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...