Horizontal History

In his awesome book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt talks about the “Myth of Pure Evil” through which we view the world and events:

“Evil doers are pure in their evil motives.”

In another terrific book, The Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant start off by asking:

“Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent equivalence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our patriotic or religious partisanship.”

Combine those two views and it makes you wonder whether you should trust history at all. Not just the Hindutva or Taliban versions, but even the secular versions?!

Tim Urban nails the impossibility of narrating an accurate version of history:

“History is a giant collective tangle of thousands of interwoven stories involving millions of characters, countless chapters, and many, many narrators. And you know humans—that’s not how they like things. The human brain really, really likes to simplify things.”

And so we over-simplify our history, says Urban:

“When things are unsatisfyingly multi-faceted, we pick the facet we like best. When there are knowledge gaps, we make things up. When there are questions of motive, we pick one that fits nicely into the narrative.”

So what do we need to do then, to understand history more accurately?

“To really have the complete truth, you’d need background—the cultural nuances and national psyches of the time, the way each of the key players was raised during childhood and the subtle social dynamics between those players, the impact of what was going on in other parts of the world, and an equally-thorough understanding of the many past centuries that all of these things grew out of.”

One way to achieve the above would be to read (and teach) history “horizontally”, says Uran, i.e., narrate the stories of different characters who lived around the same time, even if their stories don’t always intertwine. Why? Because:

“Trace a horizontal line across to get a feel for what was going on during that particular time.”

And then I remembered that a book I loved, Freedom at Midnight, was an example of history being narrated “horizontally”. The authors had drawn a “horizontal line” across Mountbatten, Nehru, Gandhi and Jinnah and boy, did it help understand the decisions so much better than the typical fairy tale, “myth of pure evil” versions of history that we are otherwise so used to.

I guess Urban does have a good point with his idea of “horizontal history”.