Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I happened to have been reading an essay mentioning Forrest McDonald's insistence that his students keep looking to primary sources in their work, and a young person's PhD thesis, at the same tim and so I was struck by something extraordinary in the latter. Let us call the newly minted doctor of philosophy Jones. Jones's work was essentially "Examining the Debate Concerning Great Thinker X." I was perusing his bibliography, and what struck me was that it did not contain a single reference to anything written by X! And this is a book-length work, which I believe has actually been published as a book. Apparently, Forrest McDonald would actually avoid the secondary literature on a topic he wanted to explore and immerse himself in the primary sources. I don't blame Jones for his very different approach, but his elders, and their obsession with "the literature."

One-book-itis is a malady that strikes amateurs in an academic field (e..g. history) when their reading in that field, on a particular topic, is largely restricted to one strong defense of a controversial position about that topic. The amateur simply doesn't know the field (e.g. history) well enough to realize that: 1) Of course any competent professional historian can marshall a strong case for any position he puts forward: he wouldn't put a case forward unless he could marshall strong evidence for it, and his entire professional life has been spent learning how to make the historical case for proposition X strong. In particular, what the amateur overlooks here is that their champion for this controversial position is in a dialogue with other professional historians . And whatever view he is disputing, those others themselves put forward good cases for the view he is disputing: if they hadn't, he wouldn't even bother disputing it ! 2) The professional discussion...

"The origin of things is the Apeiron  [unlimited]... It is necessary for things to perish into that from which they were born; for they pay one another penalty for their injustice according to the ordinance of Time." -- Anaximander Voegelin notes how strong is the resistance to the fact that nothing in the world of contingency lasts: "The temptation to hypostatize historically passing societies into ultimate subjects of history is strongly motivated. At its core there lies the tension, emotionally difficult to bear, between the meaning of society has in historical existence and the never quite repressible knowledge that all things that come into being will come to an end. A society, one might say, has always two histories: (I) the history internal to its existence and (II) the history in which it comes into and goes out of existence. History I is greatly cherished by the members of a society; History II encounters emotional resistance and preferably should not be me...

Anyone using this term assumes we are in the end stage of "capitalism," however they define that word. But history gives us no knowledge of the future, and thus, no knowledge of how far along we are in some process. History is precisely the discipline, as Oakeshott would put it, that views the world sub specie praeteritorum , through the lens of its "pastness." In history, the present world is seen as laden with artifacts that tell us what came before it. Those artifacts, understood as evidence of a past that has vanished, cannot possibly tell us what is to come. Thus, "late capitalism" is always an ideological construct, not an historical one.

Collingwood likened the historian to a detective in The Idea of History : both regard narratives from the past not as "the facts," but as evidence to be analyzed to get at the facts. Agatha Christie seemed to understand the resemblance as well: "You are at least right in this -- not to take what has been written down as necessarily a true narrative. What has been written may have been written deliberately to mislead." -- Murder in Retrospect , p. 183

George Will continues to be in the news for his controversial op-ed column claiming "that when [universities] make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate." He really put his foot in it when he next discussed rape, implying that there are now many flimsy rape charges being forwarded. His host of critics called this "stupid" ( this search turned up 165,000 results for me today) and have gotten him fired from at least one newspaper . George Will seems to just know this sort of thing is going on, while his critics seem to just know that it is not going on.* What amazes me is that both sides simply bring their presuppositions to the table and state them as facts. Neither side seems to of heard of research . I do not claim to be more virtuous than these people, but I am fortunate enough to have been trained in historical thinking. When an historian resorts to talking about the likelihood or implausibility of something having ha...

"Whenever goodness, truth and beauty are realized, universality and particularity are mutually implicated in each other. Universality manifests itself through the particular. This synthesis does of course shun particularity incompatible with itself, but, to become itself, universality requires its own kind of particularity. The more adequate the concrete instantiation, the more profound the awareness of universality that it yields. Universality is transcendent in the sense that none of its particular manifestations exhausts its inspiring value, but without historical particularity universality also is not a living reality, but is only an empty theoretical abstraction created by ahistorical reasoning." -- Claes Ryn, " Leo Strauss and History: The Philosopher as Conspirator "

A commenter scoffed at the idea that Neville Chamberlain might be vindicated for his decision at Munich in 1938 by "relying on" the exact same sources of information that Chamberlain used. But this is a serious misapprehension of the historical method. Historians do not "rely" upon their sources. They use their sources' words as evidence giving clues as to what happened, not as statements of what did happen. For instance, consider Biston's Inscription, where Darius the Great declared:  26. Darius the King says: An Armenian named Dadarshi, my subject -- I sent him forth to Armenia. I said to him: "Go forth, that rebellious army which does not call itself mine, that do you smite!" Thereupon Dadarshi marched off. When he arrived in Armenia, thereafter the rebels assembled (and) came out against Dadarshi to join battle. A place named Zuzahya, in Armenia -- there they joined battle. Ahuramazda bore me aid; by the favor of Ahuramazda my army smote t...

