The Future of History in an Increasingly Unified World

• Autores: Alan Charles Kors
• Localización: Reconstructing history: the emergence of a new historical society / coord. por Elizabeth Fox Genovese, Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, 1999, ISBN 0-415-92278-X, pág. 12
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The parameters of ecological exploitation ought to be defined, at least in significant part, by precise science, but few historians seem more than marginally interested in precise science these days. Political disillusionment is a curious addition. As for ethnic tension, it has been with us, everywhere, through all of recorded history, and for all we know as historians, aversion to difference might well reflect, alas, one of those ancestrally functional and now dysfunctional evolutionary legacies from which culture only partially saves us. The kaleidoscope of history may be somewhat less confusing than the full kaleidoscope of nature, but the political and psychological gratification of certain beliefs makes history at least as prone to self-deception as was seventeenth-century natural philosophy. If history as a discipline can offer anything to the world, it can offer that sense of the value of open-mindedness, competing interpretations, and intense debate in the pursuit of knowledge about the human past.