History, Not Histrionics. Facts, not Factoids

History is an art in a sense. That is, it is not mathematically provable. The mathematician (I am one, at least through some bit of graduate studies) must prove something logically (there are certain basic rules of logic—contrary to reflections from “the squad,” et al). If he can’t prove it, it simply means it is not provable true, nor is it provable false. It may be either but it is neither, absent a deterministic logical proof. Such problems wait to see if one may ever find a proof (such as the recently and famously proven "Fermat's Last Theorem"). Many, many today fall into the yet unknown true or false class. For those interested, an excellent book for a layman’s (most) comprehension of one of the most famous problems, is John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession, summarizing The Riemann Hypothesis.

Paul H. Yarbrough explains.

Abraham Lincoln.

The scientific method of proof (different from the mathematical proof) in the physical sciences is proved by sampling and testing to the point of reproducing such results in the laboratory. These are scientific-method determined proofs. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine work is an example of a proof by the scientific method.  Climate change study is an example of a crock of crap.

But the historian has no logical proof of his art since history is what it was. You cannot associate an abstract thought with a concrete fact of the past in order to change the fact.  But this is exactly what “liberals” do. (The quotation marks are a tweaking of the modern definition of liberal as opposed to the once accepted and true one—but another story for another day.)

Liberals will suggest silliness (though they believe it is serious thought, perhaps) such as Lincoln was responsible for a horrible war that resulted in well over half a million deaths and billions of dollars of destruction of private property and on and on with a political wrecking ball of death by fire and murder as well as the raping and pillaging of both blacks and whites, male and female, and so on. BUT, the great defensible BUT, he was trying to save the union. This is, in fact, abstraction smothering fact.  I say "liberals will suggest" when the fact is they state it as the fact that they have proven, even though facts of history are not provable but revealed from recorded sources. 

The fact is he was no more trying to save the union than he was trying to free the slaves. He (and many, many Republican cronies), like Hamilton before him, wanted to create a national state. i.e. a nation.

Irony

How irony raises its fortuitous head from time to time? Abe Lincoln was assigned the label "Honest" Abe. However, when digging into history and available primary sources reveal the guy as a notorious liar and charlatan. If Lincoln lived today, he would be in bed with the Clintons (at least one of them) when it came to honesty. Alas, Lincoln's reputation remains largely untainted by those who worship the faux pas of some rotted theory of national conservatism. 

But another historical faux pas (of the many) that seems a lesser light of historical fiction is about a man who was president but had a more honorable reputation. Though, sadly influenced by the liar, Alexander Hamilton. 

George Washington never (contrary to modern legend) had offers to be king. The myth is that he was so well respected that a crown was offered to him. There was also a myth cultivated due to his honest character: That is, he did not lie. The myth was the one most everyone has heard: he cut down a cherry tree, then fessed up when asked. But neither tale--crown offering or cherry-tree-chopping --was true about Washington. However, most historians have recorded him as a man of integrity.

So it is that good tales are created about someone who has a good reputation for honesty. At least most of the time. But the “creation” is not a fact. It is just supposedly true.

But the real historian is like a prospector—always digging, always sifting facts from rumor and/or legend. The primary or original source (I am not a historian, but am a history student), or as close to it as one can get to begin a study is the best beginning. From the beginning of whatever historical-to-present goal is sought the trail is like the trail of evidence in a crime. That is to say that great danger can come to the truth if the trail is broken. All of the evidence may not be available, but all that is should be examined. Therefore, the trail route (the history) can be surmised with a given degree of accuracy.

Around us, primarily through online chatter, social media, and the monster maniacal media of television fame are those historian-labeled personalities, many who are promoted (many self) as PhDs of some grandiloquent history department of “XYZ” university –blah. Blah, blah. These types and their schools are worthy of the aforementioned climate change students. Many (most?) of the media-type historians are just airbags who get a nice paycheck.

