Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love
for stories is hard-wired.
To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong,
says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling
especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the
best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It's
not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as
Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center
of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our
attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long
Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is
hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool
useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature.
Stories historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but
harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives of
dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the other.
Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of Vienna to
American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human evolution
improved primate mind reading―the ability to anticipate the behavior of
others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators―to get us to the top of
the African food chain. Now, however, this hard-wired capacity makes us
think we can understand history―what the Kaiser was thinking in 1914,
why Hitler declared war on the United States―by uncovering the
narratives of what happened and why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will
only understand history if we don't make it into a story.
