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Carpal Tunnel
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shanks, I'm sure you guessed that I didn't really pick Barbara Tuchman at random; she used to say (she died about 10 years ago) that she thought of herself not as a historian but as a person who wrote about history. She is more well known for "The Guns of August" and "Stillwell and the American Experience in China", for both of which she won the Pulitzer prize (for what that's worth). She first developed her passion for 'historical events' reporting on the Spanish Civil War; her bias there was loyalist. Here's a little blurb: http://www.netsrq.com/~dbois/tuchman.htmlAs for "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century"; I think you read a bit *too much into the title. 'Mirror' certainly reflects [sorry] her approach: what can we discern from the past that is parallel to our own time, perhaps redounding to our benefit? 'Distant' as in before the time of Gutenburg, and therefore somewhat murky. 'Calamitous' as in heresies, pogroms, Black Plague, internecine wars, the Crusades, etc. (As for 'The', I'd guess that an ariticle was wanted and "A Calamitous 14th Century" doesn't quite work -- where it would in "A Calamitous Century".) So what do I make of all of this? I think we all bring some personal bias to whatever we write. But that doesn't necessarily make what we write biased. Read: I think that there *is such a thing as objectivity.
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Ah, I was kind of agreeing, Mr Heisenberg.
Too slow on the uptake. That's my problem...
Hi Shanks, Oh no, you instinctively avoided to be trapped in the sling of self-reference!
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you instinctively avoided to be trapped in the sling of self-referenceYou betcha it was instinctive - my conscious mind certainly hadn't a clue about any of this...
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Pooh-Bah
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shanks - I believe you are a covert historian! Your analysis accords strongly with my own. Like you, I have not (nor will I, most likely - not my period ) read Tuchman, but my immediate response to tsuwm was - "Calamitous - yes; all four horsemen were riding hard through that century, but it would not (could not?) have been calamitous for everybody. Undertakers and shroud makers would have done well, at the very least. In England, many peasants made enough out of their scarce labour (after the Black Death) to buy land and become yeoman farmers, some of whom went on to become great landowners and members of the nobility in later ages." Calamity - at the time, perhaps, but look at the impact on the future. We all have our view on such things - thank goodness - and it very properly comes out into the open in one's interpretation of History, so that it can be scrutinised and commented on by others - including those who are not "experts, but have a valid viewpoint. (OK - who decides which is "a valid viewpoint" or not? we can become infinitely subjective along this route!) As to any period of history "mirroring" any other - !!!!!???!
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Yeehaw! Some support!
Indeed, the problem may partly stem from the fact that the word 'bias' has both denotative and connotative senses. In the denotative sense, of course, as I have suggested (and you), there can be no work of 'history' that doesn't contain bias. But this doesn't mean the writer is biased in the pejorative sense of bigoted.
Language eh? Trickier than you think. Trickier than you can think...
cheer
the sunshine warrior
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Carpal Tunnel
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Language eh? Trickier than you think. Trickier than you can think...Yes, I agree with both of you (this is worrying for this forum, is it not!?!?) tsuwm suggests death as a starting point Have you heard of Lord Lucan in the States? (although he is “definitely dead” according to a coroner, he’s probably been reported as “definitely observed crossing Central Park”, I bet ) And what about say, jazz – some would say that is as “definitely” over and done as other unique happenings in a particular time, whilst others would claim a continuity of jazz-becoming-something-else. What I am moving towards is the general *belief that what distinguishes us at our very core is our tendency to make patterns. This is true of language, true of visual sense, and surely true of the other ways we think, such as forming theories. We tend to adopt short-cuts (perception theory is littered with examples of how the brain ‘fools itself’) and discard material that doesn’t sit happily with our frame of reference – because ultimately it is not the veracity but the aesthetics of the pattern that counts to a key part of our imagination! As a matter of fact I believe this is what John Keats means by “beauty is truth…”
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veteran
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there can be no work of 'history' that doesn't contain bias. But this doesn't mean the writer is biased in the pejorative sense of bigoted.shanks (and Rhub), couldn't agree more. On the other hand, I don't think the above viewpoint is incompatible with tsuwm's that there is such a thing as "objectivity". But I might also be inclined to say that "good taste" is an objective thing. Something about common consensus here, I think. Errr... Burble burble.
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Carpal Tunnel
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what distinguishes us at our very core is our tendency to make patterns. This is true of language, true of visual sense, and surely true of the other ways we think, such as forming theories. We tend to adopt short-cuts (perception theory is littered with examples of how the brain ‘fools itself’) and discard material that doesn’t sit happily with our frame of reference – because ultimately it is not the veracity but the aesthetics of the pattern that counts to a key part of our imagination!
As a matter of fact I believe this is what John Keats means by “beauty is truth…”
Yes, mav, we certainly do have a very strong tendency to make things fit into a recognizable pattern. You could well be right about Keats, too--no argument here. (I can't help being reminded of "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder".)
Attempting to make things fit a pattern, I think, accounts for a LOT of subjectivity. If I am in an environment that is completely alien to me, I will make efforts to comprehend it in ways that are familiar to me. So, my reporting of an event there may be incomprehensible to a native.
Making things fit patterns does not automatically mean that the result will be..."un-real", for lack of a better term. I agree with tsuwm that there can be objectivity.
I also think that some of the world's greatest inventions came from people who had the ability to not see things as part of a pattern. I think a quote sent to me by a friend fits well here: "I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature in repose, distinct."-- Denise Levertov
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mav: ..our tendency to make patterns- Jackie: ..a very strong tendency to make things fit into a recognizable patternHere I find another case of a discussion illustrating itself (self-referentially): Jackie seems to assume that her sentence is simply a re-phrasing of mav's sentence. As I see it, there is a whole ocean between the two. make things fit into a recognizable pattern presupposes the existence of things as well as patterns, whereas making patterns presupposes only chaos (randomness). Chaos, of course, tends to be resented as frightening. This is why, I assume, the first sentence was fitted into the "recognisable pattern" of the second sentence. I neither suppose nor have the ambition that this should be the last word on the subject .
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Ws!
Excellent analysis. Are you sure you're not a post-modern philosopher?
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