History being the study of human beings and how they do, you need a baseline grasp of how humans are. It doesn’t matter how smart you are — if you don’t have a good baseline grasp of human nature, History, the discipline, will always elude you.
[This is true of any Humanity, of course. Shelley and Keats have to be in the conversation for “greatest English poet,” right up there with Shakespeare. One or both of them might’ve been more naturally talented than the Bard. But Shakespeare was clearly a man of long, deep experience, whereas the Romantics … weren’t. For every “Ozymandias” or “To a Nightingale”, there’s at least one reminder that these guys died at 29 and 25, respectively. To call “The Masque of Anarchy” sophomoric is an insult to sophomores. “Like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number.” Ugh. Good God, y’all].
Which is why that “social construction” stuff is so popular. Yeah yeah, it has some real (though really limited) explanatory power, but mostly it’s an excuse for kids who believe themselves clever to avoid contrary evidence. Calling, say, “masculinity” “just a social construction” frees you of the burden of entering the headspace of men who do things as men, because they’re men. To stick with a theme: Shakespeare could’ve written something like “the Masque of Anarchy” — probably as a wicked bit of characterization in Hamlet: The Wittenberg Years — but Shelley never could’ve written MacBeth’s “sound and fury” soliloquy. Shakespeare had obviously seen violent death; Shelley obviously hadn’t.
Knowledge of human nature is almost nonexistent in the Biz.
Severian, “How to Teach History”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-23.
May 12, 2023
QotD: Great (but young) Romantic poets
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