Or there are the puffed-up Twitter et chirps who glorify themselves in some modern cloak of Thucydides such as the “spit and damn” clownish Kevin Levin (as just one example) who tops out as a racist of the first liberal order.  No?  His mentions of historical studies and insights of the American War Between the States are the typical Yankee sighting and portraying of the American South with its blacks as simple-minded toadies following “Massuh-Cotton-Man” to every beat of the drum because he (the black man) cannot, or even conceivably learn for himself.

Meanwhile, looming elections of great importance are nigh, and even if there is an explosive so-called Reagan Revolution or contemporarily a red wave, no histrionic magic can make fact fiction, nor vice versa.

Problem

This is the problem with the red wave, for those who seem to think that it is a robust rekindling of something called federalism—no it is not. It is simply the other side of a unitary coin, red on one side and blue on the other. The reds don't know or don't care (either is a possibility, and both a consideration) about federalism. If they did, they would not spout off constantly about their hero Abraham Lincoln and his weaker forerunner Alexander Hamilton. These two draughts of politics and statist standards are the red guys (not necessarily conservatives), the original wolves in sheep’s clothing to any honest concept of federalism. Hamilton, a New York immigrant, spoke one way at the Philadelphia Convention, and a different way when reporting back to his New York delegation.  He lied often. Possibly this was what Lincoln found as a trait in common with Hamilton. They both were notorious liars. 

The “Federalists Papers” are a defensive rupture of federalism; THAT IS. THEY ARE A SUBTLE DEFENSE OF NATIONALISM, NOT FEDERALISM. A better bet, FOR HISTORIGRAPHY, if you can find them are the Anti-Federalist Papers. These are scattered in publication but delve at length into the things Patrick Henry probably concerned himself with when he refused to attend the Philadelphia convention with his infamous: "I smell a rat," rebuff.  Think of Lincoln’s “new nation” as a stinking rat (if you are a conservative).

But not to worry, we have been saved from our corrupt past of a voluntary federal system and have come scarred and skinned by an anti-federal and ill-called “Civil War” into the 20th and 21st centuries safe in what both contemporary red and blues call “our democracy.” 

This is blue territory. Nationalism and Democracy are their game. 

That is of course the “democracy” that has given us most of that which God would not give: A central government with control over all aspects of life; an eternal number of wars, including two that were happily (or somberly) called WORLD WARS; men who are women, women who are men; children who are designated sex toys by their teachers and approved by their parents—who probably thought abortion would be legal until the child reached 18—so plenty of time to get some fun out of the kid before killing him. Old enough to fight, old enough to be aborted.

These people care no more about federalism than did Hobbes or Rousseau and a whole bunch of others, who saw little in man’s locale and locality, down to a single soul, but greater in the state of the state as his god.

History

"The States have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal status. If they break from this, they can only do so against law and by revolution. The Union, and not themselves separately, procured their independence and their liberty. By conquest or purchase, the Union gave each of them whatever of independence and liberty it has. The Union is older than any of the States, and, in fact, it created them as States." 

Abraham Lincoln--July 4th, 1861

 “It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the States; the States created the Federal Government.” (Emphasis added)

President Ronald Reagan --120 years later

What happened to Reagan? He had too many “reds” whose skin was red but whose heart was blue. 

What happened to Donald Trump? He had too many “reds” whose skin was red but whose heart was blue.

What happened to Abraham Lincoln? He had too many people who believed him to be honest.

Many conservatives (as those who voted for Reagan) knew the Cheney-type-timbre was lurking in the dark socialistic political shadows long, long before January 6, 2021.

But the key to elections and politics is history. Not the banal blathering splattered by most media types, too many talk-show chatterers, and enumerable university wags.

History, where the proof is in the facts. Where the future forms in one way or the other.

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What can the Ancient Greeks Can Teach Us About the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election?

The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election sees Donald Trump face off against Kamala Harris. But what the Ancient Greeks teach us about truth and the election? In this fascinating piece, we get an explanation from author  Daniel W. Lawrence, PhD.

A detail from The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio, 1509. Plato is on the left and Aristotle on the right.

