I don’t know an awful lot and can unlikely relate any one subject at severe depth should I not invest an hundred hours or more. I gradually accumulate bits for my archives containing as many ‘todo’s as subject matter; topics such as Orientalism, secular and religious development, histories of France, Britain, Slavic people, Vikings, Romans, Byzantine and Ottoman empires, etc, plus such movements as Zoroastrianism, Protestantism or Enlightenment.
Don’t ask me what I’ve learned. I’ve little aptitude for historical presentation. Like a naïve stamp collector, I acquire arbitrary data that I probably can’t illustrate but in the most superficial pigments.
But when I stumble across the dates, the major events, the tolls, the beneficiaries, the expulsions, the exterminations, the land reforms and the annexations, I get a different picture than imparted over the polemic channels, the bulletins, through persons influenced by the such or holding emotional stakes.
Just about every sort of thing has happened. But over even greater periods, nothing at all was happening across any still existing population. Nothing devastating. Nothing serendipitous. Nothing game changing.
Be they the national or religious majority or minority, be they more or less tolerant or tolerated, they mostly existed in some social equilibrium. They wouldn’t still be around otherwise.
Their history manifests calamities, sometimes of unthinkable proportion, though far and in-between, and for a tiny fraction of history.
But they otherwise live out mundanity, conducting commerce, playing the cards dealt, dealing the cards played, sometimes prospering, until the next perturbation, usually many decades away.
But otherwise, nothing, in major contrast to the projections of news and passionate beings distorting the magnitude and frequency of events to disproportionate levels.
Again, as far as I’m concerned, populations of any significant numbers could not have survived under any other dynamic, conditioned on their today being non extinct.
We live for a tiny fraction of history, next to nil. The Byzantine empire spawned a millennia in various stages of influence. The Ottoman empire, likewise, no small number of centuries. Even the Khazars, whose existence would probably confound today’s layman, exerted power over three centuries, per the official dates anyhow.
The modern era trifles in comparison. But when that calamity impacts a significant period of your life, however infinitesimally short on the grand scale, it’s tempting to draw all sorts of fallacious inferences across the greater span, substantiated by politics and personal prejudice.
Thus I prefer to conduct my research solo, away from news and human beings, should I not engage them with point-blank analytics leaving no room for opinion.
Naturally, I know far less of what goes on today or even the last thirty years. But I’m evidently not equipped to know that anyhow, with all the anti-information perpetuating.
And besides, the little that has trickled into my ear inevitably finds invalidation once I travel to the regions incumbent and interact with individuals more intimately concerned; or the spiky projection undergoes smoothing (or a progression more inline with reality), or the polarized projection yields to a broader range.
I think it’s this learning paradigm I’ve emphasized all along.
Another point. Even among historians or pseudo-historians, there’s endless room for interpretation. But you know what? The discrepancy also yields information.
Whenever one communicates, in these or other words, that it has been mostly okay for that or other group under such or other constraints, while another accentuates misfortune (in much deceptively creditworthy verbiage), I’m inclined towards the former. That is, the really catastrophic periods of history won’t produce such discrepancy. For instance, there’s general accord over the impact of the 1940s Holocaust.
But otherwise, I’ve noted tendency to amplify for the worse, to project adversity: for the discrete now, naturally, as well as over the greater span.
There you have it, my take on such matters. It will be interesting to research this contemporary period of ours some two hundred years onward.
Questions, comments? Connect.