No, History Doesn’t Need to be “Mathematized”

On 12 November 2020, The Atlantic published an article titled “The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse.” This article, written by a staff writer named Graeme Wood, is primarily a profile piece about Peter Turchin, a Russian American entomologist-turned-pseudohistorian. It is also, however, to a large extent a full-on polemic against real historians, whom Wood portrays as obsolete curmudgeons who don’t really understand the past and are allergic to science.

As can only be expected, the entire article displays an absolutely flagrant ignorance of what the historical discipline is and what historians actually do. Indeed, it is full of all kinds of outlandish howlers, bordering on outright silliness. Unfortunately, many of the misconceptions that the article promotes are becoming more and more common as our society continues to devalue the study of history.

The assumption that all fields must be “mathematized”

I don’t have time to respond to everything that is in Wood’s article, so I will confine myself strictly to refuting specific passages that I believe illustrate misunderstandings that Turchin and Wood have about what history is and what historians are actually studying. The first passage I want to talk about comes from about halfway through the article. It’s talking about why Turchin left entomology and decided to become a historian:

“Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings. He’d long had a hobbyist’s interest in history. But he also had a predator’s instinct to survey the savanna of human knowledge and pounce on the weakest prey. ‘All sciences go through this transition to mathematization,’ Turchin told me. ‘When I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.’”

Here we have a comically illogical assumption. Turchin assumes that, because some fields are currently “mathematized,” this means that all fields must inevitably be “mathematized” and that history is therefore in dire need of “mathematization.”

There are several problems here. First of all, just because a certain field is currently heavily “mathematized” doesn’t necessarily mean that it should be mathematized. For instance, I am not an economist, but, based on my reading of articles written by economists, I think that many economists have been led to make a lot of false conclusions based on the false assumption that all human societies function in precise, mathematically predictable ways according to universal, inviolable, and invariable laws of nature that can be known and understood. I think that human societies are a lot more complicated, diverse, and hard to predict than these economists portray them.

Setting that whole matter aside, I will, of course, acknowledge that “mathematization” is clearly useful for some purposes in some fields. This does not, however, mean that it is useful for all purposes in all fields. Mathematics may be useful for predicting the motions of the planets in accordance with the laws of physics, but it may not be so useful in, say, determining what an author from two thousand years ago meant when they wrote a particular passage in Classical Greek.

Furthermore, just because something involves mathematics does not mean it is scientific. Mathematics is only useful for finding answers if the data a person is relying on is complete and accurate. If the data is inaccurate or incomplete, the answers that the math will yield will inevitably be incorrect.

Attempts to apply mathematics to history are often nothing more than blatantly pseudoscientific sophistry. For instance, the Evangelical Christian apologist William Lane Craig is notorious for using Bayes’ theorem to “prove” that God really resurrected Jesus from the dead after three days exactly as described in the gospels.

It’s easy for an expert in ancient history or New Testament studies to see that the data Craig plugs into the theorem is essentially made up, but people who don’t understand ancient history just see that Craig has reached his conclusion using lots of complicated math and therefore conclude that he must be correct. In other words, the purpose of Craig’s math is not to find an accurate conclusion, but rather to obfuscate the historical evidence and convince people that Craig’s claim is true.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Christian apologist William Lane Craig, who is notorious for using Bayes’ theorem to “prove” that Jesus was really resurrected from the dead

What do historians really do?

Wood goes on to describe what he thinks historians do and why he and Turchin think such methods are obsolete:

“Historians read books, letters, and other texts. Occasionally, if they are archaeologically inclined, they dig up potsherds and coins. But to Turchin, relying solely on these methods was the equivalent of studying bugs by pinning them to particleboard and counting their antennae.”

The analogy here doesn’t work. Historians don’t just rely on texts, potsherds, and coins. Historians rely on a vast array of sources that survive from the past; these sources include written documents, living eyewitnesses, photographs, visual depictions, recordings, documentary footage, oral traditions, and all kinds of archaeological remains—as well as other kinds of sources that I haven’t even mentioned.

