The glory of progress

Something I run into relatively regularly is the idea that people in the past were stupider than modern people. (Granted, it's not usually stated as bluntly as it was today, when a student explained something we were talking about by saying literally that medieval people were stupider than modern people, but the idea frequently underlies other comments.) I'm curious about how students define "the past" and "modern" in thinking about this - I suspect that they actually draw (entirely unconsciously) on an old school, secular humanist Enlightenment vision of history that disses the Middle Ages, and that they don't actually believe that the ancient Greeks and Romans were less intelligent than people today - but I'm sure that this idea pops up in many fields of history. Apart from the Enlightenment vision, I think much of it derives from an idea of progress - that past history is a linear progression to the present and that progress entails improvement: hence, people today must be smarter than those in the past.

This is one of those fallacies that I, and many instructors I know, have railed against many times. But I feel a little unfair in doing so, because I can actually pinpoint the moment when, viscerally, I came to understand what I now tell my students. I'm sure that before that time I didn't blurt out in class that people in the past were stupider than those today. But somewhere I absorbed the idea that because medieval sources didn't try to tell us modern people what we wanted to know, they were deficient. They didn't write "real" history.

Well, duh - of course they didn't write "real" history. They didn't know what it was. Not because they were stupid, but because the concept didn't exist. They didn't write for the same reasons we do; they had their own reasons. History meant something else entirely.

My realization came, embarrassingly late, in grad school, when I read Walter Goffart's The Narrators of Barbarian History. I think this was really the first time that I saw a scholar say, explicitly, bluntly, that because we find particular medieval authors hard to understand and that because they don't write what we would write, this does NOT mean that the texts are corrupt or deficient or inferior. It was one of those great DUH! moments. Clearly, if Goffart needed to say this so clearly, I wasn't the only one who felt that way (and I suspect that those studying the early Middle Ages have to combat such assumptions even more than I do, given how many of their texts only survive in later copies, sometimes copies of copies of copies, and that it's easy to explain difficulty away by saying that the text is corrupt). Nonetheless, his book illuminated for me some of the assumptions lurking in unexamined corners of my brain.

In my defense, I'll point out that when writing my senior thesis in college, I read an AWFUL lot of nineteenth-century editions of medieval sources, editions produced by erudite and eccentric independently wealthy gentlemen who wanted little more than to be the knights and nobility whose words they inscribed. (In one of my favorite editions, the editor deplored the need to have issued a revised edition, but there had been so many errors in the first edition that it had really had to be done. It was too bad, too, he went on, because the organization sponsoring the edition had provided a really bright undergraduate [this would have been an Oxbridge student, mid-to-late nineteenth century] to aid with the editing. When they asked the original editor why there were so many errors, he said that he had been so impressed by the undergraduate's work on the first two pages that he didn't bother to check the rest.) Whatever their reverence for the social structures and material records of the past, these gentlemen had no qualms about decrying the inadequacies of the authors of those records. (Another favorite? The cataloger from the British Library who described one of my treasured texts as, essentially, so much papist claptrap. I don't remember the exact words, but "papist" was definitely one of them.)

This brings me to one of my cherished theories about studying the Middle Ages: that we're not even figuring out what happened then, as much as we are trying to dismantle assumptions about the Middle Ages that the Victorians constructed and then bequeathed to us. (This has been especially true, I think, for medieval women's history.)

In any case. I'm not going to stop challenging my students when they tell me that medieval people were dumb. But I'm also going to remember that it's really hard to escape the mental structures that support your world so strongly that you don't even realize they're there. And as a society, we Americans sure do love the narrative of self-improvement and the idea of progress.

Comments

[Notorious Ph.D]

Oh so familiar. I teach a course on women in the ancient and medieval west, and I constantly have to combat the "march of progress" version of the story. I still haven't come up with the perfect response, but one that has gotten me at least partway there is to let the clichés fly for a couple of minutes, then slowly work them around to the fact that they are labling things as better or worse, depending on how much they look like us. Most of them see the narcissism inherent in their assumptions, and at least temporarily bring themselves up short.

[Jane Dark]

Oh, yes. We talked about this a little when I was teaching Swift's "A Modest Proposal."

And to be fair, I realize that at times, I struggle with the opposite problem: I catch myself being unwilling to believe that Theorist X would make Mistake Y -- or else, find it hard to process that Critic Z is writing about something very simple that lays the ground for more complex thought later.

[Rudbeckia Hirta]

Your students might be right if the Flynn Effect is true. :)

[Dr. Moonbeam]

I think you are right on about this, and I certainly see it a lot of the time from students. Interestingly, in a recent discussion a few students said the opposite -- how smart the ancient Mesopotamians etc. must have been to build a civilization with so little technology!

[styleygeek]

Do you think that maybe part of the problem is that students often don't distinguish clearly between knowledge and intelligence? I.e. if medieval people didn't know something that they do (existence of Australia, some particular mathematical theory, whatever) then they must have been "stupid": not stopping to think that we know these things not because we are smarter, but because someone else discovered these things and someone told us. (Also, people often don't think about the millions of things that medieval people knew that your average young adult today has no idea about: just take agriculture, for one example!)

Maybe there is also an element of people not really believing that much happened for centuries during the middle ages, and then comparing this to the technological changes of the last 50 years, they wonder why medieval people didn't invent modern technologies (not considering the contributions of prior science that laid the foundations for modern tech, and the other prerequisites of modern society necessary to get to this point).

