- Books by Gottschall and Rosenberg, and how history is just a bunch of stories;
- A couple notes from the fringe;
- Beck’s “We Live Again”.
I’ve mentioned more than once the truism that “history is written by the winners.” I just finished reading Jonathan Gottschall’s The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down from 2021 (which got a killer review by Timothy Snyder in the NYTBR, that I discussed here). One thing that occurred to me as I read the book is: the losers also tell history, from their own perspective. Both the winners’ narrative and the losers’ narrative are stories, told to justify and flatter themselves. (I’ve occasionally wondered what the history books in England say about the American Revolution, for example, but I don’t know any easy way of finding that out. Order a history textbook from Amazon UK? What do Russian history books say about the United States? Is there a book somewhere that has compiled these issues?) Yet again, I suspect this is something obvious to everyone that I have only just realized for myself… or realized it in the sense that I’m trying to integrate it into my theory of science fiction.
Again, Gottschall reminded me of the 2018 book by Alex Rosenberg, How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories, which I’ve put off reading (though it’s right up my alley) since I had some issues with Rosenberg’s earlier book, yet whose point apparently is that all historical narratives are just stories, and therefore wrong, in a fundamental sense.
I’ll write up my reactions to the Gottschall book later this week. Meanwhile, here’s a new item that fit this into narrative about narratives.
The Atlantic, Annie Lawrey, 20 May 2024: The Worst Best Economy Ever, subtitled “Why Biden is getting no credit for the boom”
Note this first paragraph: “the strongest economy the United States has ever experienced.” And yet many people don’t believe it. Is this a prime example of the power of stories over reality?
