IS BAD HISTORY DISTORTING OUR THINKING ON THE CURRENT AMERICAN POLITICAL CRISIS?
INTRODUCTION:
In several past meetups, we've discussed "pseudohistory" - i.e. a dishonest form of scholarship that attempts to distort or misrepresent the historical record, often using methods that superficially resemble those used in legitimate historical research but analyze historical evidence in a flawed manner. Pseudohistory frequently presents sensational claims about historical facts which would require a radical revision of the historical record, and this usually entails either: (1) asserting that an event that's assumed to be fictional by mainstream historians actually happened (e.g. Noah's flood, the sinking of Atlantis, aliens visiting ancient human civilizations), or (2) denying that an event that mainstream historians believe happened even occurred or that a historical figure even existed (e.g. Holocaust denial, the Phantom Time Hypothesis about the Middle Ages, the Jesus myth theory), or (3) claiming major details of a historical event were different than they're described in mainstream histories (e.g. the Anti-Stratfordian theory about someone else writing Shakespeare's plays, the "Lost Cause" historiography that claims the Civil War wasn't fought over slavery, JFK assassination conspiracy theories). Many pseudohistory theories also allege a conspiracy theory within the field of historical scholarship that tries to suppress their ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudohistory
In this meetup, we'll address the somewhat less egregious phenomena of "bad history" and "misuse of history" - i.e. forms of historical scholarship that violate the historical method in some way without entailing falsification or distortion of the historical record. In the first half of this discussion, we'll look at how many people in recent years have used flawed "historical analogies" to try to understand America's heightened political polarization & the uptick in political violence over the last 5 years. Specifically, we'll look at analogies between our political conflicts today and those in the U.S. in the period leading up to the Civil War and/or in Weimar Germany leading up to the Nazi takeover.
While "comparative history" is generally considered to be a legitimate academic endeavor, historians are often wary of untrained people using historical analogies to try to understand the present or predict the future. The problem is these analogies are often based on the false assumption that if two events separated in time agree in one respect, then they probably agree in many other ways. Amateurs will often make the mistake of focusing too much on a few similarities between two historical events while overlooking major differences in the economies, political structures, demographic trends, cultural norms, etc., of the times and places they're comparing, leading to flawed analogies. Historical analogies can also become incredibly strained when non-historians who have only a cursory knowledge of past events have very small "reference classes" to draw upon, usually very dramatic ones, with the result that any political leader they suspect of wrongdoing might be compared to Hitler or Stalin, or any political conflict is assumed to be escalating towards a "Second Civil War", another Holocaust, or purges & gulags. If you're worried about our current political crisis and your understanding of political violence is based entirely on the Civil War and World War II, you may begin to look for a "Harpers Ferry raid" or "Fort Sumter attack" or a "Kristallnacht" or "Reichstag fire" rather than using a broader understanding of "trigger events" to look for a wider ranger of possible catalysts for political violence. This tendency to focus only one or two well-known dramatic turning points in history is related to the problem of "extension neglect" in scientific research where the sample size is ignored while evaluating a study. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_historical_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension_neglect
Another reason that people will often make bad historical analogies to Hitler and the Nazis (or occasionally Stalin & the communists, or some other reviled group like the KKK or Islamic terrorists) is rhetorical - i.e. it's a use of "guilt by association" to demonize a political opponent, and it can be used to derail arguments because such comparisons tend to distract and anger opponents. In the case of Hitler comparisons, it was a common enough tactic in political debates that the philosopher Leo Strauss coined the term "reductio ad Hitlerum" in 1953, less than a decade after WWII ended. In political debates on the internet, it's not uncommon for people to trade recriminations, trying to one-up each other as the debate goes on, to the point that someone eventually compares the other side to the Nazis. This tendency has come to be known as "Godwin's law", one of the so-called "rules of the internet" which states that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." It was coined by the lawyer Mike Godwin, who made an observation about Nazi comparisons popping up in Usenet debates way back in in 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
In the second half of this discussion, we'll look at the related phenomena of "social cycle theories" that claim that America's current period of heightened political conflict can be understood and even predicted on the basis of a pattern of regular conflicts that repeats throughout American history or all of world history. We'll look at two social cycle theories promoted in a pair of books that have been heavily discussed in the media recently - the "Strauss-Howe generational theory" from William Strauss & Neil Howe's books Generations (1991) and The Fourth Turning (1997) and "structural-demographic theory" as presented in Peter Turchin's books War and Peace and War (2006) and Ages of Discord (2016). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural-demographic_theory
As with historical analogies, historians are often wary of cyclical theories that posit regular, clock-like intervals of (say) 20, 50, 80, or 150 years that can allegedly be used to predict the future. Anyone familiar with the irregular patterns of stock market fluctuations, birth rates, or crime rates will immediately realize that while these do fluctuate over time they don't produce regular cyclical patterns like a sine wave that can easily be predicted. Attempts to correct for this by stacking cycles on top of cycles recalls the "epicycles" of pre-Copernican astronomy's geocentric model of the solar system. These sort of modifications smack of trying to avoid falsification of the cyclical theory of history by developing ever more elaborate ad-hoc justifications. Skeptics also tend to see the creative interpretation of these historical cycle theories as akin to astrological readings. Like a true believer interpreting the ambiguous advice of a fortune-teller, attempts to "prove" a cyclical theory right often involve forms of confirmation bias that Michael Shermer calls "patternicity" - i.e. the tendency to find the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise - and "agenticity" - i.e. the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle#Bad_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia#Related_terms
In this discussion, we'll look at how attempts to understand America's current political conflicts using historical analogies & historical cycle theories can often go awry. We'll also consider if these comparative methods have any merit and might shed some light on our current situation, provided we're more careful in our analysis.