The only thing all these sources have in common is that they are all things that have survived from the past in some form or another. This is because historians, by definition, study the past and the only sources that can tell us about the past are sources that are actually from the past. If you’re not relying on sources from the past, you’re not doing history.

Furthermore, when historians do examine sources from the past, we don’t focus on minute and irrelevant details as Turchin seems to imply; we think about what the sources tell us about the time that the sources come from, what connections the sources may have to other sources from other times and places, what broader trends the sources reveal, and what we can extrapolate based on the sources. That’s the whole point of studying historical sources to begin with; we study them so we can draw information from them—not just because we think looking at old stuff is fun.

ABOVE: Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 16, a first-century CE papyrus fragment containing a portion of Book Four of Thoukydides’s Histories of the Peloponnesian War

An attempt by STEM to colonize the humanities

In any case, Wood’s paragraph continues:

“If the historians weren’t going to usher in a mathematical revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for them.”

This sentence exemplifies the most extreme form of the hubristically arrogant views that many people in STEM fields seem to hold. These people, who generally have no training or experience in the historical discipline whatsoever beyond the high school level, look over at historians and think, “Those people over there are doing things differently from us! That can’t be right! They must be doing everything wrong! We need to fix what they’re doing to make it more like what we’re doing!”

I’m not saying that all people in STEM are like this. There are, of course, many STEM scholars who acknowledge that the methods used by historians are legitimate and who don’t try to impose irrelevant STEM methods onto the study of history. The view held by Wood and Turchin, however, is frustratingly common and is part of an ingrained sense of STEM superiority and pridefulness. You’ll notice that you almost never hear of humanities scholars telling scientists that they need to stop using their current methods and start treating science more like history.

Turchin’s argument that all history must obey identifiable laws

Next, Wood quotes a passage from one of Turchin’s books:

“‘There is a longstanding debate among scientists and philosophers as to whether history has general laws,’ he and a co-author wrote in Secular Cycles (2009). ‘A basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems.’”

This notion is clearly preposterous. Human societies are incomprehensibly complex and diverse. Indeed, they’re possibly the most complex thing in existence. One human society can’t even necessarily be studied with the same methods as another human society, let alone the same methods chemists use for studying chemical reactions. You can’t just plug some numbers into a standardized equation and say, “Yep, this answers all our questions. History is solved!”

I will grant that, in principle at least, history does obey natural laws of some kind. The problem is that those laws are so complicated and full of exceptions and our information about the past is so incomplete due to the inherent limitations of us being human that it is impossible to identify laws that can be consistently applied across all time periods and societies.

“Turchin founded a journal, Cliodynamics, dedicated to ‘the search for general principles explaining the functioning and dynamics of historical societies.’ (The term is his coinage; Clio is the muse of history.) He had already announced the discipline’s arrival in an article in Nature, where he likened historians reluctant to build general principles to his colleagues in biology ‘who care most for the private life of warblers.’ ‘Let history continue to focus on the particular,’ he wrote. Cliodynamics would be a new science. While historians dusted bell jars in the basement of the university, Turchin and his followers would be upstairs, answering the big questions.”

This characterization of historians is egregiously inaccurate. Historians do try to answer “big questions”; most qualified historians, however, realize that answering these questions isn’t something easy that can be done all at once. It isn’t possible to answer any “big question” without extensively discussing the particulars of the subject to which the question relates.

Meanwhile, the particulars are important for their own sakes too. Even many small and seemingly irrelevant historical occurrences can have enormous consequences for people’s everyday lives.

“To seed the journal’s research, Turchin masterminded a digital archive of historical and archaeological data. The coding of its records requires finesse, he told me, because (for example) the method of determining the size of the elite-aspirant class of medieval France might differ from the measure of the same class in the present-day United States. (For medieval France, a proxy is the membership in its noble class, which became glutted with second and third sons who had no castles or manors to rule over. One American proxy, Turchin says, is the number of lawyers.) But once the data are entered, after vetting by Turchin and specialists in the historical period under review, they offer quick and powerful suggestions about historical phenomena.”

