The Story of History
How do you prevent a bear attack in the middle of nowhere? Bring a theist and an atheist along with you. Even grizzlies would not want to interrupt their constant arguments. You could call it bickering but saying so weirdly unites them against you and you do not want that. I would rather be mauled by a bear.
One of the big pleasures of social gatherings is that you inevitably witness arguments over topics that you would have otherwise never thought about. The best part is, if you play your cards right, you can somehow relegate yourself to the audience — you could look disinterested while still lending an ear, you could jump in and moderate the whole discussion (risky, takes a lot of guts) or you could just adamantly stay on the fence despite feeling like how I feel in a quantum computing class (I don’t get it, I will never get it). A while ago, I happened to witness one such argument as I deftly put on my disinterested/clueless face.
The theist in the discussion said that Hindu astrology predicted a natural calamity of epic proportions in 2020. He went on to add that India’s ancient methods are way more modern than is given credit for and that India’s ancient cultural zeitgeist continues to be one of the best. Clearly, the atheist denied, pointing out historical and scientific fallacies around these claims. He added that religion-based history is more hearsay than history. And hence started another argument on what is hearsay and what is not.
So much to digest from that conversation and all I took was a single question that wasn’t asked — what is history? How did that word come into existence? As a professional software developer, I used the only skill I can be proud of — googling.
Until late 14th century, history had a slightly different meaning — “relation/connection of incidents”. This, in turn, was derived from an archaic French word “estorie”, a synonym to multiple words (quite concerning how that is) — story, chronicle, history.
English is a weird language, isn’t it? It is truly global (and British) in the sense that the language derives so much from other languages that it really does not own much itself. I digress.
“Historia”, a word in Greek and Latin can mean either a record/account/narrative of inquiries/past events or a story. This, once again, is derived from “histor” and ”historein” which means “to inquire” and “a judge/wise man” respectively. And that in turn, is derived from a Proto-Indo-European word, “weid” — to witness.
I wonder if people knew all along that history, in itself, has a touch of fiction in it. Irrespective of what evidences we might have on a past event, we can only produce a narrative or an inference. If the evidence is a scripture of sorts, that could very well serve as a narrative too. And that is probably why history is considered both an art and a science. We will never truly know everything about any event from the past because there is always a level of inaccuracy expected. The same can be said about predicting the future as well, which is a mathematical fact.
This led me to finally walk towards what that conversation was really about — hearsay vs history. At what point do we deem something hearsay? How far are we allowed to deviate from an evidence in an attempt to extrapolate or make an educated guess? British comedian Ricky Gervais once said that if we destroy all science books in the world and start from scratch, we would come up with the same concepts again. I wonder if the same can be said about history in particular. We would run into the same evidences again but would the narratives connecting said evidences remain exactly the same? Based on that logic, can we say that believing in historical narratives rather than theism, is a form of reverence too?
At the end of the day, the source to every story in the world is “trust me bro”. In some cases we trust and in others we don’t. And I would like to believe that these choices shape our ideologies. But there is one thing that none of us can deny. We all love a good story, don’t we!