Weaponized Digital Advertising

With the 2024 United States presidential election around the corner, political parties have already ramped up their advertising spending to attempt to persuade voters to cast their ballot in a particular direction this November. In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Trump campaign was spending around $1 million per day on Facebook advertisements through their partner, Cambridge Analytica, who weaponized psychographic data to target who they identified as particularly persuadable voters (a group they internally labelled "The Persuadables").

It's a troubling saga documented well by Professor David Carroll in the very watchable and worthwhile documentary, The Great Hack. In fact, it was Cambridge Analytica who designed the "Lock Her Up" attack campaign against Hillary Clinton for the Trump team--there's more than a little irony looking back on these tactics, as it should be clear to most readers which of the two 2016 presidential candidates has been found guilty by a jury and may be more worthy of being attached to the slogan designed by Cambridge Analytica.

Lest you think I'm being partisan, it was widely reported that Democrats were already outspending Republicans by more than twofold in May 2024, with a total of $72.1 million spent on advertising by both parties in just the short period between March 6, 2024 and May 26, 2024. While parties were spending $1 million a day in 2016, those numbers have increased significantly in the interim, and the sophisticated digital advertising tactics they're employing directly target individuals in specific geographic areas and use troves of user data to hone in on precise demographics.

While many of us like to think we are free-thinking, rational individuals who come to our own conclusions and make our own decisions, it doesn't take much reflection on global history to realize that we can be easily persuaded. Hitler leveraged mass communication technologies and fiery speeches to convince millions of Germans to commit horrific atrocities in the 20th century in a world war that threatened democracy across the planet.

Fortunately for us, we receive from the wisdom of the ancient Greeks the arts of rhetoric and philosophy, which can help inoculate ourselves against the bombardment of messaging we face in our daily lives. With Americans now spending more than 3 1/2 hours on their smartphones every day, with more than three billion new Facebook posts being created daily and more than 100 million users leveraging ChatGPT and similar AI technologies to quickly generate content for social media, we live in a super-charged, super-confusing information environment where it is harder than ever to tell fact from fiction. I believe the lessons on truth and persuasion from the ancient Greeks that we receive from Plato and Aristotle are more important now than ever, as they can help us develop the critical skills needed to sift through the onslaught of information we receive not just from political parties but also from private companies, organizations, and governments.

What is Truth, and Who Can We Trust?

When we’re faced with evaluating the truth of a claim, we can boil down the whole, complex equation to a simple, four-part question: what is the credibility of a source or speaker, what are they trying to make me do or believe, what techniques are they using to make me feel or think that way, and why are they doing it? But no single part of this question is easy to answer. As one team of disinformation researchers wrote in their 2017 study, “Determining who’s behind information and whether it’s worthy of our trust is more complex than a true/false dichotomy.” More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote about ethos and the credibility of speakers, as far back as 350 BCE. Now, we are just as likely to be fooled by a website, social media post, or vlog as we are to be persuaded by a person physically speaking. But we tend to fall into a default position of trust. If an article, post, speaker, or web page looks vaguely well designed and similar to other things we’ve read before, we tend to say, “Sure, that looks legitimate! Why not?” without questioning the purpose, intent, or origin of the information.

Credibility is difficult to assess; when we see a well-groomed man in a sharp suit and shiny tie on a cable network—or even in a YouTube video—we are immediately tricked into thinking the person is credible. It’s something like the Ted Bundy effect. The infamous serial killer dressed well, spoke intelligently, and carried himself like a well-meaning citizen. In this way, he was able to lure unsuspecting people to horrific deaths at his hands. All the time, we are being tricked in the same fashion. Just because someone is wearing fancy clothes and is sitting in front of a green screen doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about. In truth, it doesn’t mean anything other than that they purchased a suit, tie, and green screen, and maybe they know how to use some video-editing software. In the same way, we too easily accept the information we read in online spaces to be valid simply because it’s there. We think, perhaps even at a subconscious level, “Well, this web page looks legitimate enough. It must be true.” But there’s nothing qualifying about the existence of a web page in today’s day and age. Anyone can create a website with a few dollars and an hour of time. Everywhere around us, we must be more sceptical of the credibility of the information that we see, read, and hear.