Here is where the pseudoscience comes in again. Remember what I said earlier about how you can’t hope to get a correct answer out of a mathematical model unless the data you are relying on is complete and accurate? Well, for the kinds of questions Turchin is asking, there’s no way his data can possibly be complete and accurate, since human civilizations are so complex and diverse. There are so many factors that it is impossible to take them all into account.

There’s also the problem that, when it comes to time periods older than around seven hundred years ago, we really don’t have any kind of good numerical data at all. For instance, we don’t have any kind of exact, reliable, numerical data about how many people lived in the Roman Empire in the second century CE, how many of those people were enslaved, how many of those people were literate, how many of those people were members of the equestrian class, how many of those people were members of the Senatorial class, and so forth.

Anytime someone tries to give you any kind of specific numbers on any of these subjects, what they’re actually giving you are just modern guesses based on vague statements in ancient sources and incomplete archaeological findings. There’s also widespread disagreement among scholars about many of these figures. Even today, people have intense debates about how common literacy was in ancient Rome; some people say it was fairly common, while others say it was very rare. The historical evidence is ambiguous.

How can someone like Peter Turchin believe that he can answer all society’s “big questions” when the data that he is putting into his algorithms and equations is, at best, fragmentary and incomplete and, at worse, totally inaccurate?

ABOVE: First-century CE Roman graffito from Pompeii with labels written in Latin. Graffitos such as this one give us a vague impression of how widespread literacy might have been.

“Moralizing” deities and civilization

In an effort to prove that Turchin is awesome and historians are stupid, Wood touts a specific example of Turchin supposedly answering a question that historians have supposedly been asking for centuries. He writes:

“Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in gods—especially ‘moralizing gods,’ the kind who scold you for sinning. Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (‘records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality’) to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before. As the database expands, it will attempt to remove more questions from the realm of humanistic speculation and sock them away in a drawer marked answered.”

This is yet more silliness.

First of all, we have virtually no information whatsoever about what people who lived before the invention of writing believed about religion. We know that they practiced some kinds of rituals and that some people made figurines, some of which may or may not represent deities of some sort. It’s only after the invention of writing—which happened only around 3000 BCE (i.e., roughly 5,000 years ago)—that we really have any indication at all of what any people believed about the deities.

Even after the invention of writing, though, our information is severely limited. We only have detailed information from civilizations that either had writing themselves or that were in close contact with civilizations that had writing. Furthermore, even within literate civilizations, the sources that have survived are not necessarily reflective of what all or most people in those civilizations believed. All surviving written sources were written by literate elites, who naturally only wrote about things from their own particular perspectives; we have far less information about what the illiterate masses believed.

The selective nature of the sources is especially evident when you look at, say, the surviving texts of the Hebrew Bible. All the texts that are now included in the Hebrew Bible were written by elite, literate members of one particular religious faction. We have far less information about what other elite religious factions believed—even though we know they existed—and we have even less information about what ordinary Judahites believed.

ABOVE: Painting from the north wall of the Dura-Europos Synagogue dated to the third century CE depicting the prophet Elijah’s supposed miraculous victory over the priests and prophets of Baal. We don’t have any sources written by the Judahite prophets of Baal, so we don’t know nearly as much about what they believed.

Furthermore, the distinction between “moralizing” and “non-moralizing” deities is not very clear-cut. For instance, let’s look at the Homeric epics, which were most likely composed in around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. The epics were composed in a time and place in which the vast majority of people were illiterate and they are generally believed by scholars to have been originally passed down orally.

Superficially, the deities portrayed in these epics may not seem “moralizing,” since they don’t have any equivalent of the “Ten Commandments” and, generally speaking, they don’t seem particularly concerned with punishing wrongdoers. (Indeed, the Homeric epics portray the deities themselves as engaging in acts that violate most human standards of morality.)

