Who cannot recall being told at some point that 90% of an iceberg is underneath the waterline and that we therefore can only see its proverbial tip? We are cautioned thereby not to conflate appearances with reality—whether we are talking about physical realities or more ethereal concepts and proposals.
The same is true of course for the very oceans in which the aforementioned icebergs sit (float?). There’s about 139 million square miles of oceans on this planet, with an average depth (according to reliable (?) AI sources) of 12,100 feet. By my rough calculation, that means that more than 99.99% of the water is more than 10 feet deep (we’ll call it roughly 318 million cubic miles). So, if we’re looking for metaphors for the discrepancy between appearance and reality, we’re better off using the oceans rather than the icebergs, even if (at least since the Titanic (1912)) icebergs present a more dramatic threat.
While that 99.99% number is likely to go up a tad with the advent of global warming and glacier melt, this is not basically a blog on hydrology, so I will get to my point which is, as usual, more in a historical and sociological vein.
One of the basic challenges in any project of historical research and understanding is that we are usually at risk of conflating the evidence we find with the facts of what actually happened. When reading an ancient text, there are always issues of authors’ bias (Can you really rely on Caesar’s assessment of Gaul or Cheney’s assessment of WMD in Iraq?), crumbling documents, and the absence of tape recordings of the debates at the Council of Trent (mid-16C). But more to the point is the historian’s bias (and discipline of History’s bias) towards written records. This is often described as the “streetlamp problem” (A drunk loses his car keys. A policeman accosts him as the drunk searches for them under a streetlamp. When asked where he lost them, the drunk points to a spot fifty feet away. “Well then, why are you looking over here?” “Cuz this is where the light is!). In other words, historians do our research where there are documents, regardless of what the full set of historical causes might be. As a result, history tends to overemphasize rationales supported by written evidence and, importantly, by those who wrote those documents.
This is a problem since for most of historical time, those records were produced by elites and by males in particular. Since literacy was pretty limited until the 19C, this severely skews our sources, making it difficult, for example, to fully understand the experience of African slaves, female servants, or the vast majority of humanity that spent their time as agricultural workers. Thus, R.G. Collingwood, the mid-20C English philosopher of history, had it wrong when he said that “all history is the history of ideas.” By defining the entire field according to the recorded output of a small fraction of the people who participated in that history, we have left a lot on the table. We can guess and infer and interpolate (and often do!), but most of the past is unrecoverable (even if X-ray scanning microscopes can now read the charred remains of scrolls from Pompeii) and there isn’t much to be done about it.
A variant of this problem arises in the field of “intellectual history” or the “history of ideas” faces this issue in spades. I will return to this topic in a few weeks, but this sub-field in particular tends to conflate the most intellectual slice of society for the whole of a culture, much like our oceanographic example above.
A parallel problem arises in considering the state of modern democracy. Much of the theory of democracy (whether from intellectuals or more common pundits) tends to assume a society of these self-same intellectuals. The concept gets idealized and when you insert the great mass of ordinary folks who not only don’t know or care about Aristotle’s ideas but aren’t even interested in the latest heat wave killing people in their city or their tax bill.
Yet, democracy is built on the aspiration of an informed and engaged electorate. The theory assumes that we’re all bright, well-read, and civic-minded. But a key part of the problem with fixing this type of problem with political structure is that it relies on the same perspective with which I started today: that of conflating the top ten feet of the ocean with its entire depth. Democratic theory has been created by a collection of smart and usually well-intentioned people who project their own interests, capabilities, and morality onto the population as a whole. If I truly believe that the best society is governed by the collective determination of each adult, then I have to take those folks as they are. I can’t make them into intellectuals or virtuous people and assume that a proper democratic system will thereby run its due course, inching towards perfection. I have to allow not only for different tastes and political priorities, but also for and respect different levels of engagement. Democratic theory can’t be well built on foundation that not only presumes, but mandates that its citizens bring education, engagement, and commitment to the resolution of our shared issues.
American designers of democracy (aka the “Founding Fathers”) were aware of this, of course, and built a system that kept the great masses at some distance from comprehensive power. Over the past 250 years, many of those systemic features have been eroded, mostly in the past 50 years (e.g., too much money in politics, hypermedia hoopla, superannuated office holders, partisan primaries). There is a whole raft of other problems with contemporary democracy, to be sure, but most are (relatively) easily fixable if we can deal with the underlying premises.
