Clivedurdle

There are various histories - I have Norman Davis -"A" History of Europe, there was an allied view of history, a whig view, a feminist view, a communist view. Islam has an everyone was muslim view. I am working in the field of disability - there is a disability view.

I think there are ways through this - evolution with clades, evidence, but are there not significant problems with a christian view of history that postulates a human founder called Jesus of Nazereth?

Clivedurdle

An example

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...all-tales.html

and see the introduction to

The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (or via: amazon.co.uk)

premjan

Even science is myth making isn't it - just that the room for opinion is narrower?

gurugeorge

Yeah it's all myth making, in the sense that it's projection into the unknown. Only scientific myths have a better chance of being true, because they confront the tribunal of low level facts (which are connected to the theories by strict logical implication) more than other myths.

I guess I'm making a Popperian point, also connected to the view of Varela, etc. It's not that scientific myths are necessarily true, it's just that so far, they've passed all the tests ("satisficed"). This is exactly parallel to evolution: all we know about any given species is that so far, it has stood the test of time.

Another way of putting this: the type of body and brain structure generated by a given gene pool has survived up till now, but that doesn't mean it necessarily fits nature in every way. Just the bits of it that have come to nature's tribunal fit, that's all we know. For all we know that body structure might generate all sorts of internal "freewheeling" thoughts that wouldn't fit any real aspect of nature, but they get carried along for the ride, because the bits of the structure (as they come out in behaviour) that have touched nature (in ancestors) just happen to have gotten a pass from nature.

Similarly with science, all we know is that a given theory has passed the tests we've created by drawing out the logical concrete implications of the theory. This means it could be true; it's at least a candidate for truth, so far.

So wrt to history, all we know is that these various views of history have passed the publishers' tests in making books that are interesting enough for historians/academics/the general public to read.

Or an even simpler way of putting it, the actual indisputable historical facts are few and far between, rather "dry" (not often significant in themselves), and open to multiple interpretations which are coherent in themselves, but which clash with other interpretations. It's very rare that a fact can decide for one theory against another - it can happen, but its' rare.

Gamera

History is written by people who have agendas and who craft a narrative based on that agenda. They include what supports their agenda, they exclude what harms their agenda, they make stuff up.

Post modern historians have utterly deconstructed the idea that history is an unbiased accurate record of events. History is politics played out in texts. History is texts, it isn't events, and texts have authors and a purpose.

So yes, all of history is a "myth" in the sense that it is a constructed narrative written for a purpose.

Roger Pearse

As written by them this is probably accurate. In what sense this is different from "history is mostly bunk" I'm not sure.

I suspect that most of us would prefer history, tho, to such well-paid obscurantism.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Gamera

It's only bunk if you find meaningful significant texts bunk. I don't and neither do postmodern historians. But unlike you postmodernism focuses on what we actually have: texts and our relationship to them, rather than a naive concept that texts give us unbiases unedited access to past events.

In short, postmodernism recognizes the problematic that history is merely texts. If you want to ignore the problematic, do so, but it's a form of knownothingism. But of course as a postmodernist I would ask what do you mean by history is you are measuring texts against it, when history itself is just texts.

angela2

At least in the case of modern history, we have oral history and recorded history.

Amaleq13

Yes, I think most people would prefer to believe that they can obtain reliable information from ancient texts.

Gamera

Texts are a subset of discourse. So is oral history. The point is all we get is discourse, mostly in the form of writing. We don't experience the events.

Even a recording is a form of discourse, at least in the sense that it is agendaized. A film for instance is always a film about the facts inside the field of vision, whereas the facts outside the frame may totally change the meaning of those facts. The paradigm case is the film of a man professing his belief in God. It means one thing until you pan back and show hooded men pointing guns at him. Then it means another. If you pan back farther and find your on a Hollywood movie set, then it means another. And so on and so forth. You never have a panoptic field of vision so the frame is always edited and agendaized. The director shows what he wants to show for his agenda, and no more.