History and Story-telling

History and Story-telling
[This post is a slightly-edited verson of something posted elsewhere. The novel which helped ignite this train of thought was I, Claudius, written by Robert Graves.]

One of the books I've been reading and commenting about is a work of fiction which tries to present itself as history.

This book raises several questions in my mind.

Robert Graves wrote his book in a way that made it hard to distinguish from translations of actual 1st-Century Roman writings. The bare factual outline of the story is hard to dispute: the succession of the first four Caesers (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius); the death/banishment of many members of the Imperial family; the military victories of the armies of Augustus; the position of lowly Sejanus during Tiberius' years on the isle of Capri; the uneasy stasis between Tiberius' armies and the Germanic tribes; the madness of Caligula. All of these things are attested to in at least one ancient source.

Yet the tale that Graves weaves around these events isn't strictly history. Part conjecture, part prejudicial reading of the available data, this story places blame heavily on certain characters, and absolves or exonerates others. The tales of political intrigue within the complicated familial connections of the Julio-Claudian dynasty are told with a particular slant in mind.

I don't know if I agree or disagree with Graves--the details are too distant, and the crimes seem too unimportant. History has moved on; the vast Empire that was claimed by the power-struggles has crumbled.

But the methods Graves used to arrive at his conclusions and weave his story are methods that are regularly used by historians.

Historians often work with more information than they can present to their audience. Some of the data are from doubtful sources; some of them are widely-known but poorly sourced; some of them are indisputably true. The historian selects these items and arranges his historical rendition around them.

It is simple to say that good historians select only obviously true information and discard the rest. It is too simple: the set of obviously true facts doesn't contain all of the historical data. The historian may have three good sources about Caligula's military campaigns at the northern edge of the Empire. But if they all disagree about the sequence of events and the trail of the campaign, which one is dependable?

Also, facts by themselves don't assemble into history by themselves. The information needs a story to bind them together. Is it a story about the madness of an Emporer who thought he was divine? Is it a story about an army that was sent out without a clear objective or strategy? Is it a story about generals playing politics while politicians played generals?

So the historian often fits the information into a framework--a story--that helps him figure out what the information means. (Of course, scrupulous historians pay a great deal of attention to the information itself, and to its pedigree of trustworthiness. But even that process has subtle interactions with the pre-existing story.) This inner meaning puts some of the information at the forefront, and reduces other information to irrelevance.

Historians also must deal with a different problem. Sometimes, an event will be known to have happened, but the direct cause of the event can't be determined. Many members of the Imperial family died of poisoning: the perpetrator in most of these cases is unknown, as is the motivation.

How does a historian tell that story? Does he invent a plausible story to fill in the blanks in his knowledge? Does he pick the most plausible explanation advanced by contemporaries? Or does he say that he does not know why this event happened? If he uses speculation, does he warn his readers which part of his history is speculation and which is known fact?

I suspect that these processes are also used by other people (non-historians) on an everyday basis. When a person hears information about the world that is outside of their direct experience, they compare the new information to a story about that subject that already exists in their minds. If the information doesn't fit the story well, some accomodation must be made. Either the information is suspect or the story is suspect. The story, if suspect, may need extension, revision, or a complete rebuilding.

Revision of this pre-existing story is much less drastic than rebuilding from scratch. Extension is less drastic than either, although extension and revision are not always distinct.

This process looks simple at first, but can quickly take on confusing complexity. The story isn't constant. Every time information is added or rejected, the story's structure has to change a little bit to explain why.

Other examples from ancient history can be found. Did the end of the Roman Empire occur when it was split into Eastern and Western halves? What about when Rome was sacked? What about the fall of Byzantium? Each one represented a diminution of the power and prestige of Rome. Each event is important in the decline and fall of the Empire.

What about the difference between Medieval Culture and Renaissance Culture in European history? Medieval culture is often defined by its focus on religious thought. The Renaissance culture is described as based on humanistic thought and making heavy use of the rediscovered literature of Rome and Greece.

The greatest poet of Medieval Europe was Dante; his Divine Comedy is peppered with mentions of people and stories from Classical times. Plato and Aristotle (as well as legendary characters like Aeneas and villains like Brutus), appear in Dante's Inferno. The greatest religious scholar of Medieval times was Thomas Aquinas; yet Aquinas read and commented heavily on Aristotle. Classical literature was not unknown during that time. The growth of humanistic thought is probably measurable, but the beginning of the Renaissance is still hard to pinpoint. The historian who tries to draw such a line must depend on a story--usually the growth of challenges to Church authority, the growth of natural philosophy and the sciences, or the growth of voyages of exploration--to help him define where the dividing line should be put.

Examples of overarching stories that define how history is told abound in the political history of the past few centuries. Ask a Marxist disciple about that history, and he will tell you it is a story about class warfare and the exploitation of the laborers. Ask a trans-nationalist progressive about history, and he will tell you about the rise of international institutions which overshadow the dominant nation-states of the world. Ask an American of the Jacksonian tradition, and he will tell a story of America trying to deal honorably with the world--and of America needing to send her soldiers to deal with various enemies around the globe.

This is not to say that none of these stories are truthful, or that all have equal validity. Some of these stories are more trustworthy when used for predictions. Some of these stores produce a need for large conspiracies that beg for the application of Occam's Razor.

When Cuba became a Socialist Worker's Paradise, what happened to its agriculture and economy? Before the Revolution, Cuba was home to a significant number of tractors and other mechanized farming tools. At that time, the street-markets were awash with lemons and oranges, among other products of agriculture. Today, most of the farm work is done by hand and oranges are reputedly rare. Starvation is an ever-present worry. As a more important question, why weren't people getting in rafts to go from oppressive capitalist America to Worker's Paradise in Cuba?

(I have my explanation, which is that "Worker's Paradise" does not describe what was and is going on in Cuba. Likewise for "oppressive capitalism" and America.)

Which returns me to revision of the Big Story, the meta-narrative that I use to analyze history. I don't want to change my version of the story at the drop of a hat. But I also don't want to keep a bad or unusable version of the story. I suspect that I'll continue doing what I've been doing for some time: analyzing incoming data for information that looks discordant with the meta-narrative that I am analyzing it with. I will then test the data to see if it is trustworthy, as well as testing my meta-narrative to see how trustworthy it is. I try to make the overall story, the meta-narrative, more robust as I go on. Generally, this method is successful.

Most of the time, this process goes on without too much conscious thought. Sometimes, it requires a great deal of thought. Occasionally, it produces vociferous disagreement with people who use a different story to define and analyze the information that they come across.

Sometimes, the disagreement is about whether scientific study precludes religious belief; sometimes the disagreement is about the guilt or innocence of soldiers charged with war crimes; sometimes the disagreement is about the necessity of higher mathematics in college curricula; sometimes the disagreement is about the choice of a candidate to vote for; sometimes the discussion is about the definition of "sensible gun laws".

But now, every time I enter into such a discussion, I come fore-armed with the knowledge that the disagreement is probably not about data--it is about the interpretation of which data is important, and why the data is important.

The hard part is convincing the other participants in the discussion that they may need to re-evaluate the story they use to analyze and interpret the data at hand.