How bad is history?

So this all started with a book; Napoleon's Crimes: A Blueprint for Hitler.  It asserts that the person to invent gas chambers as a method of cheap and efficient mass execution was Napoleon, in response to rebellions by slaves in the Caribbean.  Particularly, the economically important islands of Haiti and Guadeloupe.  The method described in the book, was to section off the holds in the French warships and burn sulphur containing rocks, to produce poisonous sulphur dioxide gas to kill the slaves.  Using this, the author claims that thousands, possibly tens of thousands of slaves were slaughtered in these "choker" ships.  The book was not very well received politically - that is about as surprising as a baseball bat hit to the head hurting a lot; what government would want to be linked to the holocaust's gas chambers, Hitler and have its country credited with the invention of the gas chamber modern genocide set up, also used by the Nazis?  Well the answer is probably North Korea, but that is not relevant right here.  It was also not very well received by the history community as the evidence is mainly sporadic memoirs and diaries of revolutionary leaders and French naval officers that performed the acts, often with remorse.  Great, so Napoleon = Hitler, and some feathers were ruffled.  So, is it true, or not?

Immediately it was conceivable to me that these atrocities happened.  Maybe its because I am not a very good scientist - I will explain that in a bit.   Or am I such a pessimist that human depravity does not surprise me (the realist in me would say this was a great example of operational excellence and 19th century six-sigma in operation...)?  This goes on to my point - a curious observation, that is a symptom of a society that can't sit easy with the horrors that exist in its history.  Though maybe that is a good thing - perhaps it shows we are getting conditioned to be squeamish - sadly not all at once since mostly, atrocities continue across the world (more on that later).  I have, of course  named the problem; archeoeuscopophilia - the love or tendency to view ancient things with a positive perspective.

Gas Chambers:
Bad

Let me begin by explaining what I have observed when it comes to how we approach historical study when faced with incomplete facts.  Incomplete facts are common, particularly with ancient history, where we have little written evidence; and most of that tends to be biased towards the rich and victorious, not the oppressed and slaughtered.  What I have noticed is that people seem to assume that past was generally better, less disgusting and less bloodthirsty as it actually was.  We end up changing our opinion once we find more facts about the events.  The problem is, that by then society has often made a consensus opinion that ends up being pervasive; and it becomes a common misconception.  This is strongest when the events are horrific - you know, massacres, genocides, wars, racial oppression, gender oppression, systematic state endorsed slavery - all the good stuff that makes people want to study history in the first place, rather than find a more amusing way of passing the time such as catching spit or falling asleep at your desk out of boredom and accidentally stabbing yourself in the eye with your pen.

Now, let me be clear; I am not a trans-temporal time lord; I have hot had the fortune of being able to magically visit events in the past and compare them to the present day historical consensus of the event and say, "wow guys, you really have got that ass-backwards".  Instead what I have generally looked at is our understanding as it stood at point A in time, about an event in history and compared it to our understanding at point B later in time, about the same historical event.  Point A might be long before point B, or it might be temporally close but intersected by a significant new discovery that radically changes the perception of the historical event.  What is the transition from A } to } B, with respect to how we have to alter our perception and understanding?  

When we gain more information and evidence about historical events, we reassess and tend to have to conclude that they were worse and more horrific than we initially thought.  Therefore, the opinions that we generally form when we first start building up a picture of the past, seem to be of the proverbial "rose tinted spectacles" version; rather than the shockingly despicable, "glad we don't live like that, anymore" version that more often that not ends up being the case, as we find more bones, artifacts, crushed babies, murals, pottery or whatever else we use as evidence to further our understanding.  Or if you prefer to be an optimist about it, we tend to reassess that they were more profound or different than we imagined, compared to today's analogues - so this can also apply to good "things" in history.  But there is so little that is "good" in history that this is a particularly sunny and inane form of optimism, if you espouse optimism here.  

The reason we generally start off with "pleasant" assumptions about the past is twofold.  This is expected as humans tend to be self involved, narcissistic and selfish, so it is blindingly obvious that they would add greater weight to their own experiences, relative suffering and context; over that of peoples' that are long dead and lived on a different continent.  More positively, we can say that because things are so much better today - in the western world - that it is hard for people to understand the horrors of the past; without rigorous study and immersion into our species' tendency for violence and oppression.  The other bit is actually very understandable and "benign"; good history scholars are essentially scientists, and good scientists use observations of facts to make their conclusions.  That is why unless there is the credible evidence, that an event occurred and occurred in a specific way (good / grisly / whatever), a scientist would not want to leap to wild conclusions; right?  Mostly.  

While I would not condone wild conclusions, science uses postulates as a way to picture a problem before it is solved.  Postulates must be proven with evidence, but the postulate itself can be as bland or fanciful as the author wants it to be.  As Santayana, Lincoln and Sagan all said; you are better prepared for the future by knowing the past (I'm heavily paraphrasing here).  Stay with me here; the past is not the future, but it can be what is "unknown"; equally the known past can be though of as "knowledge".  Going back to the saying; if you substitute "unknown" for the "future" (since the future is generally unknown), and "past" for "knowledge", then you can say; to be better prepared for the unknown, understand the trends in the knowledge that you already have.  

The past is really quite awful, new theories about civilizations or events that are just being discovered  should comfortably assume the worst about our ancestors' actions.  This does not detract from having a range of interpretations, nor does it detract from the necessity of using facts and evidence to prove the correct interpretation of a theory of the past.  This only states that the most likely interpretation tend to be (one of) the worst!  You can call it negative or pessimistic.  But there is a trend towards awful...  On a tangent - that's kind of where business discovery and artificial intelligence is heading - more on that in a much later post though (or just read New Scientist).  

The species really has to clean up our act, and with a glimmer of hopefulness for my ability to be optimistic, I will say that we have come a long way, baby; there must really be some diligent and courageous people throughout history, trying to scrub the world of the evil that festers in it.  I have no idea why people don't realise just how terrible our society used to be, still is and some very horrible things that happened only very recently!  How much do people have to be reminded of wars, plagues, ignorance causing pointless suffering, slavery, legal sexual inequality in he west as recently as 100 years ago and active racial segregation 30 years ago?? 

As a summary: what is going on in Sudan, bad; what is going on in Syria, bad; what was going on during the cold war; worse; what was going on during the world wars, worse still; what was going on during the crusades, ancient Rome or the Mongol invasions, also very, very bad.  We tend to forget that the British army used concentration camps in South Africa and the US used them against the Native Americans; we conveniently ignore that Ancient Greece was built upon institutional slavery yet we ironically call it the birthplace of democracy, instead choosing to admire only the romantic and the frankly sane parts of its culture and philosophy (big fan of Ancient Greece by the way...).  Then we wonder why western powers became so keen on slavery 1500 years later - surely they learned what a great labour saving device it was from their very ancestors!  We still turn a blind eye to the 3rd world's wars and problems when we get bored, or more local news happens (like a royal wedding dammit!!) or we ignore barbaric practices such as female (or male...) circumcision that still go on in Africa.  The list is long, only to shame us for not caring and, hopefully, to spur us into action!

Keep the past in mind - it will let you see in panorama and broaden your critical ability.  You are encouraged to criticize the status quo; to push for further progress.  Lets remember the capacity of man's inhumanity to man.  That knowledge is our shield against it.

Oh - so, is it true?    Yeah, it is.  

¦-(