Nevertheless, there are things that the Homeric deities do punish people for. In the very opening scene of the Iliad, the god Apollon sends arrows of plague down upon the Greek armies to punish Agamemnon for having taken Chryseïs, the daughter of Apollon’s priest Chryses, as his sex slave. In the Odyssey, Book Nine, Odysseus tells the Kyklops Polyphemos that Zeus punishes hosts who mistreat their guests. He says, in lines 288–293 of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation:

“It was our luck to come here; here we stand,
beholden for your help, or any gifts
you give—as custom is to honor strangers.
We would entreat you, great Sir, have a care
for the gods’ courtesy; Zeus will avenge
the unoffending guest.”

Thus, according to the Homeric epics, Zeus enforces the laws of how hosts are allowed to treat their guests. Doesn’t this make him, in some sense, a “moralizing god”?

Now, a supporter of Peter Turchin might argue that Homeric Greece was already a “complex” society and that the Homeric deities are therefore in the process of becoming “moralizing”—but yet we have no reason to believe that Zeus’s role as the protector of guests was a recent innovation in Homer’s time. It might very well have been an aspect of Zeus’s character going back to the very beginning of Greek civilization.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a statue of the Greek god Zeus in the Louvre Museum

There’s also the problem that, even within a single society, different people imagine the deities in often drastically different ways. The poet Xenophanes of Kolophon (lived c. 570 – c. 478 BCE) famously criticizes the Homeric epics for portraying the deities as engaging in immoral behaviors. He writes in fragment D8 (B11):

“πάντα θεοῖς ἀνέθηκαν Ὅμηρός θ’ Ἡσίοδός τε
ὅσσα παρ’ ἀνθρώποισιν ὀνείδεα καὶ ψόγος ἐστίν,
κλέπτειν μοιχεύειν τε καὶ ἀλλήλους ἀπατεύειν.”

This means:

“Homer and Hesiod have attributed all things to the deities
that are such great blames and censures among human beings:
stealing, fornicating, and even deceiving one another.”

Xenophanes rejected the Homeric view of the deities, preferring instead to see the deities as abstract, idealized beings. This view was shared by many later Greek philosophers and writers. Nevertheless, the Homeric view of the deities was influential as well. Whose view of the deities, then, can we regard as the view of “mainstream” Greek society?

I believe that we can’t see any one particular view as the view of “mainstream” Greek society because Greek views about the deities were always diverse. The same, I believe, is true for many other societies. Trying to find a point at which people stop believing in “non-moralizing gods” and start believing in “moralizing gods” instead is therefore misguided; the two conceptions can coexist.

ABOVE: Fictional seventeenth-century engraving depicting how the artist imagined Xenophanes of Kolophon might have looked. No one knows what he really looked like.

Some very obvious observations about war

Wood follows this up by claiming that Turchin has made shocking and completely novel conclusions about the nature of war and civilization that mainstream historians find discomforting:

“One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale. ‘No one wants to accept that we live in the societies we do’—rich, complex ones with universities and museums and philosophy and art—’because of an ugly thing like war,’ he said. But the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones.”

In reality, Turchin’s observation that war causes some societies to thrive and others to be wiped out or subjugated is mind-numbingly obvious to every historian on the planet. In fact, this exact observation was made over 2,500 years ago by the ancient Greek poet Herakleitos of Ephesos (lived c. 535 – c. 475 BCE). Herakleitos famously writes in fragment 22 B53:

“Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους.”

This means (in my own translation):

“War is the father of all things and the ruler of all things; it reveals some to be deities and others to be human beings, it makes some people slaves and other people free.”

Modern academic historians, having already realized long ago that success in war can cause a culture to rise to prominence and failure in war can destroy a culture entirely, have moved on to more complicated questions. There is an entire field of history called postcolonial studies that focuses on how the industrialized world as we know it today is fundamentally a product of western European colonial violence.

If Turchin really knew what he was doing and he really wanted to contribute something to academic discourse, then he would have actually read some of the great work that has been produced by postcolonial historians and would actually be engaging with this work. Instead, he seems totally oblivious to the existence of this field and is instead trying to claim that the premise of the field is somehow his own unique conclusion.

