Understanding Before Thinking

Reconnecting to History, Part 2

As my first post in this series attracted some welcome attention from homeschoolers (hello! I’m very pleased to have you here!) I decided to start putting this series out more regularly than I had planned. Whether you’re a late-life autodidact, or a student still in school (formal or at home), or a parent trying to support your child’s learning, this article is for you.

An Electrifying Discovery

I’d managed to get my hands on a particular classic truck that I thought I’d never be able to afford. Only problem was that it had been moldering on a scrap heap for ten years.

“Moldering” is putting it nicely. It had no floor. Large sections of the bed had rusted through. There was a hole in the frame. It was a wreck. It was also a steal—the engine and transmission were in perfect condition (everything else, on the other hand, was suspect). Since I needed practice with mechanicry, electrical, and metalworking, I plunked down my cash and bought it for a song.

The restoration went pretty well right up until I finished replacing the steering box. Up to this point I’d re-done the cab floor (using metal salvaged from a treasure trove of old washing machines), fixed the frame, built a flat-bed and sold the original bed, painted the whole thing, installed a snow plow, changed all the fluids, replaced the radiator, re-packed all the bearings, replaced the hubs, and by-passed the leaky transmission cooler in favor of something much more efficient. The steering box was the last problem.

When I took it off, I found the frame underneath it had cracked and was on the verge of failure. So, thinking nothing of it, I busted out the welder, fixed the frame, then replaced the steering box, accidentally set the truck on fire (and quickly extinguished it), and started up the truck…

…to find that the alternator was completely dead.

I am told by reliable sources that a herd of cattle two counties over was spooked into stampeding by my howl of frustration.

So I replaced the alternator, and got nothing.

Over the next two weeks, I took the whole damn truck apart again and put it all back together.

Still nothing.

One moment I had a good truck. The next moment I had a ten thousand dollar paperweight. Mechanic friends couldn’t figure it out. I despaired, and decided to sell it. I wrote up the listing and took a walk.

Had I just bought a lemon? Was everything so far gone that I needed to take out and inspect ever single one of the 2600 wires in the vehicle? How the hell wasn’t the alternator talking to the battery when the cable between them was right there and I’d replaced it?

In my considered opinion, I’d just wasted months of my life and a spectacular amount of money, and now I’d need to buy another truck for the ranch I was prepping to start.

As I walked, a thunderstorm brewed. I turned around to head home so I wouldn’t get soaked, and as I did a bolt of lightning spider-webbed across the northern sky…

…and I realized my error.

Fixing a machine is a problem-solving game. You look at the parts, figure out what failed, and replace or repair it. I hadn’t even considered that my distant past as a computer repairman might be relevant. But that big static discharge in the sky reminded me of frying expensive CPUs while I was in my apprenticeship at the computer store, and something occurred to me:

This truck might have a computer in it.

Well, the truck might have had a computer in it. It probably didn’t anymore.

Normally when you weld on a vehicle you disconnect the battery, because that much amperage going through the frame can fry your battery. When I was welding up the frame behind the steering box, I was in a hurry. I didn’t bother to disconnect the battery, and the battery was still fine.

But this vehicle was fuel injected. It had to have a computer. And that computer was patched into a live circuit while I poured a hundred-twenty-amps of liquid lightning into it.

I’d been running on pure momentum, the end of the project in sight. When I saw a new problem I just carried on in the same frame of mind. But if I’d bothered to understand the issue before forming opinions about it, I’d have saved myself several hundred dollars and two weeks of my life.

History is Like My Truck

History is way more complex than my dinky little truck, but like I learned the hard way (and it wasn’t the first time I’d learned it, dammit) there are two equal and opposite errors into which one might fall when dealing with anything complicated or complex:

1) Forming strong opinions before you understand the subject

2) Trusting the opinions of others before you understand the subject

This is doubly true when the subject is, like history, dominated by narratives and filled with nuance.

But Dan! I hear you cry, How are we supposed to learn anything that way? Won’t everyone in this kind of field have an opinion, an agenda, or something like it?

Yes, they will (and I am no exception). Which is why it’s valuable not to confine your studies to those voices you find comfortable.

What is History Really About

What are we studying when we study history?

There are a few different answers to this question, and they delineate the major schools of history:

• The Great Man view says that we are studying the highly agentic individuals who disrupt the normal flow of events and wrest the course of the future to their will. Hitler, Napoleon, Washington, Einstein, Jesus, Caesar, and so on.

• The Ideas-Driven view treats history as an extended philosophical argument. People have ideas, and those ideas push individuals, economies, and nations towards particular courses of action. A subspecies of this view is “cultural determinism,” which includes religions and customs and law in the arena of “ideas” under consideration.

• Techno-determinism views history as the story of technological progress, one invention leading to another, shaping human events as it goes. A related approach is “Geographic Determinism” which uses the physical environment (sometimes including the technological environment)

• Hegelianism views history as a sort of unfolding, ideal narrative that is composed of interacting forces that come into conflict, and that conflict gives birth to the future. On this view the world is basically a fait acompli, largely deterministic, and something the individual (even a great individual) can’t influence. The point of Hegelian historical study is to chronicle what happened and understand what made it inevitable—or, alternately, to plot the future conflicts so that one may join the fights early and thus be on “the right side of history.”

