“To understand something, you need to know its history. Right?”
– That sounds reasonable.
“Wrong“, says author and professor of philosophy Alex Rosenberg.
“Feeling especially well informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list?”
– Well, since you are asking…
“Don’t. Narrative history is always, always wrong.”
– Oh…

That is the rather provocative premise that Rosenberg pushes with How History Gets Things Wrong. Given that I review both pop-science books and books charting the history of certain academic disciplines, will this be the book that brings on a bout of existentialist doubt, and cause me to abandon reviewing books? Is this book the proverbial blog killer??

How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories, written by Alex Rosenberg, published by MIT Press in October 2018 (hardback, 296 pages)

Before upsetting every historian, Rosenberg is quick to clarify that, yes, they “are perfectly capable of establishing actual, accurate, true chronologies”. Historians working in archives can and do uncover documentary evidence for past events that we had forgotten about. And “what most faculty members produce in the history departments of the world’s universities is not the target of this book.” No, it is popular history and biography Rosenberg takes aim at. The kind of history that is widely read. It is not that these writers get their facts wrong. Well, they usually do not. It is that their explanations for why things happened and why people made certain choices are always wrong.

Rosenberg asks some reasonable questions here. How can there be some 40,000 books written on former US president Abraham Lincoln? Why did the centenary of World War I produce yet another crop of books all offering the “definitive” narrative of what caused the war? Or take the many books about the fall of Rome*. Is all this rewriting of history actually getting us closer to a complete picture? No, asserts Rosenberg. Whereas scientific theories often started out (very) wrong and then converged on better explanations with greater predictive powers, the same is not true for historical narratives.

The meat of the book sees Rosenberg draw on findings from three disciplines to support his thesis: evolutionary anthropology, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. And this is where I found the book to be both enlightening and challenging. Let me start with the parts that I did understand.

“Whereas scientific theories often started out (very) wrong and then converged on better explanations with greater predictive powers, the same is not true for historical narratives.”

The idea that humans are natural-born storytellers is not new. We are, as Rosenberg says, besotted by them – a good story will actually give us a hit of oxytocin, the same hormone released during orgasm.

The evolutionary story – see what I did there? – goes something like this: our odds of surviving and reproducing increased by cooperation (e.g. hunting or babysitting) and tool making. Both of these required not only communication but especially what psychologists call a theory of mind. This is the ability to realise that you have thoughts, emotions, desires, and beliefs – in short, mental states**. And that others have them as well. We use these to explain and predict the behaviour of other people. As a solution to tackle the problems faced by hominins on the savannah, face-to-face and over short time periods, this worked reasonably well. As evolutionary biologists are always keen to point out, evolution as a process makes do with whatever is at hand and cannot plan ahead. It selects for whatever solution works, rather than finding the theoretically best possible solution.

The problem is, it also turned us into “hyperactive agency detectors”: we see patterns and suspect motives everywhere. This can be as innocent as pareidolia, and it explains why we are so incredibly susceptible to conspiracy theories. Even our belief in one or more all-seeing, all-knowing deities falls under this rubric. As our societies grew in size, some people realised it provided a useful tool to encourage collaboration and scare potential cheaters and free-riders into submission. These were all fairly innocuous drawbacks. Until, that is, we started to write histories and tried to use them as a lodestar for future decisions. This is where they can feed the atrocities committed in the name of political parties, religions, and racist or nationalistic ideologies.

“a good story will actually give us a shot of oxytocin, the same hormone released during orgasm.”

This brings me to the parts of the book I struggled with. According to Rosenberg, the theory of mind completely fails as a predictive tool and is a scientific dead end. But, to be honest, I am not much the wiser as to why after reading this book. Partially this is the book’s lack of a clear structure. It would have been helpful if Rosenberg’s introduction had contained a road map for the chapters ahead, to be revisited throughout the book. He now makes a few flourishes in that direction, but never returns to summarise his arguments clearly.

If I understand Rosenberg correctly, he argues that there is no link between our desires and beliefs on the one hand and our actions on the other. Neurobiology shows our mental states to be by-products of unconscious neural events. It may very well be my lack of training in the fields of psychology and philosophy, but this assertion is couched in several woolly sections that read like philosophical navel-gazing. There is a lot of talk of introspection, the nature of our thoughts, and questions such as “are our thoughts anything like what consciousness seems to tell us about them?”. It begs the question, can a mind ever truly grasp itself?

