THIS CAME UP IN MY YOUTUBE FEED yesterday. I almost didn't listen to it but the frost killed the rest of my garden last weekend so I have time I didn't have before.
Robert Lynch has taught history at a number of legitimate British and Irish universities, so he's not just some internet phony. Looking at his other videos, he's someone who really digs deeper into the common received lore that plagues history, especially "history" aimed at the non-specialist.
I especially liked how, if his demonstration that the entire notion of medieval "feudalism" is a fake construction which never existed is accurate, the legitimacy of those systems which were invented with it as one of their foundations, modernism, Marxism, etc. are seriously if not fatally flawed. I think that has been demonstrated by the histories of modernism, Marxism, etc. because we now have something their inventors didn't have to work with, a long enough history of their own under use to test those ideological framings of what purports to be reality.
Marxism in practice has certainly failed the test of history, even the Communists don't want Marxism. No more than our Republicans want a republic anymore. I've noted the statement of Marilynne Robinson about modernism, that it is a failed project, as well.
Lynch notes that the likes of Montesquieu and Voltaire invented the violent, irrational mythological view of that very long period called the "medieval period" and also invented 17th, 18th and 19th century anachronisms like "feudalism" to characterize and mischaracterize an extremely long and extremely complex number of years, decades and centuries - far too complex for such pseudo-sciency summation* - in order to promote the supposed rationality and, well, enlightenment that they wanted the world to adopt.
We are living in days when it is a very possible outcome of the election today that Trump will, at Israel's insistence, set off a nuclear weapon over Iran. And if that happens, Putin will feel free to use them in Ukraine (after the West talked the Ukraine government into nuclear disarmament, it wouldn't make that mistake a second time) and that is only emblematic of the lie that modernism, the "enlightenment" has brought us to a more rational and less violent and arbitrary world. Modernism and all its various associated ideologies, which include all of the Marxisms, fascism, Nazism, and what could prove to end in as bad a way, liberal democracy especially the American type of that, has been as if not more oppressive, murderous, violent and characterized by war as that 17-21st century cartoon of "feudalism" claimed it was. If America drops a nuke for the third time, that has definitively discredited our system of government with a strong presidency. I think the election of Trump already has and the world has woken up to that reality. The presidential system is one of the most dangerous of the schemes of government under the ideology of modernism. Violent, irrational, lawless, bigoted, ignorant, . . . under the most moderny of modern times brought to us by the framers and the U.S. Supreme Court and "free speech-press" absolutism, a very moderny notion.
Here, you can hear what he has to say about where this started.
* You take any history of fifteen hundred years or so of a very large area of land and condense it in the inverted telescope of history that pretends to characterize something so vast and it's going to look about the same. I'd say you can take the seven hundred years of modernism or the three hundred or so years of the "enlightenment" and condense it with the most exciting bits all that is presented and the "enlightenment" has been a horrific, destructive, violent, irrational bloodbath.
Historians who pretend they are doing history are as pseudo-scientific as those in the so-called social sciences. The modern person's notion of what I just said would be that I just reduced the practice of history to a minor role, beneath science, but that's not what I think. History, honestly and carefully done, is as legitimate a way of knowing reality as the real sciences are. In fact, I think it is one of the most helpful practices for the understanding of reality that is too big, too varied, too complex and too reliant on things like human minds which are not honestly or adequately treatable by science. Math, physics, chemistry are not going to teach us anything about how humans can avoid those catastrophes that recur in human history, history can give us some helpful information to do that.
History can come up with more absolute knowledge about human culture, politics, law, etc. than just about any science. There is no room for rational doubt about many of the documented facts of history. But that becomes problematic when assertions are made that other "facts" which may not be facts at all are presented as if they are the same kind of thing.
That is one of the worst practices of history as taught in schools and, far, far worse, the sources of most Peoples' idea of history today, show biz, popular novels, "historical novels." I've noted how bizarre the idea of "science fiction" is but, since so many readers and watchers are apt to mistake the fiction for history, "historical fiction" is as bizarre and perhaps as dangerous a concept. It is especially dangerous when such pseudo-history is made for ideological motives, as, indeed, much purported history is. I didn't say that history is a perfect lens with which to examine its subject matter. Like all of human culture, human ideas, the product of human minds, it is a risky thing that can only honestly be undertaken if honesty and a determination to tell the truth override that. But that will get me into the topic of what's wrong with academia and professional journals which is a bigger topic.
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