Thinking About History

[Larry124]

Please indulge a long post. This is about thinking about history.

From a 4/15/2009 New York Times op-ed column by Nicholas D. Kristof entitled “How to Raise Our I.Q.”
He writes about the book “Intelligence and How to Get It,” by Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.

Off topic to the intent of the piece, I was struck by this paragraph:

Another indication of malleability is that I.Q. has risen sharply over time. Indeed, the average I.Q. of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s I.Q. test. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements, Professor Nisbett says.

My emphasis added. That’s 1917. I wonder about 1817 or 1717 or 1617. Go back to Roman or Greek times and it becomes mind boggling.

This might explain a lot about some of the seeming irrationalities (by today’s standards) of history. WWI comes to mind.

Granted that people then may have understood as much about their daily life as we know about our own. And that sense and common sense might be best understood in the context of their time.
Is it too relativistic to include vice and virtue? Good and evil?

One of the things that I remember from William Manchester’s book “A World Lit Only by Fire” (on the Middle Ages) is the youth and (to my modern eyes) immature temperament or excessive emotionality of rulers in that time and place.

One more: “Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil” by Ron Rosenbaum. His idea is that a book of history reflects as much or more about the life and times of its author than it informs on the subject. That is all it can do. Absolute disclaimer: The author is not and I am not defending Hitler - my point is separate from that book's subject.
Other than to say that Hitler is the example to me that no matter how much time passes evil is still evil.

I conclude that I can have only a dimly reflected understanding of the people of history. They were different from us – very different – perhaps incomprehensibly different.
I can attempt to imagine their lives and the world in which they lived only in a very incomplete way.

Might our own age someday be viewed as largely (or thoroughly) primitive and brutal? Probably.

A connection to some of the historical topics on this forum?
I think that the personages and occurrences and disputes in the history of the British Isles are no exception to all of that above.