History and its 50 shades of Grey

History has always been a subject of interest for humankind. The curiosity in questions like ‘Where do we come from?’, ‘who were our ancestors?’, ‘What happened back then and why?’ have always intrigued us. Perhaps, more today than ever before.

History plays a dominant role in building our belief system. Especially, the history taught in schools. If not all, for most people, those history lessons are the only source of knowledge of our past. Despite that, we hardly ever challenge the history taught in schools. If it was in the textbook, then that’s the truth for us.

The boiling question is — are they explicitly telling us the truth in our textbooks? There is a high chance that the government is manipulating our history. And I am not talking about today’s government or the government of any particular nation for that matter. Here the quintessential question mark is on all governments, throughout the ages, across nations. The worst part is we don’t even have a remote sense of which government manipulated history and to what extent!
What government has to gain, you ask? Here is what they accomplish with distorted history:
“Within the next generation, I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning… is more efficient, as instruments of governments, than clubs and prisons… by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.” — Aldous Huxley (in a letter to George Orwell, October 21, 1949)

For the sake of simplicity, let us assume there was no distortion of facts by any government, and they passed on as events happened. Still, there will be a distortion of facts in history. Majorly, we study history through the documents & writings of contemporary intellectuals and scholars. There is a high chance that contemporary intellectuals were biased toward a particular school of thought or the specific narrative of the event. We are entirely reliant on the assumption that intellectuals and scholars who documented the proceedings of the event are conveying the truth, and there is no iota of distortion or manipulation of facts as they happened. With this in mind, we can fairly say, the history that we know is reasonably biased. We can try to diagnose the agenda of the authors to whom we are referring. However, that won’t be conclusive. Essentially, we should take every document and writing with a pinch of salt.

Moreover, can we call commonly accepted opinions ‘history’? or maybe, tell the lie so many times that the lie becomes the truth? Ultimately, when we are presented with several versions of the same historical event, we tend to accept the version which suits us the best, based on our inherent beliefs and biases.

All historical events are a homogeneous amalgamation of facts, opinions, and imaginations. The only variation is in the percentage of these factors. Lesser distortion with the opinions and imaginations of authors takes historiography closer and closer to the actual events. And vice versa higher percentage of opinions and imaginations in historiography take the events farther from actual happenings. We can plot the ‘Normal bell curve’ with various percentage combinations of these two variables.

The space under the curve represents all known historical facts and events. While there are small numbers of events and facts, which are least distorted, there is also a part where certain historical events that are distorted the most. However, for most of the events, there is a different proportion of distortion of facts. Now it is an individual prerogative to decide which historical event lies where in the bell curve.

Another perspective to understand this amalgamation is the black-and-white coding of facts.
If we assume all historically correct and true events as white and events purely borne out of imagination as black, we can say that most of the historical events that we know are grey in color. Again, now it is an individual prerogative to decide which shade of grey applies to which historical event. Various events throughout the human timeline lie in the various shades of grey. Some events lie in darker shades while some in fainter. Having said that there are some events that are as white as it can get and some as shady and scornful as black. But most of the events, opinions, and historiographies lie within these two extremes, with varying shades.
We often try to classify things into black and white, good and bad, but more often than not, this world is grey, and so is history.

What is the solution to this? There is no simple solution, considering how we as humans are wired. We are prone to having biases and beliefs which are deeply rooted in our subconscious.
Still, we can grow the practice of taking a slightly larger view of the historical event that we may come across. Think in a neutral way. Think from the perspective of the other party.
Also, we should keep in mind that, historians who are theorizing various events of history, are the possibilities which they think “might have happened” and shouldn’t take them as the only truth.
Try to keep biases aside, think neutrally, and assess historical events thoroughly!

-@Mirakee