narrative and history

This is a very strange essay. Alex Rosenberg writes that narrative history “fails to explain anything because it attributes causal responsibility for the historical record to factors that contemporary neuroscience reveals to be fictions — convenient ones, but fictions nonetheless.”

The causal factors narrative history invokes, such as the beliefs and desires that are supposed to drive human actions, rely on a scientifically unwarranted theory of mind. It‘s one that breeds emotions such as anger, shame, jealousy, retribution, and vengeance, and has wreaked havoc throughout recorded history.

But Rosenberg illustrates this point by pointing to works of narrative history that, he says, have been enormously consequential in shaping people’s thoughts and actions: they have “changed the world in profound ways.” That is, he “attributes causal responsibility” to these works of narrative history: he says of one work that it “provoked political activity and significant change in the values, especially among people of the Left, who found themselves surrendering illusions and forsaking commitments that had been among their most cherished.” So, in Rosenberg’s view, historical narratives offer unjustifiable accounts of the world, except in the case of his historical narrative, which attributes causal power accurately. One wonders how he alone manages to escape the curse of meaning-imposition that lies upon all other stories.

And there’s something else odd here. His two prime examples of world-changing historical narratives are Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. I’m not sure I’d call either of those “historical narratives” in any straightforward sense, though both of them have historical elements. But I’ll waive the point with regard to Mein Kampf.

Not with regard to The Gulag Archipelago, though. I think everything Rosenberg says about it in this essay is wrong.

Let’s start with this:

… what we can’t deny is that “The Gulag Archipelago” had a profound effect on people everywhere and on late 20th-century events.

Again: Everybody else’s attempts to say what did or did not have profound effects is the result of a bad theory of mind, but Rosenberg alone is exempt from this critique. But let’s resume, and look at what he says this “profound effect” was:

The reason is obvious: It moved people. It had an enormous impact on people’s emotions and motivations.

Rosenberg’s consistent emphasis is on The Gulag Archipelago as a generator of emotions. And certainly many people did respond emotionally to it. But the primary work of Solzhenitsyn’s book was informative.

People inside and outside the Soviet Union knew, of course, that the regime sent people to prison, and that some of those people did not come back. What they did not know — until Solzhenitsyn informed them — was just how vast the Soviet prison system was, and how systematic. They did not know the policies and procedures, the laws which the system claimed to enforce and to which it appealed; they did not know how the system moved a person from arrest to interrogation to trial to conviction; they did not know where those convicted were sent or why; they did not know why the prisoners who never never returned never returned, whether they were formally executed, or died of malnutrition or exposure, or were beaten to death, or died of untreated illness, or indeed simply lived on, beyond the knowledge of outsiders to the system, in one camp or a series of camps; they did not know why some prisoners were released.

Solzhenitsyn called his book An Experiment in Literary Investigation: an experiment because he followed no pre-existing generic form; literary because he writes as artfully as he can, stylistically and organizationally; investigation because this is not a story but rather a forensic analysis, a gathering, sorting, and deploying of vast tracts of information, taken from Solzhenitsyn’s own experience, yes, but that of many others: “Material for this book was given me in reports, memoirs, and letters by 227 witnesses.” Photographs of some of them are scattered throughout the three volumes.

Though there are narrative portions of the text — a series of chapters describes the progress of a typical zek through the belly of the beast — it is largely, as I say, forensic: Solzhenitsyn is saying to the Gulag, You say you are the Law, you say you merely follow and enforce the Law; very well; I shall use the language and the procedures of law to expose you.

And the accumulation of this evidence leads not to a story but to a thesis:

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology — that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.

Evildoing on a human scale has what Solzhenitsyn calls a “threshold magnitude,” a maximum extension. But ideology allows the human to break through that threshold, to become, in this one abysmal sense, trans-human: when he “crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.”

Solzhenitsyn does not say Listen to my tale. He says, I, a witness, have amassed the evidence: look upon it, if you dare.