• The Geopolitical approach views history as an ongoing contest between civilizations and people-groups for world domination. Military history is usually a subset of this approach, though it can also comfortably slot in with the Great Man view.

• The Chaotic approach sees some truth in all of the above, and, in a disinterested fashion (i.e. without a thumb on the scale), tries to understand how all these elements play a part.

And there are a few other approaches as well, but it would take too long to list them all.

My approach is Chaotic. I have come to view human events as analogous to the unfolding life of an ecosystem—there are a lot of moving parts, all pulling in different directions. I could go on at some length, but you can see my approach on display in the first series on this blog (all posts from The Ground Beneath Our Feet to Neo-Trads at the End of the World).

What are those moving parts in that complex ecology? They all come down to three things:

1. People (everyone is tries to make their way in the world, and their actions have effects).

2. Their products (cultures, ideas, inventions, governments, etc.)

3. Their environment (everything that defines the playing field, from geography to predators to climate to other humans and their products)

Out of these three basic elements the astonishing, weird, and wondrous variety of humanity springs. For there to be history we have to figure out how to live, breed, and raise our children well enough to repeat the cycle—assuming we want our species (and communities, cultures, religions, and nations) to continue.

If history is that basic, then, why are there so many approaches?

Well, they grow out of the three basic reasons to study history:

1. To justify your worldview (and thus reduce your anxiety in the face of attacks from others)

2. To understand the world you live in (which also helps you understand who you are)

3. To learn the good tricks of the people who have gone before (and thus extend your power to act effectively in the world).

History, in other words, is the study of how to survive, thrive, and locate yourself in the world.

If we are to do that well, we must do two things that are almost entirely alien to we who feel as if we must have an opinion on everything:

We must hold our conclusions lightly.

We must understand before we think.

On Thinking and Understanding

Archaeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it’s truth you’re after, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is right down the hall.

—Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

The study of history is, in a sense, a search for grander kind of truth than the one we mean when we tell a child “Tell the truth about what happened.” When we admonish a child in that fashion, we’re demanding accurate reporting of the facts.

But it doesn’t take long for children to learn to use facts to weave illusions that advance their own interests. Adults are adept at this art, and we even have a name for this art of deception when practiced at the highest levels: Propaganda. Which, as Edward Bernays (who wrote the foundational text on the subject) pointed out, works best when the propagandist tells no discernible falsehoods. Instead, the propagandist uses the “truth” (that is, facts) to tell emotionally compelling lies.

Therefore, for our purposes, there is a difference between fact and truth. A fact is a thing which is, whether you know it or not. Truth is the story that the facts tell when they’re put together honestly (not that we can ever know all the facts). It is in the putting together of facts that history takes on its narrative quality.

To pursue truth, one must start with two basic assumptions:

1. Life is not a dream. If life is a dream, then this is all pointless anyway. But if it’s not, then it’s a good idea to try to get some idea of what’s going on.

2. No matter how smart and scrupulous you are, you will never know the whole truth. The science fiction film The Man From Earth offers an excellent exploration of the limitations of perspective and the difficulties of knowing what to believe. You’re a small person in a wide world—even if you were to live forever, your perspective will limit what you can know, and what you can understand, as illustrated here:

If life is not a dream, and your perspective is truly limited, then it is wise to form opinions reluctantly, and to hold them lightly.

This sounds rational, but it’s counter-intuitive, because that’s not what judgments are for. Judgments are help us decide what to do, so it’s natural that they proceed based on instinct and prejudice—just as I did when trying to fix my truck. We avoid things which threaten our lives or our view of things (fear) or might infect us (disgust), and this presents a problem studying history:

People in the past valued things, understood things, and did things differently. When looking at the past, it’s tempting to condemn as evil that which offends our modern sensibilities, and to extol as ideal that which comports with our desires, values, and unfulfilled needs.

But if we are to extract maximum value from our studies of history, we must first learn it on its own terms as near as we are able.

The Problems of History

A generation which ignores history has no past—and no future.
—Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

The ideas we each hold most dear don’t originate with us. They come from the past. They were formulated by other people, to solve other problems. Some of them were useful beyond their original context—of those, some of them are no longer adequate, some of them are still useful. If we do not know where those ideas come from, and what purpose they served, how can we tell how we should value them?

Such ideas are contingent. The printing press, for example, was not invented to print cheap books, it was made to print indulgences (i.e. get-out-of-hell-for-a-fee cards) so Johannes Gutenberg could pay off his business debts. His financial desperation accidentally shattered a centuries-old civilization, gave us five centuries of the bloodiest warfare and fastest technological progress the Earth has ever seen, and created the world we live in.

Gutenberg made his invention out of bits and pieces of technology that had been sitting around for well over a thousand years before him. If Gutenberg didn’t need quick cash, he wouldn’t have invented movable type, and humanity might have waited another thousand years for a literate, industrial world.