History and democracy are but two aspects of this problem of focusing on the “tip of the iceberg;” much of our culture (and media!) pays little attention to ordinary folks unless they make a particular effort to be heard.
The same is true of course for the very oceans in which the aforementioned icebergs sit (float?). There’s about 139 million square miles of oceans on this planet, with an average depth (according to reliable (?) AI sources) of 12,100 feet. By my rough calculation, that means that more than 99.99% of the water is more than 10 feet deep (we’ll call it roughly 318 million cubic miles). So, if we’re looking for metaphors for the discrepancy between appearance and reality, we’re better off using the oceans rather than the icebergs, even if (at least since the Titanic (1912)) icebergs present a more dramatic threat.
While that 99.99% number is likely to go up a tad with the advent of global warming and glacier melt, this is not basically a blog on hydrology, so I will get to my point which is, as usual, more in a historical and sociological vein.
One of the basic challenges in any project of historical research and understanding is that we are usually at risk of conflating the evidence we find with the facts of what actually happened. When reading an ancient text, there are always issues of authors’ bias (Can you really rely on Caesar’s assessment of Gaul or Cheney’s assessment of WMD in Iraq?), crumbling documents, and the absence of tape recordings of the debates at the Council of Trent (mid-16C). But more to the point is the historian’s bias (and discipline of History’s bias) towards written records. This is often described as the “streetlamp problem” (A drunk loses his car keys. A policeman accosts him as the drunk searches for them under a streetlamp. When asked where he lost them, the drunk points to a spot fifty feet away. “Well then, why are you looking over here?” “Cuz this is where the light is!). In other words, historians do our research where there are documents, regardless of what the full set of historical causes might be. As a result, history tends to overemphasize rationales supported by written evidence and, importantly, by those who wrote those documents.
This is a problem since for most of historical time, those records were produced by elites and by males in particular. Since literacy was pretty limited until the 19C, this severely skews our sources, making it difficult, for example, to fully understand the experience of African slaves, female servants, or the vast majority of humanity that spent their time as agricultural workers. Thus, R.G. Collingwood, the mid-20C English philosopher of history, had it wrong when he said that “all history is the history of ideas.” By defining the entire field according to the recorded output of a small fraction of the people who participated in that history, we have left a lot on the table. We can guess and infer and interpolate (and often do!), but most of the past is unrecoverable (even if X-ray scanning microscopes can now read the charred remains of scrolls from Pompeii) and there isn’t much to be done about it.
A variant of this problem arises in the field of “intellectual history” or the “history of ideas” faces this issue in spades. I will return to this topic in a few weeks, but this sub-field in particular tends to conflate the most intellectual slice of society for the whole of a culture, much like our oceanographic example above.
A parallel problem arises in considering the state of modern democracy. Much of the theory of democracy (whether from intellectuals or more common pundits) tends to assume a society of these self-same intellectuals. The concept gets idealized and when you insert the great mass of ordinary folks who not only don’t know or care about Aristotle’s ideas but aren’t even interested in the latest heat wave killing people in their city or their tax bill.
Yet, democracy is built on the aspiration of an informed and engaged electorate. The theory assumes that we’re all bright, well-read, and civic-minded. But a key part of the problem with fixing this type of problem with political structure is that it relies on the same perspective with which I started today: that of conflating the top ten feet of the ocean with its entire depth. Democratic theory has been created by a collection of smart and usually well-intentioned people who project their own interests, capabilities, and morality onto the population as a whole. If I truly believe that the best society is governed by the collective determination of each adult, then I have to take those folks as they are. I can’t make them into intellectuals or virtuous people and assume that a proper democratic system will thereby run its due course, inching towards perfection. I have to allow not only for different tastes and political priorities, but also for and respect different levels of engagement. Democratic theory can’t be well built on foundation that not only presumes, but mandates that its citizens bring education, engagement, and commitment to the resolution of our shared issues.
American designers of democracy (aka the “Founding Fathers”) were aware of this, of course, and built a system that kept the great masses at some distance from comprehensive power. Over the past 250 years, many of those systemic features have been eroded, mostly in the past 50 years (e.g., too much money in politics, hypermedia hoopla, superannuated office holders, partisan primaries). There is a whole raft of other problems with contemporary democracy, to be sure, but most are (relatively) easily fixable if we can deal with the underlying premises.
History and democracy are but two aspects of this problem of focusing on the “tip of the iceberg;” much of our culture (and media!) pays little attention to ordinary folks unless they make a particular effort to be heard.
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