Post date: Aug 17, 2020 4:54:48 AM
i've always liked history, but i never seriously considered a career in it.
it wasn't because of my parents.
to be honest, when taught history in pre-graduate education [1] and now recollecting it in grown-up eyes, i realise now that it was always taught in a rather simplistic fashion.
this is to say: mostly one-fvcking-dimensional, with a nod to the occasional two additional dimensions of longitude and latitude.
in other words, the naive critique of history as just "names and dates" has a basis .. in my own experience, at least. i remember quizzes innumerable consisting questions of the form ..
"[who] did [what] and [when]?"
.. which a solid A.I., let alone search engines, can answer for you, incredibly well, at blinding speed. [2] if my younger self would have been asked ..
"[who] did [what] and [where] and [when]?"
.. now THAT is far more interesting!
when you are responsible for geography, then you are entering the world of dynamics [3] and things get so much more interesting ..
.. i remember a colleague once commenting to me:
"if you think a problem is interesting,
then it's probably too hard for your undergraduate students;
..
just think about how you would give a class (or three) just to explain it properly!" [4]
.. so, in translation:
it gets so. much. harder.
what actually caused what?
was this uprising truly incidental, or what it part of a larger movement?
why did the french properly murder their elite, anyway ..
.. whereas in a few british colonies, some rich men decided not to pay a sudden increase in taxes and instead, forge a new, paranoid manner of living, so that it would be harder for anyone to tell them what to do?
they would be living under the same poor people, right?
collect their own taxes so they can stay rich?
until, after a rebellion [3π/2] or two, they realised that they couldn't do it either .. and to stay rich and alive, then ..
...
imagine if we decided to study history like how scientists now study the weather:
they look for sudden changes, if only because "sudden" usually means that [put-big-enough-number-here] many people will die or lose their homes and their descendants will become poor and they become a collective ward of the state ..
.. in whatever state remaining that is sufficiently robust to bear responsibility for such a large group of persons, legally-defined or otherwise.
the best example of this of which i am aware is the journey, by train, by v.i.lenin from zurich to petrograd. i am also aware that a non-uncommon parlance of this phenomenon was: "ze germans were sending a virus into pre-revolutionary Russia" ...
huh: virus.
wait .. virus?
like viruses and the inherent difficulties of contact tracing?
historians have so many words, but here they cede to biological terms?
a butterfly flaps its wings in zurich,
and the-storm-of-all-storms erupts in petrograd?
if there were enough field data, we would never have heard of ed lorenz [5], honestly .. if only because that discovery would not have been noteworthy ..
.. humanity having already recognised it, absorbed it, deemed it common sense and only worthy of children.
...
i await for the day for when there is an experimental, inter-disciplinary program that focuses on psychohistory, or what i'd rather be named quantitative history.
it already exists in fiction;
then again, travels to the moon and other planets within our solar system were once put into fiction until they became history and fact.
like the sketches of da vinci, of rotor-based motions of machines that can fly, that could not be created in that era ..
.. maybe the work of asimov is a similar way? maybe the warning of the mule is best to warn off again political elements like .. autocracy.
i await the day when, having said these same things, children tell me: yes, we know that from school already and then they think that i'm just senile.
to think that apparent senility could be, ultimately, a blessing;
we .. or i, because i should only speak for myself .. can only hope.
...
[1] as an antonym to post-graduate studies, of which i know nothing about .. in that field, anyway.
[2] to be fair, there is freeware out there that can solve most naive problems in basic calculus for you, in the same way. so this criticism is not indicative of history, but of how we assess students by way of administering a formatted medium called a test or examination.
[3] for the non-mathematician, just read this guy: seriously. this mathematician is the best expositor of mathematics of whom i am aware. i also once heard him speak live in an auditorium when i was young and to this day, it was the best talk i ever heard that was suitable for the non-mathematician. if had to teach a "maths for the 'i'm not good at maths' folks" course, the syllabus would consist of at least several of his NYT columns.
[4] in other words, they said something that even shut me! up!
[3π/2] or to paraphrase: people shouldn't be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people.
[5] that said, some of you may have never heard of this researcher. i hope you clicked on the link and ran a google search, honestly. on a related note: modern chaos theory is amazing; it confuses me to no end.