By Joel Thurtell
What this country needs is more historians.
Or at least, people who THINK like historians.
Thinking like a historian involves two different kinds of mental concentration.
First, a historian understands that, according to the laws of physics, an event, call it Event A, can influence a second event, call it Event B, only if Event A comes BEFORE Event B.
Second, a historian has to understand that in the past, and this goes even for the very recent past, people did not think or react to ideas and events as we would today; therefore, the historian needs to understand the culture and mentality of the time he or she is trying to explain.
Right now, I’m most interested in the logical problem historians–and journalists–encounter when they or others fail to understand that there is a sequence to causation, and that something can’t cause another thing to happen unless the causal action occurs before the supposed result.
Does this statement seem too elementary to warrant discussion?
Unfortunately, it’s a reality that some people miss entirely.
In my time as a newspaper reporter, I sometimes found myself talking to people who inverted event structure. They would place Event B ahead of Event A, thus inverting and thereby totally distorting the causal sequence.
In my forthcoming book, SHOESTRING REPORTER, a manual for would-be journalists, I explain a situation that happened to me shortly before I retired as a reporter with the Detroit Free Press. In a community south of Detroit and on the Detroit River, some citizens were blaming the influx of American lotus plants in their canals and bays on the act of one man who, they contended, had purposefully planted the lotuses in their watery back yards. There was a lot of factual confusion and misstatement by the anti-lotus faction. The intentional planting, while it occurred, was done in a different place, and it failed to produce a successful plantation of lotuses.
More interestingly, though, was the lotus critics’ inversion of the time line. The lotuses they so despised actually appeared before the attempted planting in a different place.
Thus, even if the geography had coincided, the timing was wrong.
Cause cannot follow effect.
My point in the book is that as reporters, we have to deal with this kind of inversion. We have to recognize it when it is presented so that we are not duped by faulty logic.
Cause and effect. It is very simple. Causes always precede effects. Period. You cannot do something today that produces a result yesterday.
Learning to put causes before effects is very important for reporting any kind of story, be it government, business, even features. Often when people present some issue to a reporter, they don’t bother to sort out the chronology. Emotions may be in play, or maybe they are deliberately trying to mislead you. Maybe they are just plain intellectually lazy or not very bright. Also, unconscious biases can cause people to withhold or distort information. As a reporter, you may have to do their thinking for them. Establish an accurate chronology of events right during your interview. By pinning people down on precisely when events occurred, you are laying down rules of discourse that say implicitly: Don’t try to mislead me; don’t lie to yourself; clear up your thinking; I need a concise presentation, not a rambling polemic.
If you think such erroneous thinking comes only from people in the Midwest, I’d like to show you a January 25, 2010 article in The New York Times Book Review that, when it comes to the broad tapestry known as European history, seems clueless. In her review, “Anne Boleyn, Queen for a Day,” historical novelist Hilary Mantel discusses THE LADY IN THE TOWER, The Fall of Anne Boleyn, by Alison Weir (Illustrated. 434 pp. Ballantine Books. $28), a book about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. In her Times review, Mantel (author of the historical novel, WOLF HALL, Henry Holt, $27 and winner of the Booker Prize) remarks that “Henry had fought for years to extricate himself from his first marriage and create a world where he and Anne could be husband and wife; to achieve it, he had split Christian Europe apart.”
Here’s my understanding of the chronology of these events:
The pope refused to grant Henry a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, so Henry created his own divorce by separating the English church from Rome and then having his own “pope,” the archbishop of Canterbury, grant him the divorce from Catherine.
When did this happen?
In 1533.
Lots of times historians are pilloried for genuflecting to dates.
But dates are important.
Without knowing dates, and putting them in their proper order, you simply cannot begin to explain historical events.
So 1533 is very important. We don’t even need to know the exact month and day. The year will do nicely.
Because there’s another date that is all-important to understanding this period in human history.
That date is 1517.
Remember what the reviewer wrote:
Henry had fought for years to extricate himself from his first marriage and create a world where he and Anne could be husband and wife; to achieve it, he had split Christian Europe apart.
According to wikipedia, “The Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences…were written by Martin Luther in 1517 and are widely regarded as the primary catalyst for the Protestant Reformation.”
If you read the Times’ claim that it was Henry VIII who “split Europe apart,” and don’t know much about history, you might attribute the Protestant revolution to an English king. But knowing that the pivotal act propelling this huge turnover in governments and religion occurred 16 years BEFORE Henry’s famous divorce helps to reveal the reviewer’s comment for a bald misstatement of history. Rather than being the instigator of the Protestant movement, it turns out, Henry was enabled by Luther’s and others’ earlier protests to take his bold action. The Reformation was well underway when Henry divorced Catherine to marry Anne Boleyn.
You could even argue that without Martin Luther, Henry would not have dared challenge the pope; he therefore would not have divorced Catherine; minus the all-important divorce, he could not have married Anne Boleyn, who therefore would not have engaged in various intrigues and affairs and quite possibly would not have lost her head to the sword of Henry’s imported executioner.
In the Times review, we see historical cause and effect inverted with an absurd result.
If it can happen in the Times, it can happen anywhere. Smart reporters need to beware of this fallacy.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
