{"id":61139,"date":"2023-05-08T01:00:36","date_gmt":"2023-05-08T05:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=61139"},"modified":"2023-05-07T10:00:03","modified_gmt":"2023-05-07T14:00:03","slug":"qotd-the-science-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/05\/08\/qotd-the-science-of-history\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The “science” of history"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>That’s how they saw it in the 18th century, of course, and even more so in the 19th, when Science \u2014 capital S \u2014 really did seem triumphant. It’s hard to overstate just how optimistic the 19th century was. In some ways, the earliest statement of this optimism \u2014 and, significantly, its most overwrought warning \u2014 was the best: Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein<\/em>. The creation of life itself<\/em> in the lab! If Science could do that \u2014 and there’s a reason<\/em> Shelley’s rather crappy novel was a massive bestseller, y’all \u2014 then it should be child’s play for Science to predict the course of human history …<\/p>\n

A moment’s glance at the “science” of history guys like Marx actually produced, though, show the flaw in that line of thought. Here again, Shelley’s novel is instructive. Victor Frankenstein could give his creature life, but it wouldn’t obey him \u2014 being alive, it had free will and a mind of its own. So “scientific” history always, in the end, means something like “anthropomorphic History, capital-H”. “Life” obeys certain laws, the way falling objects obey the law of gravity, but just as there’s no such physical object as “gravity”, there’s no such thing as “life”, an abstract notion over and above the behavior of individual living things. I know Aquinas is dead, and we have killed him (to steal a phrase from Nietzsche), but these things only make sense in Thomist terms: Just as “gravity” is mathematical shorthand for the actualization of an object’s potential to fall towards a center of mass, so “life” is just the blanket term for actualization of a living thing’s various potentials. When we say things like “gravity caused the avalanche”, we don’t mean that a living, purposive force decided<\/em> to pull the rocks down …<\/p>\n

… and yet, when you get down to it, “scientific” history always ends up meaning “History \u2014 a living, purposive force” \u2014 decided<\/em> to do this or that. We assign a telos<\/em><\/a> to history, in other words, in a way we simply don’t to any other “force” governed by “scientific” “laws”. Sorry for all the quotation marks, but I want to make this as clear as I can. Nobody but a poet would say that Gravity, a living force, longs for all things to return to its bosom, but the authors of “scientific” history all write as if History, a living force, longs for this or that outcome. C.f. Karl Marx and his merry band of murderers getting all lathered up about The Revolution. The words on the page are all about scientific necessity, but the tone<\/em> is pure hosanna.<\/p>\n

Severian, “The Science of History”, Rotten Chestnuts<\/em>, 2010-09-22.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That’s how they saw it in the 18th century, of course, and even more so in the 19th, when Science \u2014 capital S \u2014 really did seem triumphant. It’s hard to overstate just how optimistic the 19th century was. In some ways, the earliest statement of this optimism \u2014 and, significantly, its most overwrought warning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7,41,16],"tags":[1076,1462],"class_list":["post-61139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-quotations","category-science","tag-karlmarx","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-fU7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61139"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81967,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61139\/revisions\/81967"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}