Thread by @shrikanth_krish

This view that we should always engage in "monkey balancing" and that history has no real heroes and villians, to my mind, is undesirable

The quest for nuance should not stifle narrative construction

Insight usually stems from extreme partisan narratives

https://twitter.com/AKanisetti/status/1192608077448507393

If history is bereft of any passion and emotional stake, then it has little use to anybody except specialists

Different sections of society ask different WHAT IF questions and it is precisely these counterfactuals that make history a matter of general interest

E.g. A Pakistani Muslim may wonder - Oh...why did we Muslims lose India? What caused the Mughal empire to decline post 1700? How could we have prevented that?

That's perfectly legitimate

Similarly a Hindu nationalist in India may wonder -

What caused Islam to gain a share of over 25% in the subcontinent? Could HIndu society have done anything better to have prevented this?

That's an equally legitimate question

Now the cliche will go -

Hey...we must all respect facts. No matter our political orientation. Opinions can differ

Fair. But this implies facts and values are to be conceived as separate spaces altogether

The Fact-value distinction itself can be called into question

E.g. You could argue that Aurangazeb paved the way for Mughal decline by being too ambitious and overstretching himself in the Deccan

Others might argue - he was not aggressive enough

Let's take the example of Vietnam

David Halberstam in his great book put forward the view that America engaged with an enemy that it understood poorly, and that its slavish adherence to the domino theory caused a misappraisal of the threat in VIetnam

Now a conservative retort could be -

America was winning in Vietnam. But too much kowtowing to public opinion and lack of aggression prevented them from forcing home the advantage

Both these views are legitimate in their own right

Once you have a narrative, you look for arguments and "facts" to buttress the narrative

Some narratives will stick. Others won't

But the wisdom of the crowds and the "test of time" will decide which ones survive and last

But if you dont have people building narratives at all, it means the topic in question is of little interest to anyone

E.g. Political organization of Alaskan natives pre 1700

It doesn't evoke a lot of passion. Unlike for e.g

"Fall of Mughal Empire"
or
"Fall of Roman empire"

The greater the public interest in a field, the more the narratives

Sure. This will come with some propaganda

But it will also stimulate much original scholarship

E.g. The Whig conception of history gave us many great historians - the foremost among them being Thomas Babington Macaulay!

What made him distinctive was his Whiggery and liberalism

Similarly what made Churchill distinctive as a historian was his great interest in battles and great men

What made Marx distinctive was his scepticism of the influence of "Great Men" , and instead his faith in a materialist conception of history

So each of these historians is worth reading today precisely because of their political orientation

Take that away. And they'd be footnotes as historians