Too often we see political candidates make speeches on subjects with which they have no formal background. We’ve never elected a person with a PhD in Environmental Science to the presidency of the United States, yet every candidate for the position speaks confidently and unashamedly about environmental policy as though they are an expert in that field. When we ask these questions—what is the credibility of a source? What is it trying to make me do or think? How is it doing that? and Why are they doing it?—we start to engage in a process of rhetorical analysis. That is, we’re taking a critical step to stop messages from spellbinding us and working us over, and we start to assess communication in a more objective way.

Take a video advertisement for example. We see a Subaru commercial showing a car crash, but then the driver and their child safely walk away, saying they are thankful they bought a Subaru. This is trying to work us over through the method of what Aristotle called pathos—an appeal to emotion. The viewer feels something: the fear of losing their child, the trauma of an automobile accident, perhaps a lack of safety in their own vehicle. There might be dramatic, cinematic, swelling music that accompanies the advertisement and plays on our nervous system to increase our heart rates and create a sense of uncomfortable tension, which plays even further into this pathos. Then, the solution: just buy a Subaru. I have nothing against the Subaru automobile company—I drove an old, green, ’98 Subaru Outback for as long as it could possibly last, which was a long time—but I do have something to say about these tactics and how you can be better prepared to spot them, analyze them, and not let them influence your life. This is the power of rhetoric: to ask questions about credibility, intent, and purpose.

The logic of the advertisement is to make you feel fear, and to present you with a solution to that fear: “Buy a Subaru, and all your problems will go away. Protect your children by buying a Subaru.

Buy, buy, buy. If you don’t buy a Subaru, you must not love your children!” Of course that’s their purpose. They’re a car manufacturer. They’re in the business of selling cars by any means necessary. But is it true? Will buying a Subaru protect your family better than their competitor’s vehicle? We don’t know, and it’s too complex of a multi-factorial problem to figure out, even if we had the best data available. The world’s best quantum computer probably couldn’t help you with that one.

What Do We Know? (Spoiler: Not a Lot)

So, who is credible? Should we just trust no one? Credibility is a practical thing to think about. Who are you going to hire to fix your air conditioner, or perform your spinal surgery? You might have to look at several sources. You could read a surgeon’s biography on the hospital’s web page, look up their education, and see where they completed their residency. You could find out where they got their medical degree and how many years’ experience they have performing the surgery. You can ask that question directly to them: how many times have you performed this operation? You can find public data about the hospital to see what the post-operation infection rate is, and how it compares to other hospitals. These are all ways of evaluating the credibility of the institution and its messaging. But you must ask those questions: what is the credibility of a source, what is it trying to make me do or think, how is it doing that, and why are they doing it? Hopefully you come to find out that the hospital has a great surgeon who has years of experience and a great track record that will lead to a positive medical outcome for you. (That was my experience when the brilliant Dr. Craig Coccia performed an L5-S1 microdiscectomy on me when I was still in my twenties.) Skepticism and rhetorical analysis doesn’t always mean we have to end up in a place of negativity or conspiracy theorizing. It’s really the opposite. It just means we’re in search of the truth. We want to find the best solution for our problem.

Yet, we have no perfect institution for discovering truth. Even in the scientific community, for example, data might be faked in a clinical trial to push an Alzheimer’s drug to market in the pursuit of profit, or companies like Uber might hire scientists to publish peer-reviewed research that shows their services in a particular light. Human error and greed are everywhere. And, of course, we can hardly trust politicians and public figures who claim to have the benefit of average citizens on their mind while they use their inside knowledge to trade stocks, gerrymander, lie to the public, and block legislation that would help the average citizen with rapidly rising housing prices, stagnant wages, rising consumer debt, outrageously expensive college education, and a host of other real problems that affect hundreds of millions of Americans. This was precisely what Plato warned about in his dialogue, Phaedrus, when Socrates attacks the Sophists: powerful persuaders who had no sense of philosophy, no sense of ethics.

