How History Gets Things Wrong - Alex Rosenberg - 2019
The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories
By: Alex Rosenberg
Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 04-16-19
Language: English
Genre: History, World
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Format: mp3 64/24 stereo
Publisher's Summary
Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired.
To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature.
Stories historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives of dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the other. Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of Vienna to American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human evolution improved primate mind reading - the ability to anticipate the behavior of others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators - to get us to the top of the African food chain. Now, however, this hard-wired capacity makes us think we can understand history - what the Kaiser was thinking in 1914, why Hitler declared war on the United States - by uncovering the narratives of what happened and why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will only understand history if we don't make it into a story.
Disclaimer: None of the files shown here are actually hosted or transmitted by this server. The links are provided solely by this site's users. The site moderation is also a service provided by the site's users. The administrator of this site (demonoid.is) cannot be held responsible for what its users post, or any other actions of its users. You may not use this site to distribute or download any material when you do not have the legal rights to do so. It is your own responsibility to adhere to these terms.