The Past is a Foreign Country*
The other day I heard a historian proclaim something so preposterous, that I simply couldn't help but just stare in disbelief. She claimed that the demand for the telephone a hundred years ago had been the same as today's. Yes, a "professional" historian with a PhD said that. (It is even worse when you consider that she not only made the claim, but argued vehemently for it.) For a non-historian, it is all too easy to project our values and attitudes to the past, just as non-anthropologists tend to project their own values and attitudes onto other societies. In that field, this intellectual error (sin) is known as ethnocentrism. In the field history, it is known as presentism. It is a well known mathematical fact in telecommunications that the value of a network--the degree to which consumers will want to join that network (ie. "demand")--is dependent on the number of users. The more users join, the more others will want to be a part of the system because they will be have a much wider number and range of persons they can contact. A cellphone that does not allow the user to call other family members is a cellphone nobody wants. It is extremely worrisome that some historians believe they can claim anything they want to just because they have three letters by their name. It is even more pathetic when they do so while proclaiming at the same time to be defending a 'rigorous methodology' in the field. It is a discredit not only to the profession, but an insult to those who are no longer with us. Perhaps such historians should be 'exiled' so that they can begin to truly appreciate the meaning of the terms 'ethnocentrism' and 'presentism'.