Determinism v. Reality, pt 6498

The Story of the Week - Andrew Sullivan

I'm not as deflated as say, Ezra Klein, is about this Science Times article but I certainly don't share Sullivan's enthusiasm for it. I'm not a big believer in ecological or biological determinism. In part I view such efforts in the same light as the positivist efforts to distill everything about the human experience into a scientific theory. Books like Guns, Germs, and Steel and this new text, A Farewell to Arms, only serve to further the claim that you can place the subject of history in the same realm as Newton's laws. Simply put, you can't. I do agree that ecology and biology do place an important role in how human history has moved but, as any decent historian knows, there is no singular cause to the events of history and no singular motive force in history. Braudel proved this rather handily nearly fifty years ago with his idea of the 'long duration'. Historians cast a series of causes, with each higher one generally more pivotal for the moment than the one below it. But historians know that a) history is not simply the sum of its parts; and b) a historical text reveals as much about the time it was written in as it does about the time it was written about. Dr. Clark seems to think that the meaning of historical facts do not change when they clearly do. More to the point, a decent scholar would know this because they would have taken a historiography class that beats this idea into your head. Historical facts are not like science facts such as the sky is blue. They always require interpretation, contextualization and the constant movement to and fro from objective to subjective and short periods of time to the millennial view.
If you can't tell yet, books like Dr. Clark's piss me off to no end. It's not so much that I think the conclusions drawn from the evidence used are wrong but that the conclusions are puffed up to appear grandiose when a real historian would sooner laugh at them than take them seriously. This kind of history went out of style with Spengler and Tonybee.