Alex Rosenberg. How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories. MIT Press, 2018. 289 pp. Paperback $17.95.
In the summer of 1941, as a young chemistry student in New York, Isaac Asimov sold his editor a science fiction story, set far in the future, about the dark ages that would come after an interstellar empire’s collapse. Over several centuries, a pair of secret scientific foundations would manipulate human events to hasten the rise of a new empire.
Working together, Asimov and his editor devised a fictional scientific discipline, supposedly complete with theories and laws, to explain how the scheme would play out in the story. In large enough numbers, they posited, humans might act like gas molecules. Individuals were unpredictable, but scientific laws could describe a vast civilization’s behavior. Thus, with the right mathematical models, scientists could predict the future—and therefore change it. They named this imaginary science “psychohistory.” The Foundation stories, built on this framework, helped cement Asimov’s reputation as a major science fiction writer.1
I kept thinking about Asimov’s stories as I read Alex Rosenberg’s 2018 book How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories. As you might guess, it is likely to irritate many historians. That’s not simply because the book is wrong, which it is, though in a sophisticated way. It’s because Rosenberg’s critique is haunted by an ideal that looks a lot like psychohistory, an ideal that can haunt students of history as well.2 Rosenberg suggests that historians must be able to make predictions about the future, in the manner of natural scientists, in order to claim that their work provides reliable knowledge about the past or has any significance for the present. Beneath this claim, however, lies the question of what meaning—if any—we can draw from human experiences.
Rosenberg, a distinguished philosopher of science at Duke University, argues that most people read stories about the past not only because they’re entertaining, but also because they hope such stories will provide guidance for life today. But relying on history like this is a dangerous mistake, Rosenberg believes, because “historical narratives are wrong—all of them.” (p. 29) Unlike scientists, historians are bad at making predictions about the future, and can’t even agree on the causes of events in the past, because they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of human behavior itself. It’s controlled by biological factors, he argues, not the conscious choices that historians write about. When it comes down to it, human behavior is “just a lot of unexciting firing of a lot of neural circuits”(p. 160). In light of this fact, he argues, the narratives historians produce are inaccurate, unhelpful, and even dangerous, given their power to inspire violence and oppression through irrational grudges and superstition.
The Crystal Ball (1902) by John William Waterhouse
The ideal historians Rosenberg seems to imagine as an alternative have a lot in common with Asimov’s psychohistorians—far more than they do with real-world historians, most of whom do not see prophecy, however well-informed, as part of their job description. Moreover, much of Rosenberg’s dismissal of historians’ work seems to come from a strangely old-fashioned understanding of what a historical narrative is and what questions historians might ask to construct one. “Historical narratives,” he claims, “explain events in history by uncovering the beliefs and desires of the principals—the movers and shakers” (p. 103).
Throughout How History Gets Things Wrong, Rosenberg seems interested almost exclusively in specific events—tipping points—especially military and political events related to particular great men. Why the Roman Empire collapsed, why World War I began, why the British tried to appease Adolf Hitler in 1938—these are the kinds of historical questions he likes, and the kinds of questions he believes historians are primarily interested in answering. They do this, he seems to think, by reading the minds of (mostly male) leaders in order to understand the choices they made.
As far as most historians are concerned, though, Rosenberg might as well define music as something that comes out of a phonograph. His understanding of how history is practiced is an outdated one, rooted in a narrow view of what narrative history can be. Rosenberg says he is only criticizing the plot-driven books you see on bestseller lists—what he thinks of as “narrative histories”—not the work of historians in universities, who supposedly don’t care about telling stories, a common misperception.
To be fair, there is plenty of bad popular historical writing, and much of it does tell fanciful stories about great men and their decisions.3 But both popular and academic historians often place regular human beings, whether individuals or groups, at the center of their narratives instead. From Rosenberg’s perspective, however, even those narratives are flawed because they’re still rooted in a misunderstanding of the nature of conscious thought.
The problem, according to How History Gets Things Wrong, is that the desire to tell stories is inescapably human, and so are storytellers’ bad habits. Like everyone else, historians assume that people in the past had thoughts (beliefs and desires) and acted on them in conscious, understandable ways. Rosenberg calls this notion their “theory of mind” or “folk psychology.” From infancy, neurotypical humans constantly try to guess what the people around them are thinking. This is just the way humans are. It’s built into our brains. Early in our evolution, it increased the odds of survival in hunter-gatherer societies. It helped small bands of people cooperate in order to find food, raise children, and avoid danger. Now we’re stuck with it—and with all its side effects, like religions and conspiracy theories, which come from our compulsion to turn random events into stories. Historical narratives, Rosenberg argues, are simply another side effect of this compulsion.
Rosenberg concedes there’s nothing inherently wrong with stories. They provide pleasure, they help us communicate, they’re usually accurate enough for everyday use, and in any case, we can’t help ourselves; “we crave them, are addicted to them, need them” (p. 87). He even tells stories in the book to express his ideas more effectively. However, he insists we should avoid relying on stories as a source of truth about the past. To be safe, and to advance human knowledge, we should engage in analytic reasoning instead—the kind of reasoning that he believes is the province of scientists, which often contradicts our intuitions. As a result, most of the book is devoted to recent scientific research on how the brain works.
