Tweet

Zach Weinersmith

29 Mar, 11 tweets, 2 min read

Historian of the US West, Patricia Limerick on how all groups want history to give them an uncomplexly special place:

"*Everyone* wants faith-affirming history; the disagreement is just a question of which faith any particular individual wants to see affirmed. Each group wants history to provide guidance, legitimacy, justification, and direction for their particular chosen group.

These contests over history, often focused on the [American] West, resemble and echo more familiar contests over religious faith.

Different versions of history have become creation stories or origin stories for the people who treasure them, and, with so much feeling at stake, the clash between these sacred tales grows increasingly bitter."

This is something I've been thinking about broadly as how a lot of essays have both their formal content and their, to use an overused word, signalling content, which makes otherwise dry stuff very subject to anger.

I've been thinking about this as we move into writing stuff about utopianism in Space Settlement proposals. I suspect using accurate history of the US frontier will rankle people, not because of formally wrong facts, but because it indicates us as anti human achievement to some.

One interesting addendum, which I gather from reading lots of this stuff, is the way modern people are strewn with the remains of old ideas. People have views derived from particular understandings of history at particular times. This is very present in space. Examples:

Some people have a more old-style "space as destiny" conception, which was common in the 60s. In the 70s, you have more "space will stop the coming environmental calamity." What's striking is these are both claims about what it is and postures toward how it should be.

It's pretty clear now that the late 60s environmental calamities (massive death due to water/food shortage, etc.) didn't materialize, AND it's pretty clear that vast space spending wasn't the solution anyway. But the basic ideas persist even though born in different times.

One final note, back to the original quote: I found an amazon review of one of Limerick's books where a guy went on and on about how she's a revisionist historian who hates white men. This was bizarre, because the book in question bent over backward to be even-handed/complex.

It occurs to me that Limerick has the answer to why - questioning the (formerly) standard Western narrative isn't just doing history - for some people it's assaulting their personal history, their sense of who they are and what their value is. So, no amount of caveats is enough.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @ZachWeiner

Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

31 Mar

I think there's an informal fallacy that's fairly common which is something like "believing that all the people and views I dislike are part of a cohesive movement." There's a corollary assumption which is something like "everyone in my coalition agrees with me."

I think these two operate to make each other worse, because if you believe your enemies are unified and powerful that's scary, and if you assume your coalition is not a coalition but a cohesive unit, you overestimate how popular your own views are.

There are lots of examples of all this stuff, but one is the use of "postmodernism" which partially describes something real (academic bullshit) but also is used to describe anything from really non-postmodern leftism to trans rights to feminism.

Read 4 tweets

Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

31 Mar

Fun Pagan History:

The tradition of the Easter Bunny is actually an early environmental sustainability ritual. Rabbits are a food source that multiplies rapidly.

By tradition, in pre-Christian Europe, spring was a time you would hunt young rabbits both as a food source and as a means to control the rabbit population. People would often bring eggs on these hunts as a portable food source.

This evolved into a tradition of setting out caches of eggs for hunters on their trips, which were later colored both for aesthetic reasons and to make them easier to find.

Read 6 tweets

Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

30 Mar

For the Space Book I've been reading a LOT about communes. One thing I've come to believe: A single generation can probably do real capital-S socialism commune life. I don't think it can be carried through generations.

Or, to the extent it can be done successfully, it's generally not so much socialisty as religious, with serious restrictions on things like education and interaction with the outside world.

Linklater, himself a former communard, said the big misconception is that eliminating private property eliminates the need for governance. He said it meant *more* governance because you have to enforce behaviors instead of just using money/property to incentivize.

Read 6 tweets

Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

30 Mar

There's a lot of talk among space people about the importance of frontiers, implicitly or explicitly based on the Turner frontier thesis of 1893. I finally decided to sit down and read Turner's essays. Here's how he talks about the conquest of Native Americans:

"[When countries in Europe] expanded, [they] met other growing peoples whom [they] conquered. But in the case of the United states we have a different phenomenon.”

“The most significant thing about the American frontier is that it lies at the hither edge of free land.”

This is why arguing about the use of the frontier metaphor isn't just semantics - there's a whole notion of how space will be, embedded in the advocacy discourse, and it's based on stuff that, aside from moral issues, is simply wrong.

Read 9 tweets

Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

30 Mar

Here's something interesting:

Frederick Jackson Turner, creator of the "frontier thesis" of American history that dominated scholarship for 70 years, and created much of the Western Myth, gave his first paper on the topic in 1893 in Chicago.

Apparently the audience was bored.

According to a person who attended the audience was indifferent, and nobody asked any questions. Newspapers didn't report on it.

According to Faragher 1994, it took off due to the 1893 economic crisis, which it was thought to help explain.

I find this absolutely incredible, if true. I take it no historians 20 years later cared about the connection to the crisis, but the theory had gotten firmly planted. I wonder if this isn't a frequent trend occurrence.

Read 6 tweets

Zach Weinersmith

@ZachWeiner

3 Feb

Astronaut Frank Borman's biography is mostly pretty straightforward, but he gets oddly eloquent when talking about his family. This is him recalling his thoughts before his flight on Gemini 7. He didn't sleep at all the night prior to launch:

“I didn’t feel fear; I felt agonizing concern for the wife and sons I loved. I didn’t want to be a heroic casualty in man’s conquest of space and I was not oblivious to the hazards involved. I wanted to stay a living, breathing husband and father.

There's a dichotomy in all this, a kind of conflict of interest. On one hand, there's a sense of mission accomplishment that becomes a very self-centered thing; the mission has been pounded until it alone is in sharp focus, with everything else blurred.

Read 5 tweets

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!