Who Wrote that Book?

Most of my life was largely guided by unquestioned assumptions: my parents loved me, school was a good thing, following the rules was a guarantee of success. I know that my parents loved me, but the other stuff? Well, let’s just say that I take very little at face value these days. An accumulation of lived experience, books read for both pleasure and edification, and paying attention have combined to make me more savvy, less trusting, more skeptical, less impressed. Thanks to Leo Tolstoy and Gary Saul Morson, I have good words for illustrating what I mean. In Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potential in ‘War and Peace’, Morson explains: “Tolstoy believed that novels constitute a fundamental falsification of reality because they assume that they can establish identity by telling a coherent story. In fact, biographies—whether overtly fictional as in novels or apparently truthful—misrepresents the lives of individuals in much the same ways that historiography misrepresents the ‘lives’ of nations.”

Here again, I get back to Jordan Peterson’s differentiation between a world of objects and a world of actions. First, there’s the question of why a historian has chosen to study a specific time period, war, or life; second, since it is impossible to include everything that affected any event or life, we need to keep in mind that historians pick and choose what they want to share and how; and third, there’s the still timely reminder that “history is written by the victors” and the likelihood of a victor including in that history anything that makes his side look unflattering, immoral, or illegal is rather slim.