Rosenberg turns to results from neuroscience that show how, at the level of individual neurons, brains make choices and create memories. And, in Rosenberg’s words: “nothing in […] our brains works anything like the way the theory of mind says beliefs and desires work – as representations with content expressed in statements about things.” There is just a whole lot of electrochemical processes when neurons fire, giving the convincing illusion of purpose. In that sense, Rosenberg sees his argument as part of the larger project of banishing purpose from science, the way “Newton banished purpose from physics, and Darwin banished it from biology.”

“According to Rosenberg, the theory of mind completely fails as a predictive tool […] there is no link between our desires and beliefs on the one hand and our actions on the other.”

You might very well ask: “what does any of this have to do with narrative history?” This is where Rosenberg asks another big conceptual leap from the reader. Perhaps the closest he gets to outlining the logic of that leap is on page 113: “For narrative history to even stand a chance of truly explaining people’s actions, we have to be confident that there really are beliefs and desires in people’s minds and that they really do cause them to act”. And the point of his argument is that that is not the case.

How History Gets Things Wrong puts forth a fascinating and provocative idea, though Rosenberg is quick to admit that it will likely be fiercely opposed in many places, partially because we are so addicted to storytelling. I do think Rosenberg is on to something, and I found his evolutionary arguments convincing, but the book was rather challenging in places. The more I tried to wrap my head around some of the other concepts, the more they slipped from my grasp. Despite delivering a thought-provoking critique of works read by general readers of non-fiction, these same readers would benefit from background knowledge of psychology and philosophy going into this book.

*Speaking of Rome – and Rosenberg also hints at this – it is often when history starts including hard data from other disciplines that we get a clearer picture. I expect he will welcome books such as The Fate of Rome and especially The Science of Roman History, which specifically answers the question of what other disciplines can offer historians.

**Do other animals have mental states? The extent to which they do is debated but the Safinas and De Waals of this world will have you believe it is more common than we thought.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

How History Gets Things Wrong paperback, hardback, ebook, audiobook or MP3 CD

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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“Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet“, written by Will Hunt, published in Europe by Simon & Schuster in January 2019 (hardback, 277 pages)

It starts off innocently enough, with Hunt discovering an abandoned train tunnel running beneath his home in Providence, Rhode Island. This left in an indelible impression that would be reawakened when he moved to New York City and became part of the city’s urban explorer crowd. From here, Underground follows Hunt on trips around the world, exploring the Parisian catacombs, a sacred Aboriginal ochre mine in outback Australia, the underground cities of Turkey, and the Mexican tunnel systems that became such an intimate part of late Mayan culture.

Hunt weaves history throughout his tales. From the prevalence of the underworld in the gods and places of Greek mythology to the Magdalenian culture, “the Rennaissance Florentines of the Paleolithic Age”, who littered European caves with carved statues and wall paintings between 17,000 to 12,000 years ago. He introduces an extraordinary cast of historical characters, from the 19th-century Parisian cataphile Nadar, who was a very early tinkerer in subterranean photography, to the first attempts at underground mapping by Edouard-Alfred Martel, whose cartographic conventions we still use.

“The modern West may be a secular society now, but go underground, Hunt observes, and “we perform an unwitting shadow-performance of the old rituals […]””

Another very prominent aspect of Hunt’s story is the religious and spiritual pull these places have always had (see also Sacred Darkness: A Global Perspective on the Ritual Use of Caves). Examples he gives include the worshipping of the underground deity El Tío by Bolivian miners, the ritualized Aboriginal pilgrimages to dig up ochre, or the many shamans and philosophers who retreated underground for vision quests and extended retreats. The modern West may be a secular society now, but go underground, Hunt observes, and “we perform an unwitting shadow-performance of the old rituals, sometimes following the ancient choreography down to the last gesture” as we have to twist and contort our bodies in the same way to descend into these spaces.