On the other hand, consider that the Romans invented the steam engine and the railroad, and the civilizations before them had invented the gears, cam, piston and all the other pieces required to make modern industrial civilization, but the economy and culture of the Roman Empire didn’t leave an opening for anyone to put it all together and make money off them.¹

Contingency is perhaps best illustrated in this classic poem:

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost
For want of a horse, the rider was lost
For want of a rider, the charge was lost
For want of a charge, the battle was lost
For want of a battle, the war was lost
For want of a war, the kingdom was lost
All for the want of a nail.

Contingency can get freaky. But worse for the history student is that many things in history aren’t contingent, they’re overdetermined.

Imagine you’re hanging from a rope attached to a tree’s dead branch over a deep desert canyon on a hot day, and the rope isn’t long enough for you to swing to safety. Your sweaty hands ruin your grip, so you can’t climb the rope. The dryness of the dead limb means it can barely hold your weight. The heat is giving you sun stroke. You’re thirsty, and there are scorpions and buzzards.

Any of those elements are enough to kill you on its own. You might be able to escape one of them, but with so many stacked against you, you’re more-or-less doomed.

The question in such a situation isn’t “Will I die?” but “What will kill me?”

Many historical events—like the Fall of Rome, the two World Wars, the Atomic Bomb, the Civil Rights movement, the rise of fascism and communism, the Black Death, the fall of Athens, the rise and fall of the Chinese empires, the Great Depression, and the Age of Discovery—are like this. We can tell a story about what caused these things. The story could even be accurate. But to believe that story puts us in danger of understanding things in a way that blinds us to the truth:

Sometimes history unfolds in such a way that, were we to successfully steer clear of the dangerous path in our preferred story, we could still wind up at the same desperation. Like the rivers in a watershed, every branch and turn leads to the same sea.

And finally, perhaps the greatest danger in holding opinions without understanding, is that it is very easy to confuse causes and consequences. This confusion dominates the culture wars today.

Take transgenderism, for example. Those on the cultural right tell the story of how gender confusion, sexual deviancy, and rampant hedonism all cause the fall of civilization. These things erode the fabric of society, and when that fabric is sufficiently eroded, the civilization falls into its terminal phase. A variant of this causal story posits that the loss of religion causes sexual wildness, which then destroys civilization. Examples like Rome make this story sound plausible.

But what if the dissolution of religion, sexual customs, and restraint all stem from a similar cause? Or what if the outrageous behavior conservatives object to isn’t unusual at all, and instead other customs that provide a healthy and proper context for such things have failed in such a way that people are reaching for extremes in order to make sense of a world that has already gone mad? Or what if these extremes are like a social fever that arise in response to an illness? Fevers are something the body creates to drive out infections, but the strength of the immune response can, itself, kill the patient. Or what if, worst of all, the exact causal chain of civilizatioal chaos is different each time, and by the time these symptoms show up it’s already too late?

Each of those interpretations is plausible given the surviving historical evidence. We can not know for sure. All we can see—and probably all we’ll ever be able to see—is that when trust breaks down, party culture ramps up.

Because we are moralistic creatures, we take sides for or against the party culture, because it is the symptom we can see. But if the truth is anything other than a straight line from religious discipline to hedonism to collapse, then this moralistic response (either for or against the deviance) virtually guarantees our doom, because it sucks up all the oxygen in the civilizational room.

These thorny problems of history mean that, the more you learn about any particular issue—so long as that learning is not motivated by the need to reassure you of your own prejudices—the more your opinions, and even your values (or at least the relative priorities you assign to them) are likely to change.

The Duty of Opinions

Here are some questions you’ll have heard asked to the point where they almost seem like background noise:

What do you think about the war? The latest political scandal? Abortion? Drugs? Marriage Laws? Gun laws? Zoning laws? The age of consent? The National Debt?

All of these are issues that, because you have (or will soon be old enough to have) the right to vote, you might feel expected to hold an opinion on. But these are complex issues, and all of them have deep historical context that most people don’t know a thing about. The past has lessons for all of these issues, and many of these lessons are buried under many, many layers of propaganda, prejudice, and partisanship.

And, what’s worse, almost none of them are just political issues; all of them are also membership cards. When it comes to belonging to your in-group, you’re expected to make the right noises about at least some of these things, or you might get marked as untrustworthy.

This phenomenon, too, is historically rooted. It comes from a specific cultural moment, and it’s unusual in world history. But it is part of the context you live in. Should you subcontract out your opinion-making responsibilities to a political party, a social tribe, or an activist group?

Final Thoughts

So having laid out my understanding, I shall reveal to you my opinion:

Life is too short and too precious, and the world is to vast, to waste too much of it defending opinions. It is better to share understandings, and seek to find the errors in your understandings.

I submit this opinion for what it’s worth. If you find it valuable, I hope you do not treat it as an imprisoning dogma. If, on the other hand, you decide it’s bullshit, I hope that, like bullshit, it fertilizes your thinking (and your disagreements) to productive ends.

Next time we’ll look at how our technologies effect the way we understand the central object of historical study:

Human nature.

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1. So much for the Techno-determinist perspective.