After reading a few books on an historical topic, one can
pick up some of its slants pretty quickly. Over vacation I read books on New
England Indians in the 17th C, and it was clear in one that it had a
main goal of getting the reader to understand that the Abenakis and Pennacooks
and Narragansetts were more sophisticated and technologically advanced than
popular imagination would have them.
Nothing wrong with that, it’s quite true. In another the author was trying to
rehabilitate the image of both the natives and the Puritans in their early
interactions.* That is also true. We can call such things a bias on the part of
the historian, yet they are easily adjusted for. If the next book one takes to
hand is somewhat dismissive of native culture, or a fourth book dwells heavily
on the mistreatment of Indians by settlers we don’t consider that any of these
books have fully invalidated the others.
Pendula swing over the decades, and
historians like to provide correction and perspective when they can. One can
tell the reasonable works from the unreasonable by what they do with the data
contrary to their goal. It is one thing to try and explain it away; it is quite
another to ignore it altogether.
There was an American history series by Peter Marshall
beginning in the 1970’s with The Light
and the Glory. I disliked it from the start, but was also aware that I was
a new Christian and had just acquired a liberal-arts degree from exactly the
sort of professors Marshall was telling me to be suspicious of. Perhaps I was deeply, terribly wrong in my
understanding of history, having been brainwashed by secular humanists who
found no place for God. I tried to step back and take the work for what it was.
Yet there are signs of unreason that are reliable in all fields, and leaving
out the inconvenient bits is one. Marshall stressed those moments in Columbus’s
life and in his writing when he displayed piety and a desire to serve God. Those
are real – the words at least are real, we can’t know the explorer’s sincerity
from a distance – but his truly horrible deeds were simply not mentioned, or
were glossed over with so much polish as to render the wood beneath
invisible.** The pattern persists throughout the work. It is a polemic,
dedicated to proving a particular narrative of American history. I found an interesting discussion of it by an historian here.
Howard Zinn’s A
People’s History of the United States does much the same. Zinn ignores what
he doesn’t like. When events are so
large that they cannot be simply hidden behind the curtain, he highlights only
those elements which support his narrative. He is similarly polemic. Notice
that in both cases the author believes he is only righting a wrong, restoring a
balance that has gotten so far out of hand that drastic measures are justified.
Not justified. An author must ultimately consider that the
reader might encounter no other work but his, and consider his obligation to
truth simply. The wars of bias do not
suspend the rules of honesty.
Political correctness comes in many flavors, some
of them traditional or conservative. Additionally,
I am also not persuaded that the controversies are as
one-sided as the polemicists claims. Marshall’s narrative was one believed by a
great many Americans who felt it was being taken from them by a new generation
of untrustworthy historians. Zinn did not secure a publisher because his work
was original but because a great many people already believed his
narrative. His was not a declaration of
independence but a battle in a war long under way. Thus their eliding the
inconvenient is even less justified.
Reasonable authors may slip, and native religion has been
receiving one-sided treatment at least as far back as the 1960’s. They were
animists, or totemists, to use a less-familiar but more precise word. This is
very common among peoples with no system of writing. If one stops to think about it, of course it’s going to be difficult to
develop an overall theory of nature, existence, and spiritual underpinnings
without being able to write it down and share it from village to village or
generation to generation. If at least some people in the area are literate one
can move into philosophy, theology. Prior to that, even polytheism is going to
be a stretch. In reading up on the Wild Hunt in northern European mythology I
found the huntsmen could be elves, the dead, fairies, or even vaguer
creatures. Their leader might be Woden,
Gwyn ap Nudd, or the Devil and their purposes, though always dangerous to
humans, varied from tribe to tribe. Each
valley had its own mythology, related but not identical. Gods and demons lived
in the rituals surrounding them, not texts.
This is not to be disdained – Christians would do well to
better understand that God exists as much in the rituals of worship as in what
we think about him. We become so abstract that we have no blood. But it is not
the same thing as a unified theology, of which the Native Americans had little.
Yet the historians writing about them were at great pains to project a theory
of the cosmos back onto their beliefs. It seems a little patronising, actually, that they had to imbue this rather standard preliterate culture with a nice, dry, philosophical underpinning. Interesting. It wasn't that long ago that most of my ancestors believed in tomten, or sacred groves. I don’t know what the current habit of
historians is on the matter.
*I have mentioned this before. Between 1620 and King Philip’s
War, the Europeans the Puritans left behind were quite frequently at war, and
the native tribes just outside the coastal range were at war, but eastern New
England was largely at peace, even with all the differences and
misunderstandings
**it struck me while writing that “gloss over” could come
from “disguise by polishing,” or from “deceptive words of explanation,” the
former being related to glow, the
latter to glossary. Looking it up, it
seems the two concepts come from different roots but have influenced each other
in English for centuries. So there.
2 comments:
Hadn't thought of that, but the source of all wiki-wisdom suggests that the oldest Greek temples weren't as old as alphabets, though maybe roughly contemporary with the Greek alphabet.
I see "glossing over" as mentioning the few high, shiny spots, and ignoring everything else.
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