RELEVANT MATERIAL FROM PAST MEETUPS:
Since the 1st section of today's discussion involves the Civil War, it's worth noting that we had a meetup where we discussed misconceptions about the Civil War back in July entitled "Slavery & Pseudohistory" - see Part 2 of the outline where we looked at Neoconfederate "Lost Cause" apologetics & discussed whether or not the Civil War could've been averted with better negotiation, e.g. by lowering tariffs as Andrew Jackson did to end the Nullification Crisis in 1833 and/or paying slaveowner's to manumit their slaves as the British Empire also did in 1833. This is pertinent to today's discussion in terms of the federal government's ability to avoid civil unrest & civil war through negotiation & buying off most of the opposition. https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/djzwsrybckbjc/
The 2nd section of today's meetup deals with the collapse of the Weimar Republic and rise of the Nazis. Unfortunately, we haven't had a meetup on this subject, but we have discussed the political science research on racism & fascism. Back in October, we had a meetup entitled "Political Pseudoscience & Conservatism" and in Part 3 we looked at why claims that the Republicans are a "crypto-fascist" party and Trump an "evil mastermind" are overblown and fail to understand the much more common American political phenomena of nativism & populism. We also discussed how Thomas Woods' study that claimed "white racism elected Trump" merely measured something like "just world" beliefs - i.e. Trump voters were more likely to say blacks could get ahead through hard work, and didn't need affirmative action. https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/djzwsrybcnbgb/
In the 3rd section of today's meetup, we'll look at the Strauss-Howe generational theory & its connection to a period of crisis known as the "Fourth Turning". We had a meetup in Feb. 2020 entitled "Are Generational Theories Bunk?" and in Part 1 we took a critical look at the "pulse rate hypothesis" of generations, and we focused particularly on the Strauss-Howe generational theory as the best known example. We discussed why most sociologists tend to reject the rigid 20-year cycles coming of the "pulse rate hypothesis" and try to determine the chronological boundaries of generational cohorts through empirical analysis. They also use empirical analysis to try to determine the social & psychological tendencies "imprinted" on generational cohorts rather than assuming, as Strauss & Howe do, that a "generational archetype" can be deduced a priori from a cohort's position in a historical cycle. https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/fllzgrybcdbvb/
The Philly Political Agnostics looked at both the Strauss-Howe generational theory in a meetup in 2017 entitled "The Tactics & Patterns of Political Violence" that looked at how they were being used to try to forecast the dangers of political violence shortly after Trump took office. Asked whether America could be headed for a Second Civil War, and Howe said he doubted it but noted that the approach of the Civil War wasn't obvious to people at the time even when the Southern states seceded. War broke out suddenly when West Point grads wouldn't surrender Fort Sumter, and Howe theorized that something similar could happen today if California tried to secede and officers at Coronado Naval Base resisted. Howe said he thought Trump's election may have decreased the likelihood of civil war by easing the anger on the political right, and noted that stocks for guns & survival gear dropped after Trump was elected. https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/239786314/
In the 4th section of this discussion, we'll look at Peter Turchin's "structural-demographic theory" (SDT) for predicting social conflict. Back in May of 2017, we had a meetup entitled "The Historical Study of Violence" where we looked at Steven Pinker's multi-factor explanation for the long-term decline in violence from his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature" and we looked at Nicholas Nassim Taleb's critique of Pinker's theory. Taleb essentially argued Pinker didn’t take proper account of the statistical nature of war as a historical phenomenon, specifically as a time series of events characterized by fat tails. Such processes naturally have long periods of quiescence, which get ripped apart by tumultuous upheavals. We also briefly look at Peter Turchin's SDT and compared it to Safa Motesharrei's HANDY model which both were featured in pop science articles around the same time predicting cycles an imminent civilizational collapse. We noted that the historian Joseph Tainter, famous for his study The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), critiqued Motesharrei's model which blamed excessive resource extraction & wealth inequality the driving factors of collapse, arguing instead that "there is no evidence that elite consumption caused ancient societies to collapse." Rather, Tainter's research suggested collapses came from "diminishing returns on investments in social complexity". https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/239822337/
Turchin's long cycles of social integration & disintegration recall the thesis of the sociologist Robert Putnam's recent book "The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again". Putnam argues that social trust was very low during the Gilded Age in the late 19th century but was rebuilt by progressive reforms and the New Deal, leading to a peak in social trust in the 1950s & early 1960s. The Philly Political Agnostics had a meetup that looked at Putnam's book back in December, and in the meetup description there's a link to Putnam's 1-hour interview with Jeffrey Rosen at the National Constitution Center: https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/275073010/
In terms of quantitive research on violent interstate & intrastate conflict, back in Sept. 2018 the Philly Political Agnostics had a meetup entitled "Can We Predict Geopolitical Conflict?" that looked at how to apply lessons from Philip Tetlock's "Good Judgement Project" (a tournament for geopolitical forecasters). In Part 3 of the discussion, they looked at how one might be able to predict when civil unrest could lead to a military coup or popular revolt, and in Part 4 they looked at how one might be able to predict when social tensions within a society could lead to a civil war or genocide. We talked about how the "Fragile States Index" is a good tool to use to start thinking about which states might suffer a coup or civil war, since it tracks 12 social, political & economic factors that contribute to a government's weakness & social volatility. The states that top this index are all poor, developing countries, with Israel being the highest-ranked wealthy, industrialized country. https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/events/254920242/
