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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1157932" data-attributes="member: 6533">You know I got no problem with taking a history with a grain of salt, but I do have a problem with the idea that we can utterly discount the value of history as a result of that grain.Most succintly, there is a scene from the Simpsons on history that I love.  Apu is going for his citizenship interview with the square jawed federal offical character:INS Agent: and the final question, what caused the civil war?Apu:  there were many contributing factors. Both foriegn and domestic...INS Agent:  Slavery, just say slavery.I love this scene because both actors are, as is the case with the best humor, right.  What gets my goat is when you run into someone who has found the other factors and thus discounted slavery.  That's history just as bad as the type that drove them to find other factors in the first place.I work in a book store part of the time and as a result I am privy to a lot of bad conversations in an intellectual vein.   Far worse than those I encounter as a grad student since there tends to be less argument within the conversation.  The other day I heard two people who's intelligence I very much respect talking the craziest smack about history.  And the upshot of the smack was that they knew more about history than most people because they recognized that history is largely a lie and that the real history lies behind the 'official history.'  Now I don't have a lot of tolerance for this.  First of all, it's an incredible act of snobbery.  If someone cares enough about history to learn the 'official' version in the first place then they deserve some respect in a national culture that can't even find the lower 48 on a map.  Second, my world is made up of historians and rhetoricians and if there is one myth I think really needs debunking it's that official history could represent anything other than the smallest part of discourse and that that history could somehow be monolithic.  The nature of human discourse is such that such an event is impossible over anything but the most limited circumstances.  The daughter of time is truth and all that.Though I am certain that much of the time ignorance is truth.  If one of my freshman can't explain the reasoning behind a paper topic, I am certain that the motivations behind something as infinitely more complex as the Nazi invasion of Kursk can be equally unknowable and incoate.To give a nod to the original statement, however, the myth of monolithic officiality is alive and well in the opposition as well.  We know that the scientific revolution happened, and we know that paradigm shifts can be seen in that occurence.  But to claim that these things happened as a result of some intrinisic quality of the west rather than a felicitous agglomeration of wildly various circumstances both etherial and mundane is an exercise in ludicrousness.  One of the reasons we know we know so little about how history works is because we know so much.</blockquote>

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