May the power (of history) be with you | al-Wasat

I admit that sometimes I enjoy the pop culture buzz that takes up so much oxygen on social media. These buzzes take on an especially strong turn with the upcoming release of the new Star Wars movie, which has writers and editors flocking to the click mine. As political scientists Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel Neckerson put it famous In their excellent article on the relationship between pop culture and political science, they say: “It’s like having a thousand editors clamoring for clickbait, but no one has the courage to shut them up.” Listen.

Jackson and Nexon make a number of deep and important points in their article, but the most important one is that many writers who opine on the relationship between fictional worlds and contemporary politics are simply transplanting fictional worlds into our own to reveal some vague, tenuous “lessons” about our daily lives. As the authors say, “If you’re going to use a fictional universe to make an argument, you have to follow the basic rules of that universe. Not everyone does that.”

For the author, this disregard for context and the fictional texts themselves means that we can’t learn real information about politics and society by reading or watching these works. At the same time, aimless analysis trying to find political lessons from Emperor Palpatine (but really, who would think that’s a good idea?) can also lead to a false reading of our own world. Fiction can approximate the real world, but it’s still just an approximation, one that works according to the story that the screenwriters and filmmakers want to tell. You have to look elsewhere for the answers.

But while Jackson and Nexon correctly documented and dismantled all of these problematic ideas, they left out one important word: anachronism. In short, anachronism is the application of a setting, context, or set of ideas to another time and place—or a galaxy far, far away—where those concepts don’t necessarily apply or have the same meaning.

I have no doubt that the authors knew about this concept and took it to heart. After all, what they are describing and criticizing in their essays are anachronisms. So why is this word important? For me, its importance is that its absence illustrates some fundamental differences between political science and historical analysis.

I don’t want to overemphasize disciplinary perspectives on this, because people are not their discipline, and vice versa. Many political scientists value and emphasize the value of context, of gaining a deep experience of place and people through study and fieldwork, and of avoiding overly generalized frameworks to explore larger perspectives on political order.

It is important to note, however, that history itself does not take anachronisms as seriously as it does that history itself does. Historians are not always saints when it comes to avoiding anachronisms, but it is widely considered a “sin” within the historical profession, one of the worst sins one can commit. Historians at all levels of study, from high school to graduate training, are indoctrinated into the horrors of anachronism. When I begin my classes, I explain this concept to my students and discuss it with them in detail so that they retain it in their minds throughout the semester.

Sometimes this emphasis can go too far, and historians may overcontextualize or avoid framing for fear of missing important details, as historian and sociologist William Sewell observes in The logic of historyBut this focus on avoiding anachronisms is also one of the great strengths of historical analysis. It forces students and practitioners alike to ask difficult questions of their sources, to weigh incomplete and uneven information against what we know, what we think we know, and what we don’t know, and to be mindful of the ways in which our experiences and perspectives can both shape and hinder our view of the past and present.

This kind of nuanced attention is essential for both historical and contemporary analysis, because only by carefully understanding the different contexts at every level of research can we understand how things change over time. And maybe, just maybe, it will cool those who are keen to rashly promulgate opinions and destroy distant worlds in the name of page views.