ABOVE: Imaginative portrait of Herakleitos of Ephesos painted in around 1630 by the Dutch Baroque painter Johannes Moreelse. (No one knows what Herakleitos really looked like.)

“Essential goodness” of democracy?

Unfortunately, things only continue to get crazier. Wood continues:

“The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful. Instead, democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present, Turchin said. ‘There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.’”

It’s almost impossible to convey just how naïve Turchin and Wood seem to think most historians are. I don’t know of any contemporary historian who seriously believes that democracies are naturally successful because of their “essential goodness and moral improvement.”

For one thing, whether a political system is morally good has very little to do with whether it is successful. For another thing, just because a state claims to be a democracy does not mean that it is “essentially good.” In 416 BCE, when the Athenian democratic assembly voted to slaughter all the men of the island of Melos and sell all the women and children into slavery just because the Melians had insisted on remaining neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta, did they do it out of “essential goodness”?

Furthermore, I don’t think Turchin is asking the right kinds of questions here. What does it even mean for a democracy to “succeed”? I’m not convinced that the world has ever had a democracy that can truly be described as “successful” in the sense of living up to all the standards we today expect. So far, every attempt to create a democracy has been a failure in some way or another. Instead of asking why democracies “succeed,” maybe we should be asking ourselves why democracies invariably seem to fall short.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Athenian stele dated to around 337 or 336 BCE depicting Democracy crowning the Demos (i.e., the Populace)

“Trimming outliers”?

The article continues:

“Also unwelcome: the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country. In 2012, Turchin published an analysis of political violence in the United States, again starting with a database. He classified 1,590 incidents—riots, lynchings, any political event that killed at least one person—from 1780 to 2010. Some periods were placid and others bloody, with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle. Turchin excludes the ultimate violent incident, the Civil War, as a ‘sui generis event.’ The exclusion may seem suspicious, but to a statistician, ‘trimming outliers’ is standard practice.”

This perfectly illustrates how horribly flawed Turchin’s approach is. First, he comes up with a hypothesis. Then he sees that the Civil War, which killed more Americans than any other war in American history, doesn’t fit his hypothesis, so he simply dismisses it as an “outlier” that can be ignored and maintains his original hypothesis unaltered.

This is not how history is supposed to work! We are supposed to change our hypotheses to match the evidence, not change the evidence to match our hypotheses. If your hypothesis only works when you treat the evidence selectively, then it objectively isn’t a good hypothesis.

“Historians and journalists, by contrast, tend to focus on outliers—­because they are interesting—and sometimes miss grander trends.”

I’ve already established that events like the Civil War are not “outliers” that can be dismissed, but, in any case, the notion that historians only talk about events like the Civil War because they are “interesting” is silly. The Civil War was an extremely important event in American history with enormous, direct ramifications that continue to shape people’s lives, not to mention current social and political discourse.

Essentially, what Turchin seems to be saying here is, “Yeah, sure, the Civil War killed 655,000 Americans, forced radical changes to be made to the political system, and resulted in slavery being abolished. That’s all very interesting, but it’s not worth talking about because it doesn’t align well with my preconceived notions about what American history should be like.”

ABOVE: Photograph from April 1865 of Black men collecting and interring the remains of soldiers killed in battle during the Civil War

“Few would dare to write a history…”?

Alas, the article’s claims only grow even more demonstrably ridiculous:

“Turchin is nonetheless filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians with allergies not just to science but to a wide-angle view of the past. He places himself in a Russian tradition prone to thinking sweeping, Tolstoyan thoughts about the path of history. By comparison, American historians mostly look like micro-historians. Few would dare to write a history of the United States, let alone one of human civilization.”

This is possibly the dumbest section in the entire article and it clearly demonstrates that apparently neither Turchin nor Wood has ever once in his life even casually perused the history section of any library or bookstore. People have written literally millions of histories of the United States and of the world. I have at least a dozen such histories in my personal book collection right now.

