Is History Lindy?
Nassim Taleb says something is Lindy if its chances of longevity increase the longer it’s been around. Lindy-ness is a probabilistic concept, not an ontological (substantive) one—it describes a statistical reality based on our limited information, not the actual thing itself, whose longevity does not depend on our probability models. Taleb’s example is Broadway plays—the longer you’ve been on Broadway, the higher your chances of staying on Broadway. It’s also not a moral concept—things can be toxic or unfair or dumb and be Lindy; good things can be delicate.
Lindyness is about adaptability, not whether something ought to be.
By History I mean the modern academic discipline, as developed by Ranke in the 19th century and exported to universities the world over: the study and science of what “really happened” by means of “evidence” as opposed to what laypeople simply remember. Sure, Herodotus wrote Histories, and is credited as the grandfather of History, but his works are filled with supernatural occurrences. Thucydides, who wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War, had no compunction stylizing the speeches he “records,” rather than giving them over verbatim—his goals were primarily moral and political.
The notion of historians as gatekeepers of fact is a relatively recent turn. The idea that you’d study history so as not to repeat it is not universally accepted and does not seem to be as Lindy as the idea that good stories (as told around a fire) or in the form of novels or TV series are where we should go for life lessons.
If newspapers write the first draft of history, and we’re living in an age of “fake news,” where people pick the narratives they want to believe, why should historians who preserve the second and third and fourth drafts of history fair any better than journalists?
In the end, won’t the death of the referee as described by Michael Lewis in his excellent podcast Against the Rules spell the end of the historical study of the past and the return of the mythology?
In a thousand years, who will have the authority to write books about 2020—who will be believed? Harvard professors or Virtual Reality designers who’ve gamified the past, manufacturing memory “experiences” for customers based upon their customized preferences? Who will dare to deny the Holocaust deniers their “choose your own adventure” if the customer is always right? Maybe History will become nothing but what we upvote. Then again, perhaps this has always been the case in popular culture.
Evidence-based argument is for elites.
If this excites you, why? If it scares you, what will you do about it? If you think I’m wrong and academic history is here to stay for a long time, what’s your reasoning?
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