You are digging in some ruins. You find a mysterious object, and you are uncertain about what it is or how it was used. The answer is easy: it was religious ! (This is sarcasm, and, the link is to a very good blog on the historical method.) Interestingly, I was just listening to a lecture about an instance of this error of "punting" and explaining anything mysterious you dig up as religious. It seems a couple of 19th-century archaeologists from northern Europe had written a good bit about all of the ruins recently found in North Africa that were used for ritual sacrifices. This was going along swimmingly, until someone from Mediterranean Europe took a look, and said, "Oh, those things: those are olive presses. The peasants around where I live still use the same sort of structure."

Neil deGrasse Tyson apparently feels confident in discoursing on history without bothering to look any of his "facts" up . One reason I note this is because several times I have pointed out this type of thing in reference to people who are trying to attack Christianity with bogus history. However, in this case, NDT believes he is defending a Christian accomplishment, but it turns out he simply has no idea what he is talking about. Almost every single "fact" he offers is untrue! It is as though NDT was doing a documentary on physics based on misremembered material from a high school class, theories discredited decades ago, and snippets culled without discrimination from the popular press, and didn't think there was any point running any of the material by any actual physicist before presenting it. As Renaissance Mathematicus notes, NDT could have significantly improved the factuality of his account simply by consulting Wikipedia for a few minutes! One wou...

Here : "There is a clichéd view of history encouraged by bad teaching that presents the subject as the memorising of long lists of dates that somebody has designated as being significant, 55 BC, 1066, 1492, 1687, 1859, 1914 etc., etc. Now whilst in reality history is much more concerned with what happened and why it happened than with when it happened dates are the scaffolding on which historians hang up their historical facts for inspection." I tell my students this every time I teach historical material: importance of these dates is not that you know exactly which year Luther broke with the Catholic Church or Constantinople fell, but that one understands the sequence in which such events took place. Otherwise, history becomes similar to trying to watch Memento .

"If we are to get further, we need at this present no essays of the causes of the Civil War, but studies of the political behaviour of all sorts of men in all sorts of institutions, unaffected by the historian's foreknowledge of the later event. In that way we may ultimately perhaps arrive at an explanation of the mid-seventeenth century breakdown, but it will be less well-tailored, less readily reduced to a list of preconditions, precipitants and triggers, less satisfactory to theorists of revolution. On the other hand, it might be real." -- Elton, quoted in J.C.D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and society in England in the seventh and eighteenth centuries , p. 35

"But I submit that if nature is a thing that depends for its existence on something else, this dependence is a thing that must be taken into account when we try to understand what nature is; and that if natural science is a form of thought that depends for its existence upon some other form of thought, we cannot adequately reflect upon what natural science tells us without taking into account the form of thought upon which it depends. "What is this other form of thought? I answer, 'History'. Natural science (I assume for the moment that the positivistic account of it is at least correct so far as it goes) consists of facts and theories. A scientific fact is an event in the world of nature. A scientific theory is an hypothesis about that event, which further events verify or disprove. An event in the world of nature becomes important for the natural scientist only on condition that it is observed. 'The fact that the event has happened' is a phrase in the vo...

If I say we do not need theory to interpret history , how can it be that I also contend that Lincoln's diaries are not a simple statement of the"facts," but require interpretation? Interpretation based on what , if not a theory? Well, first of all, let us note that the term "theory" is overloaded. In one sense, we can use theory for something such as, "Well, I have a theory that Lincoln actually wanted to be martyred, which is why he went to the theater." Certainly historians must have "theories" like this, although I would prefer "hypothesis" here: they need to think about history, after all! What I mean by saying historians do not need "theory" (and what I believe Mises meant when he claimed they did ) is that they do not need what Aristotle would call theoria : abstract, general systems of timeless laws. For instance, Arnold Toynbee, in his A Study of History , develops a theory of how a civilization in decline wil...

Sometimes we encounter the contention that statistical studies in the social sciences are "rigorous," as opposed to the kind of "soft" knowledge we get from "merely" narrative history. This is mistaken in several ways, but probably the most fundamental is that any validity and significance of any statistical study in the social sciences are themselves based upon historical understanding. For instance, if we are studying industrial output in the Soviet Union, we have to know that data on such things was systematically doctored: and knowing that is a matter of historical understanding. Similarly, if we want to correct for this false reporting and try to get at the true figures, we must examine plant records, diaries, post-Soviet interviews, and so on: again, an historical inquiry. "Ah," you ask, "but what about where there wasn't such data distortion?" Well, we can only determine that there wasn't through... historical unders...

The late Sudha Shenoy once said to me, "They are approaching this theoretically, but the real world is historical, not theoretical." I've thought about that remark a lot since then, and I think I have an idea what Sudha was saying. All of special sciences abstract as part of their essential nature: they are constituted by the style of abstraction in which they engage. If physics stopped looking at the world only in terms of forces and motions, and began, say, taking emotions and plans into account, it would cease being physics. But history is only abstract accidentally: the historian and her readers are human beings, and no one has time to read or write everything that happened. Nevertheless, as details are added and abstractness reduced, the work becomes more , not less, historical. So history comes closer to the real world than any theoretical science can. An interesting corollary here is that, far from history being a sad stepchild of the "real," expe...