Lawyers (and others) with professional expertise in a given field often complain when a film, television program or book makes use of their discipline for purposes of popular entertainment and then gets it wrong.
I’ve lost count of the number of times (as DEM can testify) that I’ve wanted to throw things at the telly during some police procedural or crime drama. I’ve said things like ‘you can’t say that, it’s hearsay and not admissible under one of the exceptions’ or ‘a police officer who does that has just ensured all his evidence will be excluded’ and so on and so forth. I’m sure doctors watching hospital shows do the same thing, as do police officers, vets, ministers of religion and whatnot (I suspect there are professions featured in various telly shows I’ve missed in that list…).
In all of them, though, I don’t know of any lawyer, doctor, copper, priest or vet who has worked himself into such a lather that he’s sought to have the offending book/film/tv series taken off air or banned. I’m also unaware of other forms of opposition, such as poison pen letters to the author and nasty notes to the editor. I’m sure they exist, but they are rare enough not to flutter the academic dovecotes.
I came to think about this after — and entirely by accident — learning of the to-do around historian Niall Ferguson’s use of ‘counterfactuals‘ in the teaching of history. Now I like Niall Ferguson and think him one of the best and most engaging historians I’ve ever read, so perhaps I’m biased, but learning that distinguished historians resent him enormously for it surprised me. In the dismissive phrase of E.H. Carr, “counterfactual history is a mere ‘parlour game,’ a red herring.” E.P. Thompson is less charitable, calling counterfactual histories Geschichtswissenschlopff, ‘unhistorical shit.’ Now Carr and Thompson were both Marxists, and thus inclined to be a mite deterministic. Ferguson has also been explicit about the fact that he uses counterfactual scenarios to illustrate his objections to deterministic theories of history such as Marxism, and to put forward a case for the importance of contingency in history, theorizing that a few key changes could result in a significantly different modern world.
Now political disagreement I can understand, but because Marxism has been wrong in almost every particular, and especially in its ‘historical materialism‘ thesis, calling another scholar’s method ‘unhistorical shit’ is a mite dangerous, I should think. It brings to mind the dangers commonly attributed to residing in a glass house and flinging rocks at passers-by.
One of the more compelling ones — this from wiki, but the idea is originally Ferguson’s — concerns the July 20 Bomb Plot:
[T]o the counterfactual “What would have happened had Hitler died in the July, 1944, assassination attempt?”, all sorts of possibilities become readily apparent, starting with the reasonable assumption that the German generals would have in all likelihood sued for peace, bringing an early end to World War II, at least in the European Theater. Thus, the counterfactual brings into sharp relief the importance of Hitler as an individual and how his personal fate shaped the course of the war and, ultimately, of world history.
Perhaps the response to Ferguson is in reality an objection to ‘the great men of history’ style of scholarship that I (and many readers of this blog, no doubt) were taught as children. I hadn’t realised how much learning about great men irritated people until I was called on to teach a ‘Fall of the Roman Republic’ A-Level class over here in early 2001. Of course, I protested my incompetence. My relevant undergraduate major was in classics, not history, and while I had completed most of a history major my real skills were in languages and statistics. I tried to inveigle my way into teaching a math class but failed miserably when it emerged that the other chap was a scientist and would have been even more hopeless with the historians than me.
And thereby hangs a tale.
I encountered students who knew the minutiae of Roman social and cultural life but could not tell me when — to take only one example — Caesar crossed the Rubicon (49 BC), or what he said as he did so (iacta alea est). This sort of thing multiplied for a term until I realised that they were failing to understand the society and culture they’d learnt so much about because their syllabus ignored the framework provided by the great men of history. And so — with some trepidation — I spent a term teaching them the great men of history. I did things like make them draw timelines and remember dates of battles and read correspondence between important personages. I came to appreciate that one cannot just ‘pick up’ narrative history; it needs to be taught explicitly, and then tested under exam conditions so that people remember it. Much social and cultural history, by contrast, can just be ‘picked up’, but the spiny backbone of a framework needs to be put in place first if this is to happen.
Now (as my friends know) I swore off historical fiction after the to-do over my first novel, despite having some feeling for it and an appreciation (not emphasized sufficiently until recently) that the past really is a foreign country, and that they do indeed do things differently there. I swore off it because so many historians tried to read a work of fiction as history. I also remember sneering comments made by literature scholars, including one from a man — then, as now, eminent in the field of literature — accusing a well-known historian who had attacked me of ‘not being able to read.’ That comment came back to me when I was trying to teach the fall of the Roman Republic and getting very frustrated with a badly designed syllabus. It occurred to me that the historians were no doubt sitting around their common rooms accusing we littérateurs of an identical failing, and that they had more grounds for complaint. People had taken their discipline and treated it like children often treat those cheap Christmas snow globes you used to be able to buy in novelty shops: shaken it until the glass carapace was broken.
This doesn’t mean I approve of the way historians carry on when someone gets something wrong in a popularization, or that I accept the slighting treatment of Ferguson’s teaching method. Historical popularization and counterfactual history have an important role to play in making history come to life and drawing people who may otherwise go into another discipline into studying it. Classicists often talk of the ‘Gladiator‘ or ‘Rome‘ effect, and I have no doubt that other historical films and series set in different eras serve the same purpose for those periods. Even the emphasis on social and cultural history has had some positive effects, with shows like Rome and Mad Men capturing some of what made even the recent past so different from our own times. People are often shocked to see the ad agency lads in Mad Men smoking like chimneys, drinking cocktails at lunch and cheerfully chatting up the girls (and they call them that) in the typing pool (what’s a ‘typing pool’? I hear my A-Level students enquire plaintively). And that was only the early 1960s. Rome makes some social and cultural errors (the black at funerals is wrong, for example), but on the whole does a pretty good job of capturing teh cultural difference:
Most approach the problems of historical drama by emphasizing that, no matter how bizarre the costumes or the language, people don’t change — the same basic emotions have always guided us. This HBO/BBC series acknowledges a different truth; the past is another country, and they do things differently there.
Rome lays bare the oft-overlooked fact that the ancient Roman Republic was a civilisation only in comparison to the Dark Ages. Even the most upstanding figure here engages in animal sacrifice, torture, public shagging and crucifixion.
It’s just a pity they had to leave out so much of the history — including (and incredibly) some of the sauciest bits (they made up for this omission by, err, inventing shit).
I’ll shut up now, lest I start sounding like a grumpy historian…