A Tale from the Decameron (1916) by John William Waterhouse
By now, it should be clear that How History Gets Things Wrong is less about history than about psychology. Rosenberg builds a case that unconscious factors drive human behavior even when we think we are making decisions. Seen in this light, he writes, the past is “just one damn electrochemical process after another,” expressed through conditioned behaviors (p. 160).
At least as a general concept, that isn’t a very controversial idea among educated readers and writers today. And if all human consciousness is also the result of electrochemical processes plus habits, it’s not clear that it amounts to much for historical purposes. Historians mainly write about what it’s like inside human experience, since that’s where we all live. They tell stories about human constructs like “industrialization” and “war” and “Paris” and “France,” things that exist only because they exist in consciousness.
Moreover, there are many popular historical narratives that have no individual “movers and shakers,” obscure or notable, consciously driving the action. Consider Ibram X. Kendi’s widely read book Stamped from the Beginning. It’s a history of American racist ideas. Now, it makes little sense to discuss “the cause” of an idea, just as it’s difficult to say one specific thing in nature caused a particular river. They’re flows, not happenings. Yet we can map rivers and ideas, identifying some of their many sources, and we can describe how rivers and ideas tend to behave without knowing what they’ll do next.
Or consider Mary Beard’s SPQR, which is a sort of biography of the Roman empire. It’s interested less in why there was a Roman empire (or why it doesn’t exist anymore) than in how we should think about it. Much of Beard’s book, in fact, is devoted to how much we don’t know about Rome.
Or take Elizabeth Fenn’s Pox Americana, which I just pulled down from my shelf. Its opening sentence alone contradicts the premise of Rosenberg’s book: “The story that follows is about Variola major, the virus that causes smallpox.” Fenn’s argument, presented as a narrative, is that smallpox, rather than any human decision-maker, “reshaped human destinies across the continent” of North America during the Revolutionary War.4
All three of these books are readable popular histories, full of storytelling, that challenge Rosenberg’s assumptions about what historical narratives are and the dangers they pose to unwitting readers. Neither the narratives they weave nor the historical changes they chart can be put down to deliberate individual choices.
So here’s what I suspect. The real question at the heart of Rosenberg’s book is not whether historians can tell true stories, or even predict the future, but whether unique human beliefs, experiences, and actions are meaningful at all. If something—or someone—happens only once in all of time and space, can that human happening still have importance to us? Can we say true things about it, and can those things be meaningful to us in the present?
Remember, no past event (or society or thought) can be exactly repeated or observed. Past things are lost to us. We can’t go visit them; we can only examine the impressions they leave behind. And we certainly can’t experience someone else’s consciousness exactly as they did. We can never know that our stories about the past have gotten a unique thing exactly, precisely, absolutely right.
That’s true for philosophers or literary scholars as much as for historians. How could we ever know what the mathematician Hypatia or the novelist Toni Morrison was actually thinking at a given moment? We cannot know the condition of her brain, we can never experience what it was like to be her, and we certainly can’t predict that there will be another one of her in the future. Yet we insist that talking about her ideas can be a form of truth-telling anyway.
Despite focusing exclusively on unique human events in the past, How History Gets Things Wrong seems to deny that there can be unique meaning in stories about them. That would seem to devalue the kinds of meaning humans can identify in their everyday lives, since our own memories and values (and even our personal identities) are story-shaped things that don’t hold up to neuroscientific scrutiny.
Ironically, Rosenberg is so preoccupied with the psychology of great men, and so sure that historians are as well, that he overestimates the uncertainty historians have about the past. They may debate the precise mix of factors motivating the Kaiser, as he claims, but they generally agree about what main factors led to the outbreak of the First World War. They also have a pretty good idea why the United States and Germany ended up at war in the 1940s, even if they can never know exactly what Adolf Hitler’s neurochemistry was like in December 1941. One reason responsible historians mostly avoid the great-man tales Rosenberg describes is that they know their sources usually provide meager information about individual psychology, but a lot of evidence about other factors that they believe to be important in understanding historical change.
How History Gets Things Wrong is genuinely interesting, despite Rosenberg’s strange notions about what historians do. At its best, it reminds us not to assume we have other people (or ourselves) figured out—which means we can never be sure what the future holds. It reminds us that we are living organisms who respond to our environments according to our conditioning, which is a truly useful insight, even if it’s not exactly groundbreaking. And that furnishes evidence for what good historians already know: history shouldn’t be told simply as the story of powerful individuals’ free choices. It should be told as a human-perspective story about a world that’s larger and deeper than any single human’s awareness.
This doesn’t bring us closer to the superpowers imagined by Isaac Asimov. But perhaps that’s for the best.
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- A reputation that’s now damaged by reports of his relentless sexual harassment.
- Asimov himself left ambiguous whether psychohistory’s suppositions were even valid within the fictional world he created, since the characters in his stories kept making decisions that threatened to derail the master plan.
- On the other hand, have you checked out what the bookstores sell as philosophy lately? When I browsed Amazon’s list of philosophy bestsellers the other day, I had to go down to the thirty-seventh place before I even found something written by a philosopher. Book number one was a biography of Elon Musk. Numbers two and three were editions of a self-help book by a psychologist known for his mystical interest in lobsters. Problems with quality control in the publishing industry are not necessarily problems with philosophy or history.
- Ibram X. Kenxi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016); Mary Bears, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (New York: Liveright, 2015); Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).
