History is not science

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

1. History is not science … There is practically no scientific approach, no scientific knowledge, practically no scientific discussion, no scientific knowledge of phenomena. In history, either completely or for the prevailing mass of cases, it is impossible to use verification and falsification - the criteria of scientific knowledge. Finally, in history, either an experimental method is either impossible or practically insignificant, which also takes History out of the framework of a rigorous science.

Then what is History?

2. History is an offshoot of Literature (this can be seen even if you look chronologically). Yes, specific, the same as journalism, and then propaganda, PR, GR, marketing and so on (I call it according to the degree of conditional distance from the main Tree). The first historical treatises, chronicles, etc. things were created as Literary Works, first of all. And in subsequent literature-centricity is also visible to the naked eye. This is neither bad nor good, it is a statement of fact. The place of History is somewhere behind journalism and journalism and closer to PR and propaganda, if we move away from pure (relatively clean, I hope this is understandable) Literature.

So Historical fact in most cases (not always, but in 60-75% of cases, and the deeper into the abyss of time, the higher the percentage, and therefore some "epochs" are completely - 95-100% - clogged with literary characters and events) Literary fact.

This approach completely removes the childish discussion about revisionism, conspiracy therapies, etc. ravings of feeble-minded idiots cosplayed by corporations and states. Literature formif you like. With strong propaganda content. Therefore, a brilliant historian is not the one who stupidly memorized a bunch of "facts" (the battle of Las Navas de Tolos, the battle of Azincourt, the battle of Courtraus, the battle of …), but the one who understands literary history itself … A good historian is, first of all, a writer.

3. The main problem of History (if it is a problem at all, because this is not a bug, but a feature), however, is not the point. Well, literature, and what is it? On Earth, if you take it seriously and look, there is not a single area of scientific knowledge that is in any way developed at all, haha.

The main problem (feature) of History is that our civilization has short information base … A short informational background, if you will. Which, by the way, also reduces itself information reliability concept … Karl Jaspers partly called this "axial time", of course, proceeding from his literary approach. Literary writer Galkovsky calls this the "optical range", below which the level of reliability and adequacy of information is quickly reduced to zero. These are 1400-1500s in Europe and with a shift of 100-150 years - present-day Russia. Why this happened is hard to say. It is possible that brilliant "antiquity" faced some kind of catastrophe, and the information base fell into a kind of bottleneck.

Perhaps this explains the "focal nature" of the oldest information layers available to us.

I will give a short example to make it clear. From the history of Muscovy of the 16th century, extremely few documents of this kind have come down to scribes (category, order as a form) books. This is partly because the administrative system was just being formed (for example, scribal books for monasteries were required only by the decision of Stoglav, and this is exactly the middle of the 16th century, but these books that have come down to us can be counted on one hand!). It is believed that in Muscovy the first census was carried out in the 30s-40s of the 16th century, the second - in the 70s-80s of the 16th century. As far as I know, the primary sources have not reached us, and the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA) contains copies of the 18th century. They were put into circulation even later. For example, the young "historical literature" of Russia noticed the Novgorod scribes only in the middle of the 19th century (the first review was published in 1841 only).

The population of Novgorod was estimated in the range from 20-25 thousand people to 50 thousand. At the same time, the city - according to the scribes - was the concentration of a monstrous number of artisans - up to 80% of the city's population was engaged in handicrafts (4,500 out of 5,500 households in the middle of the 16th century). How many people were “destroyed” in Novgorod during the pogrom of 1570? The numbers run from 1,500 to 60,000. Take whatever you like. That is, this is all "focal" and non-specific information, and the very concept of "yard" in the scribes was of a fiscal nature at that time, and not demographic. The same as the taxable area of arable land, which was called squeeze.

But deeper than the 16th century, from which we got flickering, conditionally reliable (through rewriting in the 18th century) and very episodic and incomplete information, there is nothing at all … Only literary works of a later time (chronicles), describing, as it is believed, then, "sho bulo". And you can quickly get tired of the abundance of their literary characters.

But if there is little direct information, then is it possible to use indirect analysis? I somehow drew attention to the fact that there are obvious "stick-ups" even where spots of light are already appearing. For example, the official Russian history says that Slavic degenerates for more than 300 years minted fucking "penny-scales" and were happy about it. From the time of Dmitry Donskoy to Peter I inclusive - from the 70s of the XIV century until the first "decade" of the XVIII century! Moreover, this system was clearly "cargo", plus it was very inconvenient, non-functional and low-tech. Similar techniques of minting coins were used on the colonial periphery of Europe, but not for 300 years, but on the strength of several decades, a maximum of a hundred - Scandiania, Poland and Lithuania, Muscovy, Spanish colonies in America, and so on.

Another "gluing" is pushing deep into the so-called. the "dark ages" of the Early Middle Ages of strange, often beautifully cast, coins. These are the so-called silver coins and goldsmiths of Vladimir I, Yaroslav the Wise and Svyatopolk, after which their production for some reason disappears and a coinless period begins (after the middle of the 11th century). A similar situation was in Poland, Scandinavia, Ireland, England (only in the 7th-8th centuries), etc. the periphery of Europe. Apparently, this is such a standard, like endless knights, kings, tournaments, etc. wrestling.

But these are all particulars. What matters is that we live in a world where storage, accumulation and transmission of information have their own history and this history, alas, is relatively short, if you measure it chronologically continuous … And chronology is an additional dimension of all the same information (its qualitative characteristic, let's say).

As for the storage of information, this is partly clarified when studying the question, when in the same Europe appeared the first libraries, the first inventories of these libraries and catalogs (sic!), Which of the storage documents and catalogs came down to us in the form of primary sources, and which in the form later censuses … This does not touch upon the issue of "state" (departmental) or "corporate" archives, because the state (corporation) without accounting, documents and administrative apparatus are not functional. For example, in Muscovy, the Local Order (izba) was one of the main organs (the exact date of its creation is unknown, existed until 1721), came in various forms and still have not really studied documents for the 17th century, there is something, perhaps even from the 16th century. In Europe, there are such documents in the maximum form from the XIII-XIV centuries, but not everything is so good with them either, they survived in fragments (for example, the oldest massaria of Kafa is 1374-1381).

Next, the question arises of the accumulation of information - on what media were created, how they were stored, how they were saved, and so on.

Understand, the tales about the fact that in some damp monastery basement they suddenly found "the library of Ivan the Terrible", where it quietly and peacefully rotted for 100 years, this is in its purest form a cartoon. Because even now any art critic will tell you how this or that level of humidity, light, etc. affects parchment, paper, ink (what were they?), Wood, not to mention mold and fungi. It is already known what happens to wood, parchment or paper if the humidity level in the storage area rises by 10-20%.

But with this everything is clear. And so History is an interesting thing, you need to understand it. Because every "revisionist" should know her for himself and for the "that guy" with the brainwashed, talking like a capercaillie about the "Tatar-Mongol invasion" and "Kiev Zasrus". From which neither archives, nor documents, nor even coins have come down to us (not counting the obviously antique pieces of silver and gold coins).