As Hunt points out, subterranean creation myths are prevalent in cultures around the world. One could even argue that scientists have their own version of this. He joins a team of microbiologists working for the NASA Astrobiologist Institute Life Underground who hunt for so-called “intraterrestrials”, the microbes living deep underground, possibly even throughout Earth’s crust in microscopic passageways (see Deep Life: The Hunt for the Hidden Biology of Earth, Mars, and Beyond for much more on this). And he shortly considers the deep evolutionary history of burrowing animals, writing of ants in particular (see my review of The Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath Our Feet for more on that). Hunt also considers the neurobiological basis to the powerful experience of being underground, illustrating it with his own tales of the disorientation when getting lost in catacombs, or the hallucinations that accompany the sensory deprivation when he camps underground in the dark for twenty-four hours.

“Hunt joins microbiologists […] who hunt for so-called “intraterrestrials”, the microbes living […] throughout Earth’s crust”

Part of what makes Underground such a fascinating book to read is the exclusive access it gives the reader. Over the years, Hunt has become increasingly well-connected in the world of urban explorers, anthropologists, and archaeologists. He meets one of New York’s most elusive and secretive graffiti artists, considered a phantom by the photographer who followed his work for over two decades but never met him. And he gets up close to an exceptional palaeolithic sculpture in the privately owned and zealously guarded Le Tuc cave in the Pyrenees, which archaeologists consider the most inaccessible major decorated cave in Europe.

Hunt has placed his narrative front and centre in this book, forgoing footnotes or an index (though major works are referenced in the text), but adding many fascinating though uncaptioned archival photos throughout. I became so engrossed in the book that I managed to blitz through its 260 pages in between the gaps of a single working day. This is an absolutely mesmerizing book.

So, how does Hunt’s Underground compare to Macfarlane’s Underland? It feels Macfarlane casts his mind outwards more, pondering deep time and the Anthropocene, while Hunt turns his gaze inwards, probing the more human side: religion, spirituality, and neurobiology. Macfarlane, as a nature writer, is more poetic in his writing, though Hunt, using a different tone, is an equally masterful storyteller. Underland is carefully annotated and referenced, but barely illustrated – Underground is the reverse. And even though both writers end up exploring under Paris and both touch on topics of biology and archaeology, it is striking how little they overlap. Clearly, the world under our feet is so vast there is space for more than one book. So why pick one? I heartily recommend them both!

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Underground paperback, hardback, ebook or audiobook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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These three tasks, so says nature writer Robert Macfarlane, signify our relationship with the world beneath our feet, both across time and across cultures. Underland is his lyrical exploration of underground spaces where people have sought shelter from warfare or hidden valuable treasures, are extracting minerals in mines or knowledge in research facilities, or are looking to dispose of waste. It is one of two big books published only five months apart on the subterranean realm, the other being Will Hunt’s Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet which I will be reviewing next. But first, Underland.

“Underland: A Deep Time Journey“, written by Robert Macfarlane, published in Europe by Hamish Hamilton in May 2019 (hardback, 496 pages)

For those who don’t know him, Macfarlane has been writing about “the relationship between landscape and the human heart”, bagging several literary prizes along the way. For him, Underland is a conclusion to a personal story-arc of exploration that started up high with his fascination with mountains (see Mountains Of The Mind: A History Of A Fascination) and descended from there (see his books The Wild Places, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, and Holloway). The book is based on more than a decade of exploration, usually in the company of experienced locals.

Think underground, and you will likely think caves, and there is plenty of caving here. Macfarlane takes the reader into the underground river Timavo in Italy, a starless river that speleologists have been exploring and mapping for decades. He is guided into the karst landscapes of the Slovenian highlands that hide a chilling legacy of ethnic cleansing dating to the second World War, when corpses were dumped down sinkholes by the thousands. He explores cave chambers in Norway’s Lofoten archipelago, whose cave paintings make it the Lascaux of the high North. And he traverses, and descends into, glaciers in Greenland. But he also ponders realms not accessible to us, such as the “wood wide web”, the symbiosis between tree roots and soil fungi. This might allow trees to exchange information with each other, even crossing species boundaries. The idea of this “underground social network” has been popularised by Peter Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World.