Not only have historians written millions of books on the subject of world history, we’ve been doing it for literally thousands of years. The Greek historian Ephoros of Kyme (lived c. 400 – c. 330 BCE) wrote a history of the world over 2,350 years ago. He was closely followed by other Greek writers such as Polybios of Megalopolis (lived c. 200 – c.  118 BCE), Poseidonios of Apameia (lived c. 135 – c. 51 BCE), and Diodoros Sikeliotes (lived c. 90 – c. 30 BCE).

The fact that Turchin apparently thinks that “few” people were writing books about world history until he came along only proves the unfathomable depth of his own ignorance and arrogance. He has shown up to the party two thousand years late and yet had the audacity to claim that the party was all his idea to begin with.

ABOVE: Carving from the Stele of Kleitor of the Greek historian Polybios of Megalopolis, who wrote a book about the history of the world over 2,100 years ago

(Not) giving historians their due

Wood tries to avoid accusations of bias by briefly pretending to give historians their due. He writes:

“Historians have not, as a whole, accepted Turchin’s terms of surrender graciously. Since at least the 19th century, the discipline has embraced the idea that history is irreducibly complex, and by now most historians believe that the diversity of human activity will foil any attempt to come up with general laws, especially predictive ones. (As Jo Guldi, a historian at Southern Methodist University, put it to me, ‘Some historians regard Turchin the way astronomers regard Nostradamus.’)”

The wording of the very first sentence quoted here implies that Wood thinks that historians should just admit we’re irrelevant and accept Turchin’s way as the future and that he thinks the fact that we haven’t already done this is a sign that we simply aren’t “gracious.”

Then, to make things even worse, Wood misuses the phrase “irreducibly complex,” which is actually a buzzword used by Creationists to falsely argue that biological systems are so complex that they couldn’t possibly have evolved naturally without divine intervention.

This phrase obviously has nothing to do with the question of whether Turchin’s mathematical models can be used to predict the fates of human societies, but it is clear that Wood is using the phrase in this context because he is deliberately trying to create a false equivalence between historians and Creationists and to portray both groups as equally unscientific.

In reality, historians are empiricists not substantially different in kind from paleontologists or anthropologists. We study evidence that survives from the past and make hypotheses based on the available evidence. Creationists, on the other hand, are religious fundamentalists who deliberately distort the evidence to make it appear to support their preconceived beliefs.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Christian apologist Ken Ham posing with a dinosaur statue at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Real historians are not Creationists.

Unfortunately, Wood only goes even more off the rails in his next few sentences:

“Instead, each historical event must be lovingly described, and its idiosyncrasies understood to be limited in relevance to other events. The idea that one thing causes another, and that the causal pattern can tell you about sequences of events in another place or century, is foreign territory.”

This assessment is totally inaccurate and does not reflect what real historians are doing in any way.

First of all, the idea that historians insist on events being “lovingly” described is bizarre and obviously false. A historian may describe the Armenian genocide or the rise of Adolf Hitler, but they sure as Hell aren’t going to do so “lovingly.”

Moreover, the “idea that one thing causes another, and that the causal pattern can tell you about sequence of events in another place or century” is not at all “foreign territory”; it’s an uncontroversial and basic assumption that the vast majority of historians would agree with. We all recognize that there are connections to be made across time and space. I have had many conversations with historians who study other areas of history and take great pleasure in making connections across cultures and time periods.

The reason historians think Turchin is a crank isn’t because he is relating events in different times and places together, but rather because the specific relations he is trying to draw are simplistic and based on the false assumption that all societies in all time periods operate in fundamentally the same ways and that it is possible to predict the futures of societies knowing only a small number of factors.

ABOVE: Photograph of Adolf Hitler giving a speech in May 1937. If you think that historians insist that events like the rise of Hitler must be described “lovingly,” you are horribly mistaken.

Bizarrely assuming that most historians agree with Francis Fukuyama

The article manages one very brief moment of sanity talking about Dingxin Zhao, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, who succinctly explains that Turchin hasn’t adapted to his new subject matter and that he doesn’t really understand humans.

