Cognitive Bias in History

I just started reading Barbara Tuchman’s “The Proud Tower” and, while I’m only in the introduction, I’m already enjoying it. I read “The Guns of August” after hearing that JFK read and re-read it and thought it was indispensable. I too went back a couple of months later and read the whole thing again, not because JFK used to but because it was so damn interesting and readable.

I love learning about history - particularly history that helps you see our current world better. Walking through English villages and being able to explain why there are lots of houses from a given time period, or why schools might or might not exist, or where a pub’s name comes from…I just like the feeling of everything being built upon something, and spying the ‘something’ from between the cracks.

The Proud Tower promises that it’ll cover world history (or, Anglophone and Western European history) in the years before the first world war. This is a period that I’ve not read a huge deal about, and certainly not in isolation. The introduction though - well, it’s already a gem.

Tuchman says that she is going to move beyond the “golden age” narrative, explaining that that narrative only took off after the World War - that it was people looking back at the war, and the time before the war, and painting a picture of opulence and joy that was absent from contemporary accounts of the period.

Isn’t that just wonderful? Of course, after 4 years of terrible hardship and barely imaginable slaughter, people’s recollections of what came before that are going to be suspect. I wonder how many historical narratives fall into exactly the same pattern: a dark time leads people to re-evaluate and wonder “didn’t we have it good, then?”

I see it in politics, where I’m old enough to remember the derision that was poured on Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May. Now, it’s in vogue to remark on how good we had it, when we compare those to “the current lot”. I also wonder how much of this effect we see when people say that school years are your best, or that teenagers don’t know how good they have it.

To an extent, I agree that school years can be your best - little responsibility, long days spent with your friends, learning and growing and discovering the world…what’s not to like? Well. If I remember rightly, quite a lot. Teenagers don’t think being a teenager is the best thing ever, and they’ve probably got quite a good argument as to why it isn’t. New parents don’t often think looking after a 1 year old is the best thing ever…but parents of teenagers often do.

We normalise the wonders of our position, and acutely feel the challenges such that we remember our past more fondly and struggle with the limitations of our present. When I think of my life pre-children, I romanticise the elements that are unattainable now: the travel, the free-time, meals out. Freedom. At the time, I’m sure I lamented the travel, filled my free-time with projects, and never ate out.

What’s all that got to do with history? Tuchman says she’s only going to focus on contemporaneous accounts, in order to avoid this bias. She says that it’s hard to square the idea of the first world war emerging from such opulence, peace and joy…clearly the world wasn’t all sunshine and daisies. Sunshine and daisies don’t lead to the Great War.

I’m looking forward to seeing what was happening.