“He joins urban explorers […] in Paris and London who roam […] under these cities, “shadow twins to the upper world””

But equally fascinating are the human subterranean landscapes he enters: prehistoric barrows (cemeteries) in Somerset, and a modern rock-salt mine in Yorkshire where excavated chambers double up as laboratories for physicists probing the universe for dark matter. He joins urban explorers, so-called cataphiles, in Paris and London who roam the crypts, catacombs, wells, bunkers, tunnels, and drains under these cities, “shadow twins to the upper world” (see e.g. Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within or Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital). And he gets a tour around the subterranean waste facility in Olkiluoto in south-west Finland, currently under construction, which will store highly radioactive spent uranium fuel rods for 100,000 years. A feat which brings with it a whole new suite of considerations – how do you warn the species of the future to stay away?

What make these 400+ pages of caving, crawling, and occasional claustrophobia such a joy to read are Macfarlane’s evocative descriptions. Here is a word-smith at work, who can go from profound (“To these subatomic particles, we are the ghosts and ours the shadow-world, made at most of a diaphanous webwork”) to funny (“If you wish to listen for sounds so faint they may not exist at all, you can’t have someone playing the drums in your ear”) with but a flourish of his pen. The things he has seen have etched themselves into his memory, and he is intent on burning them into the memory of his readers in turn. From the majestic and rarely witnessed calving of a Greenland glacier (“a blue cathedral of ice, complete with towers and buttresses, all of them joined together into a single unnatural side-ways collapsing edifice”), to the surreal dumping ground in mid-Wales where locals have been pushing car wrecks down an abandoned mine shaft (“The result was an avalanche of vehicles […] a slewing slope of wrecks”). There are some truly memorable passages in this book.

Two themes run through this book, one already hinted at in the book’s subtitle. The first is that of Deep Time; the vast stretches of time in which geologists think when describing the evolution of our planet (see e.g. The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History). “Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth”, writes Macfarlane. Whether it is caves that have been hollowed out by the lapping of the sea over milennia, or the palaeoclimatological archive that we are retrieving from glacial ice cores (see The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change and Our Future), going underground brings into focus the steady grind of our planet. Although a human lifespan pales into insignificance, Macfarlane resists apathy. Much like Bjornerud (see my review of Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World), Macfarlane hopes that “deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as a part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years”.

“[…] going underground brings into focus the steady grind of our planet.”

Tying in with this is the theme of the Anthropocene, the newly proposed geological epoch based on the detritus that humanity is leaving in the rock record (see my review of The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit). Like others before him, such as Alan Weisman in The World Without Us or Jan Zalasiewicz in The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?, Macfarlane asks what legacy we are leaving behind. Nuclear waste is obviously one of the longest-lasting, but there are other revelations in this book. I was, perhaps naively, shocked to read of the mining company that simply abandons worn-out excavators, which cost £3.2 million, underground.

Each chapter opens with a black-and-white photo or illustration. I woul have loved to see more images, perhaps a colour plate section, as there are some striking photos included in this BBC interview. A book of this calibre leans on poetic language to a certain degree, but nowhere did I find Macfarlane self-indulgent or flowery. On the contrary, the book provides its own beautiful raison d’être during an interview with plant scientist Merlin Sheldrake. Macfarlane ponders how to make sense of the implications of the symbiotic interaction between fungi and trees: “Perhaps we need an entirely new language system to talk about fungi… We need to speak in spores.” To which Sheldrake enthusiastically replies: “That’s exactly what we need to be doing – and that’s your job […] the job of writers and artists and poets and all the rest of you”. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

So, how does Macfarlane’s Underland compare to Hunt’s Underground? It feels Macfarlane casts his mind outwards more, pondering deep time and the Anthropocene, while Hunt turns his gaze inwards, probing the more human side: religion, spirituality, and neurobiology. Macfarlane, as a nature writer, is more poetic in his writing, though Hunt, using a different tone, is an equally masterful storyteller. Underland is carefully annotated and referenced, but barely illustrated – Underground is the reverse. And even though both writers end up exploring under Paris and both touch on topics of biology and archaeology, it is striking how little they overlap. Clearly, the world under our feet is so vast there is space for more than one book. Why pick one? I heartily recommend them both!

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Underland paperback, hardback, ebook, audiobook or audio CD

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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