Unfortunately, the article immediately goes on to make even more false claims about what historians believe:

“Turchin’s approach is also Russian, or post-Soviet, in its rejection of the Marxist theory of historical progress that had been the official ideology of the Soviet state. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, so too did the requirement that historical writing acknowledge international communism as the condition toward which the arc of history was bending. Turchin dropped ideology altogether, he says: Rather than bending toward progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a never-­ending loop of boom and bust. This puts him at odds with American historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal democracy is the end state of all history.”

I have never in my life met a single historian who seriously believes that “liberal democracy is the end state of all history” or that there is any such thing as an “end state of all history” at all. It seems that Turchin has bizarrely assumed that most historians adhere to the long-debunked theories of Francis Fukuyama, who isn’t even a historian, but rather a political philosopher.

If history has any kind of shape at all, it is neither an “arc … bending toward progress” nor a “never-ending loop of boom and bust,” but rather a tangled, densely-interconnected web stretching on into infinity in all directions. The people who think that history is linear or circular are simply ignoring all the parts of the web that don’t conform to their own preconceived notions of how history is supposed to behave.

Moreover, the claim that Turchin has “dropped ideology altogether” is obviously false. Turchin may not be a Marxist or a progressive, but he has formulated his own ideology centered around scientism, “mathematization,” and the idea that “elite overproduction” is what causes societies to collapse. In short, Turchin is a Turchinist.

By the way, it’s a popular misconception that historians are supposed to be “neutral” and “impartial.” In reality, what matters is not a historian’s neutrality or impartialness, but rather their handling of the historical evidence. Good historians handle the evidence honestly and base on their conclusions on the evidence as much as possible; bad historians are people who tailor the evidence to match their preconceived beliefs or even outright lie about the evidence.

In the end, it is not possible for anyone to be completely free of ideology, because we are all human beings and we all have ideological beliefs of various kinds. We’re all biased in some way or another. Those of us who are honest will freely admit this. Anyone who claims to be absolutely impartial and unbiased is lying through their teeth.

Writing so-called “megahistories”

Moving on, a bit later in the article, Wood writes:

“Writing history in this sweeping, cyclical way is easier if you are trained outside the field. ‘If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it’s not actual historians,’ Walter Scheidel, an actual historian at Stanford, told me. (Scheidel, whose books span millennia, takes Turchin’s work seriously and has even co-written a paper with him.) Instead they come from scientific fields where these taboos do not dominate.”

The reason why the people who write history in a “sweeping, cyclical way” are virtually never trained historians is not because historians are superstitious fools being held back by “taboos,” but rather because the people writing “sweeping, cyclical” histories are delusional cranks who don’t understand historical methodology or why it is important. If they understood and appreciated why historians don’t write these kinds of pseudo-histories, they wouldn’t be writing them either.

“The genre’s most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), beheld 13,000 years of human history in a single volume. Its author, Jared Diamond, spent the first half of his career as one of the world’s foremost experts on the physiology of the gall­bladder.”

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is a deeply problematic book because it portrays essentially the entire course of human history as being strictly determined almost exclusively by geography. It fails to take into account non-geographic factors, such as individual decision-making, cultural attitudes, and beliefs.

Furthermore, despite purporting to be anti-colonialist, Diamond’s book ends up being, in many ways, an apologia for colonialism because it portrays European colonization as the inevitable consequence of geography and effectively seeks to absolve colonizers themselves of blame by portraying them as “accidental conquerors.”

ABOVE: Image of the front cover of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

Moving on:

“Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist who studies how children acquire parts of speech, has written a megahistory about the decline of violence across thousands of years, and about human flourishing since the Enlightenment.”

I’ve already written an entire article debunking Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined at length. The basic gist is that Pinker’s assessment of what the pre-modern world was like relies heavily on deeply unreliable sources, including works of outright fantasy.

