Once an acquaintance showed me pictures he’d seen on Google Earth. They were of southern Peru, in the famous Nazca Desert, where, as you may remember, there lie huge drawings of animals and insects visible only from the air. These images caused quite a stir at the time and became one of the “indisputable proofs” that aliens not only visited Earth but actually cooperated with the locals, who laid out landing strips for them from small stones. Well, well — in Peru they still make such drawings, perfectly visible from space. Though now they depict naked women, inscriptions like “Dynamo” — that’s cool! “Dynamo” — the school!" and “Juan Pedro — your candidate.” A question inevitably arises: weren’t those Nazca spiders and monkeys, let’s say, simply a way of courting girls?
Which brings me to the following point. History is something we can only ever grasp approximately. Every historian inevitably interprets the past through the lens of his own era. And so the Nazca drawings only became fashionable during the public’s fascination with spaceflight — that is, in the early 1970s.
Another example. Nineteenth-century anthropologists — mostly devout men who studied various natives — described their religions. For a long time these myths, often detailed and elaborate, were taken at face value, until the religious framework itself was called into question. Today, many argue these are not religions at all, but rather ways of encoding technological and practical knowledge — how to hunt, when to sow, when to harvest, and so on.
In general, when you deal with history, the risk of being wrong and presenting the desired as the real is very high. There is one more point. Along with the people who lived in any given era, the “spirit of the times” passes away too. That spirit is not a metaphor, but the most practical matter. These are the things taken for granted, about which little is written, almost never discussed, which never make it into “sources.” It is they that form the matrix in which historical events occur. For example, I didn’t know that the idea of “equality of result” rather than “equality of opportunity” has its roots in the idea of dividing land into equal parcels and distributing it to workers. This anti-aristocratic idea was popular in the Modern Era. Indeed, if aristocrats no longer serve any purpose and their lands are simply a privilege granted by the king, then one needs to take the land away and distribute it equally to everyone. Many outstanding figures, including the “Enlighteners,” saw endowing all inhabitants of the Earth with equal plots of land that would feed them and their families as an ideal — the ultimate goal of humanity. By the nineteenth century, the idea of land division had already become a kind of self-evident mental template. Which is to say, Marxist dogmas did not appear out of thin air — they grew in well-prepared soil. And now, after Marxism, we have a widespread conviction that equality means: if an oligarch earns millions, then I should too. More precisely — they owe me.
And finally. For myself, I devised a simple method for checking various political manipulations and outright dishonest fabrications that are heaped upon us under the guise of history. The method is this. You simply need to consider how our time would appear in the works of historians three hundred years from now. Judge for yourselves — we are overwhelmed with information, but in reality, there is little of it, and information about us in three hundred years will be even less, and not simply because of loss, but at least because our “information” is mostly fragments of scattered, unstructured data. On the internet, where the main information flow passes today, this very information doesn’t last long. Printed sources are falling out of use. Newspapers and magazines are secondary to the network. And imagine if someone were to base historical conclusions on surviving television broadcasts? Or worse yet — television series? I’ve always wanted to read a history book from the future about our time.