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How History Gets Things Wrong - The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories (Paperback)
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How History Gets Things Wrong - The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories (Paperback)
Series: The MIT Press
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Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our
love for stories is hard-wired. To understand something, you need
to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How
History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after
reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't.
Narrative history is always, always wrong. It's not just incomplete
or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We
no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why
do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to
history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian
pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired.
Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for
survival into a defective theory of human nature. Stories
historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but
harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives
of dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the
other. Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of
Vienna to American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human
evolution improved primate mind reading-the ability to anticipate
the behavior of others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators-to
get us to the top of the African food chain. Now, however, this
hard-wired capacity makes us think we can understand history-what
the Kaiser was thinking in 1914, why Hitler declared war on the
United States-by uncovering the narratives of what happened and
why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will only understand history if
we don't make it into a story.
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