Heroes and Villains Should Stick to Comic Books

History worthy of the name requires synthesis and complexity.

History has been used as a tool of politics since time immemorial.

The ruler is a direct descendant of a revered figure (ignoring all evidence that the revered figure is mythical or the ancestry fabricated). We are the heirs of a mighty but lost civilization (no matter that this is clearly a fairytale of recent vintage). Our people have been on these lands since the creator put us here (erasing the existence of the people we ousted by force).

All these sorts of claims had one thing in common: power. They legitimated dynasties and rulers, belittled rivals, and supported claims to land. In this sense, little has changed even in modern times. Using the past to make political opponents look worse (“Democrats are the party of Jim Crow”) or your side look better (“We’re the party of Lincoln”) is not about the past. It is a merely using the past to make a political argument in the present — and as Harold Laswell brilliantly put it, politics is about “who gets what, when, how.” Which is to say, power.

For much of human history, this sort of present-determined, self-interested retrospection dominated history. Historians were little more than bards, telling tales those who employed them wished to hear and be heard by others.

Only in the 19th century did the idea take root that historians should think and act more like scientists, or to be more precise, like the ideal that scientists aspire to. Investigate. Dig up evidence. Write accounts of the past that hew as closely as possible to what the evidence suggests without regard for whose interests are helped or harmed. The ideal, wrote the German historian Leopold von Ranke, is to write history wie es eigentlich gewesen — “how it actually was.”

Von Ranke’s nifty little maxim is far from the end of the story, however. There is ineradicable subjectivity in all perceptions, and so there is ineradicable subjectivity in all accounts of the past. The pure, perfect, objective truth — “how it actually was” — will always be beyond human grasp. This is why there can never be a correct and final history of anything. It’s why people will forever be seeing something new in the past and rewriting accordingly. And it’s why you can be sure that people who say the phrase “revisionist history” with a sneer have no idea what history is: Particular revisions may be better or worse, but all history is revisionist history.

That said, the idea that historians should at least attempt to respect evidence and avoid spinning yarns for use in contemporary politics is now standard thinking among professional historians. These are the field’s bare minimum standards. Historical accounts that don’t meet them do not deserve to be called “history.”

By that measure, an enormous and growing portion of the history that appears in social media is not history. Much of the history that appears in mainstream news media is also not history. And while politics in general pays too little attention to history than it should, too much of the history politics does pay attention to is not history.

Donald Trump’s ludicrous “1776 Report” is a case in point. It was produced by lazily rummaging through history, collecting bits and pieces useful to advance the report’s very explicit political aim. It was no more real history than Trump’s even more ludicrous plan for a National Garden of American Heroes. Equally absurd, but more sinister, are the many state Republican bills, some of which have passed into law, that forbid “negative” history and again explicitly subordinate history to a political goal.

These efforts, and many others like them, are clearly rearguard efforts to defend old national mythologies which were, a generation or two ago, the standard stories taught in schools, repeated in countless movies and TV shows, and accepted unquestioningly by the great majority. They’re the “histories” that mention the intellectual and political accomplishments of Thomas Jefferson but not Jefferson’s slaves, and praise at great length the American revolutionaries’ fight for liberty while moving swiftly and silently past the black men and women who won their liberty by fleeing to the British. Of course, Britain itself produced a superabundance of this sort of “history.” I have many such books. They’re full of stories of daring adventurers, noble soldiers, intrepid scientists, inspired industrialists, and civilization brought to masses in faraway lands — which is to say, they trumpet anything that reflects well on Britain and its empire, twist less clearly noble facts until they, too, praise all that was done under the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew … and omit everything else. They, too, are political claims in the sheep’s clothing of history.

Reading them today it couldn’t be more obvious that their raison d’être is to serve political goals and their presentation of evidence is, for that reason, as biased as a lawyer’s closing argument. But it’s important to note that many of these old-school popular histories were written by historians who would have entirely agreed with Leopold von Ranke’s maxim and the need to avoid prostituting the past to politics: The most powerful delusion is self-delusion.

Outside Republican circles in the United States, and outside the circles of the crustier sort of conservatives in other Western countries, the “hooray for us!” history that dominated popular memory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has largely been swept aside. But the political use of the past is far from over. It has merely flipped political polarity.

Winston Churchill illustrates nicely.

The famous Karsh portrait, taken in Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier.

