deadpantroglodytes
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User ID: 568
deadpantroglodytes
2yr ago
Not to come down too hard on what might be an off-hand comment, but exactly what salient or urgent "danger" does fake history present?
I can see how historical narratives (fake or not) could motivate conflict. For example, stories of dispossession can establish a deeply felt grievance that can be pointed to various destructive ends. But:
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Not all dangerous narratives are in fact fake.
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Those stories can just as easily be pointed at various constructive goals.
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Most history isn't emotionally inflammatory.
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Our understanding of history is constantly undergoing revision. Do discarded historical narratives count as fake? Are they prima facia "dangerous"?
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The stories are open for (and usually attract) rebuttals.
When I was a kid, everyone read von Daniken's Chariot of the Gods, spent a few weeks mind-blown, then moved on to adulthoood.
Isn't the real danger here, the great, recurring theme of the internet era, the crisis of authority?
A well-deserved crisis, I'd say, but also genuinely dangerous to a great many people.
deadpantroglodytes
2yr ago
This is not, I'm afraid, relevant to Fruck's (accurate) judgement.
Here's a list heavily biased towards the last fifty years:
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In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall. Discovery coupled with novelistic drama among our closest relatives. Over the years, Jane Goodall's power over me has attenuated as she's embraced expansive, unfocused activism, but her early research on Chimpanzees is astonishing. I can't think of anyone that can match her powers of observation. Mid way through the book, it develops a novelistic density that made me laugh and cry. I think the follow-up is even better, "Through a Window: Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe", but it hardly makes sense to read it on its own. Don't let anyone tell you that Bonobos are the sexually adventurous primates.
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Chimpanzee Politics by Franz de Waal. What can I say? I chose my username for good reason. This is a retrospective analysis of the author's years studying a chimpanzee colony in a Dutch zoo. I read it fifteen or twenty years ago, browsing Amazon's recommendations for good science writing, before reading Jane Goodall, and it changed my life. The backbone of the story is a contest for political supremacy among the chimps, but that hardly describes what it offers. It covers many other aspects of their lives: the way they play, how they deceive each other, juvenile sexual development, how they comfort each other, and much much more.
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I *really *love cities. Jacobs carefully builds an argument for what enables their greatness, based on common-sense observations.
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The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. Funny, sad, and deeply intertwined with the fabric of America.
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Wolf Hall, by Hillary Mantel. This is a staggering work of imagination that constructs a plausible version of history that more or less inverts the very popular conception of the good Thomas (More) and bad Thomas (Cromwell). One reviewer wrote something along the lines of "I know every twist and turn of this story from high school history and I still can't wait to find out what happens next."
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The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry. This is an account of why humans torture, go to war (instead of, e.g., settle disputes via chess), and create things. I can't think of many better examples of how to build an argument. In retrospect, it shares a lot with the best of Scott's writings and the best of the Motte.
Add to those, authors I love, whose work I cannot narrow down to a single recommendation: Nietzsche, David Mitchell, P.G. Woodhouse (especially the Wooster and Jeeves stories).
The quoted comment says the Mongols' genes were successful in the appears to say that their genes prevailed, not that their genes caused their success.
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