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The limits of their knowledge are the limits of their world

Back in the 1990s I read David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series of future history science fiction.* Set in the year 2200, Wingrove depicts a world in which China is not only ascendant but in some ways the world is China.

For me, an implausible “twist” is that the political and cultural elite of this period falsified history. In this future history, the past 2,000 years has been erased from memory. China under the Han dynasty expanded westward under leaders such as Ban Chao and conquered the Roman Empire. Organized and institutional religion (Christianity and Buddhism), the rise of the West, and eventually the decline of China, never happened. Within the series itself, the rulers know the real history. Additionally, through a process of investigation and deeper analysis, bright individuals can also piece together the past. But the vast majority of humanity is totally unaware that only a few centuries ago the world was radically different.

At the time this was the most unbelievable aspect of Wingrove’s future history. How could the history of the world be so radically rewritten? Today my views are different. I have come to understand that most people do not engage in active critical-rationalism. Rather, they look to authorities from whom they can receive enlightenment, or be initiated into esoteric truths. For them, history is not a set of facts and processes about the past, but a narrative and framework which is a handmaid to an ideological project.

The examples are legion. The American Founders were white supremacists. The American Founders were devout Christians. The American Founders were radical progressives. The truth of the matter of these claims is less important than the symbolic value of the idea of who the American Founders were. The truth is secondary to the utility of the message.

This has always been, and will always be. What I am less sure of is whether today people are more ignorant of the past, or, if more people feel confident in expressing opinions about the past despite little solid knowledge about the past. Either way, this is concerning, because the truth is a critical antidote to totalitarian temptations. A smugly ignorant populace is manipulable populace.

* The original publisher gave up on the series after book seven, and Wingrove wrote a hasty and bizarre eight novel to complete the series. More recently has been rewriting the series to give in a more definitive conclusion.

9 thoughts on “The limits of their knowledge are the limits of their world

  1. My sixth grader told me yesterday that Cleopatra (of Antony and Cleopatra) was black. She learned it from their teacher for black history month. She would not believe me when I said she was Macedonian and I doubt her teacher would have reason to think otherwise.

  2. Memory may have failed me on this- I think the false history aspect was in the original editions, but Wingrove doubled down on his narrative in the reissues of more recent years, making the Chinese seizure of power in late modernity a much more deliberate, planned act by specific leaders.

    I would have thought his original world sinister enough, if seductive in some ways.

  3. Mmm. People “want to believe”.

    In 2020 in an example adjacent to Chung Kuo, you can easily encounter people who want to believe that the California School are deeply right on late Great Divergence (almost at the lip of the mid-19th century, perhaps), and even then on colonial acres being the only real advantage of “the West”, and combine this with the sort of Marxist-Leninist idea of late Victorian imperialism as deeply destructive to “the Rest” and profitable to “the West”. So even where there is a “Great Divergence”, it was late, from imperialism and not any other deep differences in society.

    From there, it’s not a totally infeasible hop-skip and a jump to believing in an even more alternative world and history where there wasn’t even a “Great Divergence” at all, and from there…. Maybe Chung Kuo is pushing it a bit, but perhaps more than we might have thought if we were assuming a world where everyone simply wanted to know the truth, right or wrong.

  4. “most people do not engage in active critical-rationalism. Rather, they look to authorities from whom they can receive enlightenment, or be initiated into esoteric truths. For them, history is not a set of facts and processes about the past, but a narrative and framework which is a handmaid to an ideological project.
    The truth is secondary to the utility of the message.”

    This clearly elucidates what I have been feeling for the last two years. I’d like to quote this if the occasion arises.

  5. Probably the most unrealistic part about that type of history falsification is that the leadership would know and acknowledge the truth. Odds are pretty good they’d come to believe their own propaganda after a few generations, even if they’re hypocritical in how they behave.

  6. Razib,
    I noticed this with the controversy at Notre Dame over a mural/tapestry that depicted the arrival of Columbus on Hispaniola and his meeting with the indigenous peoples; it prominently featured Catholic/Christian imagery, i.e. of the Spanish presenting the Holy Cross to the natives, who were awestruck by it. The left-wing activist groups decried the piece of artwork as needing to be removed not just because it is colonialist (true imo, but a matter of opinion, and a strange point to make at a Catholic school like Notre Dame that would consider the spread of Christianity to be good), but also “historically inaccurate”, “whitewashing of genocide”, etc. This was peculiar to me: it seems as if younger generations are coming to legitimately believe that every single interaction between the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the European arrivals was one-sided brutal predation by the latter on the former. From all the first-hand, second-hand, and third-hand accounts we have from people at or near the time (i.e. primary sources), Columbus’s landing was peaceful and one of mutual curiosity, albeit with some underlying tension. No, the natives probably did not immediately bow down in awe of the power of the Cross, but that part specifically is a matter of artistic license. Nor does this initial peaceful meeting mean that Columbus’ personal brutality didn’t occur later. But the activists’ complaint seems to be that any portrayal of indigenous-European interactions that isn’t “admirable native standing up to deranged imperialist” is “historically inaccurate as a factual matter”, i.e. the “facts”‘ truth is determined in a larger context.

    The mural has since been covered over.

  7. Obs et al. can vituperate all they like about Cultural Marxism as the carrier of Western decline, but one might posit/troll, au contraire, that the bedrock delusionary agent that hastened the orphaning of idealized Enlightenment empericism was instead the not-well- cloaked* deployment of the falsely ratiocinating anti-Christian god of the Chicago School and its attendant promulgating clerics, who reduced all human behavioral phenomena to Scientistic automata and thus, via a neat sophistic trick, did Marx one better in the race to extract and subtract the Loving Soul from “serious” public consideration/conversation. (I say this as an unreligious agnostic empricist– so far as I can carry that ideal, heh).

    That’s right, the Wall Street Journal as the rather more poisoned drip into the morning coffee of the, ahem, meritocracy.

    * An unbidden Chomskyesque phrasing, hey?

  8. What would rewriting history be to people who can say a guy in a dress isn’t “a guy in a dress”, and in more than a few places, succeed at getting that to stick?

    Are, at the most general level, “the rules of discourse” being if it’s true, or at least not certainly false, it can be said, and if it’s false it cannot be said, ‘natural’? Do they do it that way at Yale? Are those rules something that westerners inherited from their ancestors so they are deluded into thinking that they’re natural?

    Maybe that isn’t the default setting on the human dial. So I guess the premise of that book doesn’t seem to off to me.

  9. A smugly ignorant populace is manipulable populace.

    I haven’t noticed anything different or new among us hoi polloi. From your vantage point in the hierarchy are you seeing something new and harmful, something different from the past, that should alarm us? Is this your way of blinking out SOS?

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