British and American conservatives have long adored an airbrushed, sentimental portrait of Churchill in which the Great Man’s life is a constant parade of the virtues conservatives love. To produce this, they have relied on the standard tools of confirmation bias: uncritically accepting anything that supports the desired conclusion, twisting evidence that does not until it does, and turning a blind eye to everything else. Largely in response, I think, the other end of the political spectrum has more recently created an almost perfect mirror image of the conservative Churchill: a man who personally embodies all the sins — racism, sexism, classism, imperialism — liberals and progressive hate.

More than once, I’ve read long Twitter threads in which people contribute bits and pieces of evidence demonstrating Churchill’s villainy, and you can see, almost in real time, how this leads the group to become ever-more extreme. (This is classic group polarization. If software designers had set out to create a tool for radicalization, they could not have done better than Twitter.) Inevitably, someone says Churchill was no better than Hitler. And then — bet on it — someone will make the case that no, Churchill was worse than Hitler. To get to this level of loathing, the Churchill-demonizers, ironically, use precisely the same method as the Churchill-worshippers: uncritically accepting anything that supports the desired conclusion, twisting evidence that does not until it does, and turning a blind eye to everything else.

This sort of polarity-flip is common. Where Thomas Jefferson’s genius was once presented prominently with no reference to the slavery he inflicted on men, women, and children, now the latter is routinely front and centre with no mention of the former. Where Victorian Britons loved to recall Britain’s long fight to suppress the slave trade, and the exploits of the West Africa squadron, while omitting mention of Britain’s earlier leadership of that very trade, now the latter is front and centre — Google “BBC” and “slavery” to see what I mean — while the former goes unmentioned.

A recent tweet captured this dynamic perfectly:

The image on the left is, of course, Superman in all his truth-justice-and-the-American-war glory. The figure on the right comes from a Prime Video series called The Boys, a satirical take on the superhero genre in which the superheroes are almost all narcissists and/or psychopaths whose wholesome public images are marketing creations of the ruthless corporation that controls them. This man is “Homelander,” the leader of the superheroes and beloved by a public that doesn’t know he is a twisted, hateful, murdering horror. (The Boys has a great deal of gross-out humour. Be warned. But if you dig that, or can at least stomach it, The Boys is a hilarious, brilliantly subversive show that often delivers savagely cutting commentary on recent political and cultural trends.)

The numbers on that tweet — they’re huge — underscore that this isn't a fringe thing. Large numbers of people really do think old, simplistic, cherry-picked fairy tales about the past must be swept aside … and replaced with new, simplistic, cherry-picked horror stories about the past.

I’ve presented this as if it were a new thing, but it’s not entirely. The granddaddy of mirror-image history is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. First published in 1980, A People’s History is essentially a litany of American crimes — slavery, war, exploitation — with an exclusive focus on the people marginalized or omitted altogether in the old-fashioned hooray-for-us accounts. Zinn was a socialist who very frankly said his history was written with intention of inspiring political action. And it shows on every page. As many historians noted at the time, Zinn deployed the classic techniques: uncritically accepting anything that supports the desired conclusion, twisting evidence that does not until it does, and turning a blind eye to everything else.

Writing in The New York Times, the eminent historian Eric Foner was sympathetic to Zinn’s project of “history as corrective” and he called it “history from the bottom up,” in contrast to traditional accounts that focus on the great and the good. I think that’s right. In 1980, what Zinn did was boldly different. It’s far from that today.

But Foner also noted that “the book bears the same relation to traditional texts as a photographic negative does to a print: the areas of darkness and light have been reversed.” Heroes become villains. Villains heroes. “History from the bottom up, though necessary as a corrective, is as limited in its own way as history from the top down,” Foner wrote. What is needed is “an integrated account incorporating Thomas Jefferson and his slaves, Andrew Jackson and the Indians, Woodrow Wilson and the Wobblies, in a continuous historical process, in which each group’s experience is shaped in large measured by its relation to others.”

What Foner describes is synthesis of multiple perspectives. It’s the heart of history worthy of the name. But synthesis inevitably produces complexity. And complexity is no way to tell the simple stories of heroes and villains that make history an effective tool in politics.

So we have to choose.

Do we want history to advance political goals? Or do we want history that gets us at least somewhat closer to seeing wie es eigentlich gewesen?

Personally, I’d like both Superman and Homelander to get lost.