6 - On Historians and Bookkeepers

I just read a book written in 1946 by Arthur C. Clarke, “Master of Space.” It is an account of the first flight to the moon, written by a fictitious “historian” (of course the flight to the Moon had not happened yet, it will happen in 1968).

Most SCI-FI writers are in a sense historians. They try to write the history of the future, but they are especially good at writing the history of the present, or sociology.

In this book Clarke has his protagonist historian say: “Look at Gibbon, look at Toynbee. Unless an historian draws conclusions (right or wrong) he's merely a file clerk..” How true.

Gibbon in his history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, asserted that one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman empire was Christianity. That influenced all my professors in Italy and I did not even know that Gibbon existed. Italian high school students were subjected to a sort of schizophrenia: religious studies on one side portrayed the Church as an instrument for good, and Latin studies on the other, portrayed the Church as the force that put an end to civilization.

Italy was a very divided country, so our history textbooks contained only endless lists of battles and dates. The books offered no interpretation whatsoever, so the the implicit exhortation was to leave history, and thinking, to the professionals, and avoid making waves.

History is taught in a much better way in American colleges now, at least in the Humanities Department. I learned that there was more misogyny in Greek and Roman culture than in the Bible, and that Rome was already decaying from the inside and hardly needed help by Christianity to collapse. What if contemporary Christian fundamentalists had studied the history of Christianity, and had found the tolerant and altruistic part in their tradition?

About Glenn Beck. – people need to make sense of their world, and crave history. But in the past they were taught only “objective,” boring facts in school. In Italy the facts were about wars and dates, while in the U.S. they focused on famous people, but the result was the same. No perspective. So if a Glenn Beck comes along with an interpretation, simple and captivating, it fills a void. Suddenly people who never learned history – and I don't blame them – feel on sure footing. They are convinced they learned the historical “truth,” and in their view people who don't agree with them must be wicked – because they deny "history."

We desperately need popular historians, like in the 70s and 80s we had popular scientists, such as Carl Sagan, who explained real science in a fun way. We need brilliant historians entertainers like Sarah Vowell, to educate us.