#history

"In his pamphlet on Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx struck a middle path between voluntarism and structuralism when he wrote: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. What happens in a crisis depends on a multiplicity of factors, and not just on revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries. Revolutions are usually initiated by a minority taking advantage of an exceptional conjuncture which they have not created. If the revolutionaries triumph, they must establish an authoritarian regime to convince others of the righteousness of their aims, or they must give power (usually through the suffrage) to the masses; but if the masses are not in tune with the revolutionary minority, a process which no one had foreseen may develop."

…

The hand-wringing about disinformation in modern times paints an ahistorical view of the past. There has always been disinformation.

Take, for example, this passage from p.589 of Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance (which I finished today) giving examples of what the printing press was being used for, even in the early days.

This, from Ada Palmer's excellent Inventing the Renaissance, which she just casually mentions in passing, is pretty mind-blowing:

Excluding tiny villages with little traffic, losing a friend or sibling to plague was a universal experience from 1348 to the 1720s, when plague finally diminished in Europe, not because of any advance in medicine, but because so many generations of exposure gave natural selection time to work, those who survived to reproduce passing on the genes that enabled their heightened immune response, a defensive adaptation bought over centuries by millions of deaths. Outbreaks persisted into the nineteenth century in the Ottoman world, and thousands of cases of Y. pestis still occur each year, most in sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, where it was not endemic as it was in Europe. And if Mihai Netea—down the block in the Genetics Lab—is correct that the immune mutation which helps those of European descent resist Y. pestis also causes our greater rate of autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, celiac, and (in my case) Crohn’s disease, then the Black Death is still constantly claiming lives through the changes it worked into European DNA over 400 years.⁶ As for the Renaissance, not only endemic plague but malaria, typhoid, dysentery, deadly influenza, measles, and the classic pox were old constants of life, which not only persisted but grew fiercer decade by decade.

…

I've set myself the goal of reading Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance this week, hopefully reading the bulk of it while here in Lisbon. My family bought it for me for Father's Day and I've been saving it specially.