Politicians, more generally, seem to just kick the can down the road to the next administration, or even the next generation. We have seen administration after administration promise to fix the housing crisis, the global climate catastrophe, job shortages, infrastructure, and to boost the economy. Yet, the planet’s still burning, and people are still homeless and hungry, and it’s hard to say anyone’s listening to public opinion. Aren’t democracies supposed to serve the will of the people? By the people, for the people? If ever there was a group of folks who needed to orient themselves toward truth and read some philosophy, it’s the political class.

While our trust in these large institutions like government, news organizations, universities, and science-at-large is diminishing, the average citizen is also being bombarded by increasingly advanced, technologically sophisticated disinformation and misinformation through complex algorithms, digital media, and social media. Despite our general understanding that big-tech companies don’t have our best interests at heart, North Americans are still using their smartphones, on average, for more than three and a half hours a day and are exposed to thousands of advertisements every day. Marketers and writers have learned to disguise information as opinion pieces—sometimes called advertorials or referred to more generally as “native advertising”—such that it is becoming harder and harder to determine what is organic, natural content in social media and what is an advertisement. And here’s that study again: remember, The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) found that 96 percent of high school students saw no reason to be suspicious of a web page about global warming “facts” clearly labelled as having been published by a fossil fuel company. We tend to assume that anything we read is credible, and we should be doing the opposite. We should be questioning the credibility of everything we read, see, and hear. Just because a web page looks clean and well-designed doesn’t mean that it is a vessel of truth and facts. It’s easy to build a professional looking website. You can make a whole website in about ten minutes with drag-and-drop web-building tools, which are widely available for anyone to use. If Plato were around today, we'd have to ask him to sit down before he read this study by SHEG.

All of this might seem like an insurmountable and world-ending situation. But it may soften your concerns a bit to know that these are problems humans have been dealing with since the dawn of time. That doesn’t make our present concerns any less species-threatening, but it does go to show something about the nature of human experience and civilization. It’s hard to go anywhere in the world without someone trying to sell you something or lie to your face for their personal gain in the service of their ideology. The short answer to the question of who to trust is: trust no one but yourself. But if you’re going to learn to trust yourself, you must learn to become a better thinker and analyzer of information and credibility, a lesson that we receive from the ancient Greeks, who also struggled with these issues of truth and lies, just as we do today. Because if we are so easily persuaded and deceived, how can we even trust ourselves not to be fooled and not to spread misinformation accidentally? Socrates had insight for this, too: we must humbly admit that we know very little about the world and the universe. Spend two minutes with an inquisitive five year old and you'll see how little you really know:

"Dad, what is water made of?"

"Uh... molecules."

"What are molecules made of?"

"Well, water molecules are made of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, basically: H2O."

"But what are atoms made of?"

"Eh, quarks, maybe? Subatomic particles. No one really knows, yet. They built a big machine called the Large Hadron Collider where they smash the atoms together to see what's inside of them. Strings, maybe."

"Strings?!"

"Yeah, strings, maybe. We're all made up of strings."

Daniel W. Lawrence, PhD is Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Wisconsin - Superior, and author of the new book, Disinformed: The History of Humanity's Search for Truth (Urano World, 2024): Amazon US | Amazon UK

In this gripping narrative, Dr. Dan Lawrence explores humanity’s troubled relationship with truth, from the propaganda tactics of King Sargon of Akkadia to the sophistication of present day hyper-targeted political advertising on social media. Spanning thousands of years of human history, Dr. Lawrence urges us to fight against disinformation and wrest back control of our minds using the critical toolbox of rhetoric: the ancient, lost art of persuasion laid down long ago by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. From the first known author, the High Priestess Enheduanna, to the modern-day developments of social media and algorithmic and procedural communication and targeted advertising, Dr. Lawrence shows how rhetoric is not just a tool to persuade and manipulate, but a toolkit for us all to use to evaluate the onslaught of persuasive messaging that we confront in our everyday lives. The time to take back the truth is now.