(Did I just embarrass myself with a big display of ignorance of my own? Feel free to smack me down.)

[Anastasia]

This brings me to one of my cherished theories about studying the Middle Ages: that we're not even figuring out what happened then, as much as we are trying to dismantle assumptions about the Middle Ages that the Victorians constructed and then bequeathed to us.

so true. And also:

This brings me to one of my cherished theories about studying the [classics]: that we're not even figuring out what happened then, as much as we are trying to dismantle assumptions about the Middle Ages that the Victorians constructed and then bequeathed to us.

so true, too.

[history prof]

There's an interesting review in the new ATLANTIC of a book on prayer books from the Middle Ages, and how they can reveal a lot about the social history of the time. It's a new book from Yale U. Press. Thought you might be interested. Peace.

[Pilgrim/Heretic]

Part of the problem with the "March of Progress" idea is that it's precisely the reason Western Civ courses were designed in the first place, to comb through the past and pick out the parts that Tell Us Where We Came From. The narcissicism that Notorious describes (and that's a great way to put it) is inherent in the very structure of most college history survey courses. All the more important to challenge it from within!

[Susan]

I think Styleygeek is right that one issue is the failure to distinguish knowledge and intelligence.

One approach I've taken to disrupt the "narcissism" Notorious Ph.D. mentions is to focus on concrete activities. If you have a student who has tried spinning, for instance, they have a sense of the complexity of work. If you show how various bureaucracies organized information, without computers, they see intelligence at work. (Domesday Book works well for this.)

[Dance]

I start world history with Guns, Germs, and Steel, which offers a lot of fodder for extended discussions about our tendency to believe in Progress with a capital P, and how you measure Progress, and the difference between knowledge and intelligence, and the fallacy of thinking it's "the invention of XYZ" that makes the difference. Then I can keep coming back to those notions when discussing later periods. I hope it sticks.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Yes, I think there's definitely a failure to distinguish between education and intelligence. I kept asking them about this until one student said, "Well, education was limited to the upper class at that time," and I said, "That's right. Are intelligence and education the same thing?" and they all sort of went, "Oh...no."

Susan, I like the idea of focusing on concrete activies (my husband and I were playing around with this last night, thinking up all the things that medieval people knew how to do that we don't).

Notorious, I totally get that in women's history classes, too. What was lovely about my women's history class last spring was (among other things) that they came into class saying, "things sucked for women in the Middle Ages, and they still suck for women now!" (We had to nuance the first half of that a bit, but it was a refreshing point of view.)

P/H, that's exactly why I dislike Western Civ classes so much! (I know that you and everyone else who teaches them doesn't teach them like that any more, but I still dislike them. Not enough not to teach them if someone will pay me for it, though!)

Dance, I love that element of Guns, Germs, and Steel - when I used to teach World History I kept trying to figure out a way to use that book. (I know there are problems with it, but it explains so many things that most histories never address! For instance, how the heck does someone actually domesticate plants? That kind of thing.) I love the bit where Diamond talks about being out in the (rain forest? jungle? highlands?) of Papua New Guinea with Papua New Guineans, and they ran out of food, so the Papua New Guineans started collecting mushrooms; at which point Diamond got a bit nervous and suggested that eating mushrooms might not be that smart since so many were poisonous, to which they looked at him like he was an idiot and reminded him that if he was there to learn different species of birds from them, he should know that they're plenty smart enough not to eat poisonous mushrooms. At which point he shut up. That cracks me up. ;-)

(RH, don't show my students that!)

[Another Damned Medievalist]

See: Choir, preaching to the ...

[Belle]

I have to teach both parts of the World History survey, and one of the first questions I ask is how many students could catch, subdue and slaughter their dinner. That usually gets us past a lot of the problems you talk about. Then we talk about what to do with the rest of the cow. Once they've figured out that they don't know some very basic kinds of things, they seem to appreciate the real accomplishments of the past.

For what it's worth, I actually miss teaching Western Civ. I made a kind of sense that World doesn't.

[mimi]

We should merge our classes: I have the opposite problem. I'm currently teaching the introductory formal methods course to new majors, and some polling and discussion on the first day reveals that, in literary studies at least, people in the PAST were smarter than people TODAY. And they wrote better, more worthy, more literary books, and every thing from modern times is just so much moronic rambling.

Seriously. It's a room full of 22 year old grumpy old men. They also like to rant about corrupt grammar and rigorous standards.

[mimi]

Sigh. I should mention I teach English. In an English department. Now my comment likely makes more sense.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

mimi, that's so funny, but I can so see that. I mean, Shakespeare was, like, the best writer ever, right? So it must have all been downhill from there! (I wonder how much that's students subscribing to the "if I can't understand it right away it must be really smart" paradigm.)

[Terminal Degree]

I have some students like Mimi's--we were talking about copyright and intellectual property the other day, and I explained that Perotin could easily rewrite Leonin's music, insert his own bits, add extra lines, and no one would care--and my students were horrified!

So then I explained about intellectual property as a modern idea, and a student said that we valued ownership of ideas because we were "more selfish" than musicians in the Middle Ages.

No, just different, I tried to explain.

Not sure it sank in, though...

What a great post, NK. Thanks.

[Jonathan Jarrett]

"Just different" is a cop-out though. I don't mean to say that using ethical judgements like `more selfish' is any better, quite the reverse, but surely as historians what we're aiming to do is describe that difference and account for it, if only so as to be able better to understand what our sources are saying!