit for yourself, you have to rely on people who do.

This feeds back into our discussion of UFOs especially hard with Zecharia Sitchin's mistranslations of the Annunaki legends in his many books about ancient aliens.

When he started publishing, there weren’t many other people who could criticize his translations and they were mostly busy so actual scholarly attention on his pop UFO mythology took years to even notice him let alone catch up.

We can go into more detail if people ask, but his errors in describing Sumerian mythology are so basic and widespread that I’ve never taken time to look at him closely.

More Assumptions

My way of reading history is pretty idiosyncratic, although I do certainly draw on academic historians.

Much of my problem comes from the fact that the parts of history I’m most interested in aren’t usually preserved: The way Power is wielded.

Not what the powerful said about how they became or used power, but how they actually did it.

Politics, the field of competition in shared human decision-making, is a messy business and our standards of politeness suggest we avoid learning how the sausage is made. But unless you learn how it works you can’t affect the process. This suits the powerful just fine.

Often powerful people will hint at the underlying process. Here’s a quote from Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book on the Romanov family:

"Years later, Potemkin's aid, VS Popov, elaborated on this by telling the young emperor Alexander 1 of a conversation he had once with the empress:

'The subject was the unlimited power with which the great Catherine ruled her empire.... I spoke of the surprise I felt at the blind obedience with which her will was fulfilled everywhere, of the eagerness and zeal with which all tried to please her.'

"It [divine autocracy] is not as easy as you think," she replied. "In the first place, my orders would not be carried out unless they were the kind of orders which could be carried out. You know with what prudence and circumspection I act in the promulgation of my laws. I examine the circumstances, I take advice, I consult the enlightened part of the people, and in this way I find out what sort of effect my laws will have. And when I am already convinced in advance of good approval, then I issue my orders, and have the pleasure of observing what you call blind obedience. That is the foundation of unlimited power. But, believe me, they will not obey blindly when orders are not adapted to the opinion of the people."

In short, “Y’all think this is easy but if I do it badly the whole house of cards collapses”. A statement lent much credence by the way the House of Romanov fell.

One of the few writers who seems to share my preoccupation with the organ-grinding level of wielding power is Robert Caro, whose biographies of Robert Moses (fuck you Bob) and Lyndon Baynes Johnson are pretty near required reading in my worldview.

Both books show how Moses and LBJ used a mix of legal savvy, relationships with powerful people, and shrewd ruthlessness to lever the world in the direction they want. Both men were staggeringly corrupt. Moses spent almost 40 years as one of the most powerful and influential people in the country despite failing to be elected to every office he’d ever run for and LBJ got the goddamn senate to behave itself while he was in charge there and levered some of the most significant reforms in US history through congress.

And he got there by sucking up to segregationists and rigging at least one election.

Oh, and all the war crimes. And if he’d beaten Kennedy in 1960, we’d all be dead because LBJ wanted war during the Cuban missile crisis.

I could go on endlessly there.

The point here is mostly that the wielding of power is a dynamic tension, a struggle between dozens of parties with varying levels of influence who are constantly trying to manipulate each other into going in a certain way.

It’s about leverage and organization and asymmetrical distributions of information.

This view roughly corresponds to political realism, the doctrine of the worst people in the world. And unfortunately, the ones who are among the most influential.

I say roughly because strict political realism also includes some weird assumptions about states being the only meaningful political actors despite that obviously not being true.

But all this touches on geopolitics and political philosophy instead of history.

This I guess is part of my point: History exists in the opposite of a vacuum. It’s bound by physics, biology, psychology, sociology, economics, and so on.

Without broad familiarity with many subjects, it’s easy to lose the thread and make bad assessments about a piece of historic information. Cultural context always matters.

All of this is to say that history is really fucking hard. It’s always condensing a very complicated system to dubious narratives even when you’re trying to push against that tendency.

Conclusion

I wanted to take some time to unpack my views on this subject because they inform a ton of my views on weirdness and our other subjects.

And since going forward, we’re going to be talking a lot more politics than we have previously.

Anyway, we’ll be seeing you again pretty soon.