Decline and Fall

When historians write about the decline and fall of great empires, or even of institutions that are much much smaller, they often do so from a safe distance — as much as more than a thousand years. When people construct accounts of current events, especially from an insider's perspective, it is often sensational and hurried, without the larger sweep of history.

The problem when seeking to construct a narrative of a phenomenon which began about a decade ago is that one is too close. There is no safe distance. You could come to conclusions and then be rudely shocked by a sudden denouement that casts those conclusions into the dust-heap. It is a bit like following a car at under the safe distance and then watching helplessly as its driver brakes suddenly and you are too close to avoid impact.

It is even worse if you have just got out of the car and are watching helplessly as it careens towards destruction. Which brings me to another point about such histories and accounts.

When an historian is too close to his subject material, there is inevitably some sort of bias. One is being shaped by historical forces and sociocultural tensions, even while trying to retain objectivity. In fact, one's concept of objectivity may have been shaped by those very forces that one is trying to be objective about. It is like gravity, in that two bodies of knowledge — the historian with his presumably self-aware professional identity and knowledge base, and the phenomenon he is attempting to discuss — distort each other's natural course.

It is the effort to avoid such distortions that requires contortions of the natural tendencies. The tortuous path to writing good, clear narratives is a very narrow one. A good narrative may be a complicated, nuanced one; a clear narrative may be oversimplified.

In my personal life, I have struggled into the corridors of the humanities, feeling at once both a friend and a stranger. I have tried to be a better exponent of these complex areas of uncertain knowledge, but I find that they sometimes seem beyond me. Sometimes, I feel that I am chronicling my own decline and fall.