For instance, his section on classical Greece in the first chapter of the book relies entirely on the Iliad and the Odyssey. To give you some impression of how historically reliable the Iliad is, it contains magical talking horses, a whole plethora of meddling anthropomorphic deities, and a scene in which a man literally fights a river. For some reason, Pinker thinks he can trust the Iliad as a portrayal of how violent everyday life was in the ancient world (even though it’s actually about the most devastating war in Greek mythology) and dismiss the parts that are obviously fictional.

Pinker’s book is also highly morally problematic because, among other things, it inaccurately claims that the modern world is objectively a better place than the pre-modern world in every possible way and that this state of improvement is to a large extent a result of the so-called “Enlightenment” that took place in western Europe in the Early Modern Period. He inaccurately portrays Indigenous peoples prior to European contact as violent savages and thereby maintains a narrative that supports the old lie that Europeans were helping Native people by colonizing them.

ABOVE: Image of one version of the front cover of Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

An observation about the sort of people who write these books

Wood does show some awareness that people like Peter Turchin, Jared Diamond, and Steven Pinker are viewed by real historians with scorn and he even makes a surprisingly keen observation about the sort of people who decide to write these works that Wood calls “megahistories”:

“Most historians I asked about these men—and for some reason megahistory is nearly always a male pursuit—used terms like laughingstock and patently tendentious to describe them.”

Wood is right here; writers of so-called “megahistories” are indeed nearly always men. More specifically, they’re nearly always cisgender, straight, white men from affluent western countries who have extensive background in STEM and nearly no background whatsoever in the humanities.

Why is this? My guess is that it is because our society is deeply sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and STEM-centric. People have a tendency to assume that straight, white, male “science guys” know everything, meaning these men tend to have much greater unearned confidence in themselves and are therefore more likely to assume that they know how to answer all history’s greatest questions, even when they really don’t.

ABOVE: Photographs (from left to right) of Peter Turchin, Jared Diamond, and Steven Pinker. Notice any similarities?

Some real-world consequences

Unfortunately, STEM scholars’ constant efforts to undermine and subvert the humanities have real-world consequences. Most people listen to scientists, but far fewer people listen to historians. When people with background in science say that historians are obsolete curmudgeonly pedants who obsess over useless minutiae, people have a tendency to believe them, which only exacerbates the undervaluation of the humanities in general.

Earlier this year, as part of a higher education reform package called “Job-Ready Graduates,” the Australian government lowered course fees for STEM classes by between 20% and 62%. They simultaneously raised the course fees for all humanities classes by up to 113%. The result of this is that students in Australia will have to pay vastly more for in a degree in the humanities than for a degree in STEM.

The government did this in a deliberate effort to compel students who might have otherwise wanted to pursue degrees in the humanities to pursue degrees in STEM instead. The Australian Education Minister Dan Tehan said that the government wanted to “incentivize students to make more job-relevant choices.” He declared: “A cheaper degree in an area where there’s a job is a win-win for students.”

In other countries around the world, there remains this popular perception that the humanities are obsolete and useless and that the only way to get a job is to go into STEM—despite the fact that studies consistently continue to find that the overwhelming majority of people with degrees in the humanities are happily and gainfully employed. It’s true that humanities graduates generally tend to make less money on average than computer science graduates, but they generally have no more difficulty finding jobs.

Actually, even the perception that humanities graduates inherently tend to make less money than STEM graduates is only true if you compare humanities versus STEM overall. There are some degrees in STEM fields that, on average, actually pay about the same as humanities degrees.

Notably, people with degrees in history, English, and most other humanities fields generally make about the same amount of money on average as people with undergraduate degrees in STEM fields like psychology and biology. For some strange reason, though, I don’t see anyone freaking out about how there are too many people getting “useless” degrees in biology!

Humanities departments are constantly in jeopardy of getting defunded or even simply gotten rid of. It is, unfortunately, quite a realistic possibility that, a generation or two from now, the only people researching history-related topics at many major universities may be arrogant STEM bros who can’t tell you who Herakleitos of Ephesos was, but who are absolutely convinced that the “fall of ancient Greece” (which wasn’t really a thing) was caused by “elite overproduction.”

Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.