A Post About Posts I Avoid

I have been avoiding going meta of late.

You know what I mean, right? The act of backing all the way up from the data, slicing it into groups and then giving the whole mess an overarching theme. When you take all the information about the witch hunts of the 1400’s through 1600’s, and then give an overarching reason why the vast majority of the victims (75% to 85%) were women. When you take all the Crusades, both to the Middle East and to Eastern Europe, and try to find an underlying reason or circumstance for all…16 of them? There were eight or nine to the Middle East and a bunch of Northern crusades to the Baltic until the mid-1500's.

It can also take the form of tracking how people write history. Not a history of the Crusades, but a history of the people who wrote about the Crusades.

This type of historiography has its place. Putting a framework on what you’re studying is important, and an analyses of why things get recorded in the way that they do can spur people to make new types of analyses and uncover new history. It can reveal serious misconceptions and help us get closer to reality.

It also has serious pitfalls.

1. It can lump together things that should not be lumped. You are covering many events that have only one or two things in common, but you are slicing and dicing disparate events to look homogenous. Once a bunch of not-similar things have been made similar, you get a sweeping untrue statement that sticks like a burr in the public imagination. It’s how you wind up with ‘millions of cultures have flood myths’ and ‘everyone worshiped the earth goddess.’
2. It can gloss over important details which leads to myths being accepted as truth. Certain historians have to be vague about the Long March: the fact that the top leadership had planned it largely to get out of situation that Mao had gotten them into makes him look bad. Likewise, the natural childbirth folks rely on no one knowing that 1/6th of women giving birth died in the process before all those nasty medical interventions got involved. And you can see where those myths get dangerous, right?
3. It can give an extremely misleading picture of the past. I covered this in ‘Signs You are About to some Pseudohistory:’ if someone says everyone everywhere did something ‘in the past,’ that someone is lying. And they are generally lying to make a larger point that isn’t true. They are squeezing and stretching events to fit a narrative. Again, do you see the problem?
4. It’s a copout. Let me be honest here: meta is easy. Skipping details and making sweeping statements is takes moments. Digging up reality as it was lived takes years. One of these things is easier for a time-strapped blogger.

Anyway, you may note that this in fact a meta type of post. That’s right: I don’t have the energy to dig up something concrete for you. Soon, though. There will be something concrete soon.

Sources:

Northern Crusades Timeline — World History Encyclopedia