The Historical Continuity Fallacy

Reading this book review of a book from 2009 surfaces a question I will get to in a minute. The review is Inventing the Crusades by Thomas F. Madden.

Madden argues that the Crusades are badly misunderstood in popular culture and I would have to agree. Most view the Crusades as an early form of colonialism which is a bad misreading of history. Most understand the Crusades as a naked land grab by Europeans rather than a response to the Islamic conquest of formerly Christian lands. 1492 echoes in the popular culture as the year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue and virtually never as the year when the Spanish finally reconquered the Iberian peninsula after some seven hundred years of Arab occupation. People almost never recall that as recently as 1683, Islamic armies of conquest stood before the walls of Vienna, hoping to break through to the core of the European continent. All missing and forgotten in a modern retelling of history from a Gramscian Studies perspective.

There are a couple key points that Madden makes. Certainly there is the loss of historical knowledge. People are imposing interpretations on events about which they know little. That is a common issue across all historical events.

The two items which Madden takes particular note of are the loss of perspective and a second order ignorance.

Loss of perspective - we are an increasingly secular age. No issue with that as a statement of empirical fact. The challenge is for the modern secular mind to encompass the worldview and motivations of people living in the religious past. We want to interpret their actions as if they were modern seculars in age without cellphones. We miss their motivations entirely because of our own biases.

One of the most profound misconceptions about the Crusades is that they represented a perversion of a religion whose founder preached meekness, love of enemies, and nonresistance. Riley-Smith reminds his reader that on the matter of violence Christ was not as clear as pacifists like to think. He praised the faith of the Roman centurion but did not condemn his profession. At the Last Supper he told his disciples, “Let him who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me, And he was reckoned with transgressors.”

St. Paul said of secular authorities, “He does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” Several centuries later, St. Augustine articulated a Christian approach to just war, one in which legitimate authorities could use violence to halt or avert a greater evil. It must be a defensive war, in reaction to an act of aggression. For Christians, therefore, violence was ethically neutral, since it could be employed either for evil or against it. As Riley-Smith notes, the concept that violence is intrinsically evil belongs solely to the modern world. It is not Christian.

Madden articulates it this way.

But the Crusades were not just wars. They were holy wars, and that is what made them different from what came before. They were made holy not by their target but by the Crusaders’ sacrifice. The Crusade was a pilgrimage and thereby an act of penance. When Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095, he created a model that would be followed for centuries. Crusaders who undertook that burden with right intention and after confessing their sins would receive a plenary indulgence. The indulgence was a recognition that they undertook these sacrifices for Christ, who was crucified again in the tribulations of his people.

And the sacrifices were extraordinary. As Riley-Smith writes in this book and his earlier The First ­Crusaders, the cost of crusading was staggering. Without financial assistance, only the wealthy could afford to embark on a Crusade. Many noble families impoverished themselves by crusading.

Historians have long known that the image of the Crusader as an adventurer seeking his fortune is exactly backward. The vast majority of Crusaders returned home as soon as they had fulfilled their vow. What little booty they could acquire was more than spent on the journey itself. One is hard pressed to name a single returning Crusader who broke even, let alone made a profit on the journey. And those who returned were the lucky ones. As Riley-Smith explains, recent studies show that around one-third of knights and nobility died on crusade. The death rates for lower classes were even higher.

One can never understand the Crusades without understanding their penitential character. It was the indulgence that led thousands of men to take on a burden that would certainly cost them dearly. The secular nobility of medieval Europe was a warrior aristocracy. They made their living by the sword. We know from their wills and charters that they were deeply aware of their own sinfulness and anxious over the state of their souls. A Crusade provided a way for them to serve God and to do penance for their sins. It allowed them to use their weapons as a means of their salvation rather than of their damnation.

Madden is explicit about the role ignorance plays in the misunderstanding of the Crusades as summarized above. But there is a second order of ignorance in play which he highlights.

President Clinton is not alone in thinking that the Muslim world is still brooding over the crimes of the Crusaders. It is commonly thought—even by Muslims—that the effects and memory of that trauma have been with the Islamic world since it was first inflicted in the eleventh century. As Riley-Smith explains, however, the Muslim memory of the Crusades is of very recent vintage. Carole Hillenbrand first uncovered this fact in her groundbreaking book The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives. The truth is that medieval Muslims came to realize that the Crusades were religious but had little interest in them. When, in 1291, Muslim armies removed the last vestiges of the Crusader Kingdom from Palestine, the Crusades largely dropped out of Muslim memory.

If the Crusades dropped from Muslim memory, then how are they the explanation for today's events?

Riley-Smith describes the profound effect that Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Talisman had on European and therefore Middle Eastern opinion of the Crusades. Crusaders such as Richard the Lionhearted were portrayed as boorish, brutal, and childish, while Muslims, particularly Saladin, were tolerant and enlightened gentlemen of the nineteenth century. With the collapse of Ottoman power and the rise of Arab nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, Muslims bound together these two strands of Crusade narrative and created a new memory in which the Crusades were only the first part of Europe’s assault on Islam—an assault that continued through the modern imperialism of European powers. Europeans reintroduced Saladin, who had been nearly forgotten in the Middle East, and Arab nationalists then cleansed him of his Kurdish ethnicity to create a new anti-Western hero. We saw the result during the run-up to the Iraq War, when Saddam Hussein portrayed himself as a new Saladin who would expel the new Crusaders.

So the idea of the Crusades as an explanatory variable was reintroduced into the Middle East in the nineteenth century after several centuries lost to memory. This is the second order ignorance. Ignoring that the past cannot explain the present when there is a discontinuity between the past and the present.

It is this second order ignorance that I want to focus on and to set aside Madden.

I can think of two similar instances of a very similar dynamic. What is happening is a contemporaneous interpretation of current events that is dependent on an assumed continuity and causative relationship between some past event and present outcomes when in fact there was no such continuity. What happens is the imposition of a preferred modern interpretation on current events which is purely the result of motivated thinking and not of historical accuracy or causation. What to call this phenomenon? I don't know that it has a name. It is motivated thinking dependent on an ignorance of the historical discontinuity. The Historical Continuity Fallacy perhaps? The Historical Continuity Fallacy would be committed when an argument rests on the assertion or assumption that there is a clear causal line between the past and the present without acknowledging a clear discontinuity in the timeline.

Example One is the Crusades as described by Madden. The events occurred and fell from conversation in the Middle East until reintroduced by European scholars in the nineteenth century. Those past events as reinterpreted by modern scholars and clerissy were then used as a justification for current actions even though there was no contemporaneous memory of those events.

Second Example. Thomas Sowell has pointed out that there is a popular explanation of the current socioeconomic circumstances of African Americans that rests on two foundations; racism and the continuing impact of the consequences of slavery in America. He demolishes the first foundation by pointing out that it is differences in behaviors and not race that leads to modern outcomes. That blacks from other countries, even those with similar histories of slavery such as Jamaica, do much better in the US than native born African Americans and usually at or above the norm for the whole population.

He also attacks the second foundation (continuing impact of the consequences of slavery) by pointing out that on most socioeconomic metrics, African-Americans were improving and converging with those measures for whites from the 1900s to the 1960s. Education attainment, labor force participation rates, longevity, morbidity, income, marriage rates, family formation, etc. It was only in the 1960s, a hundred years after the Civil War, that most these measures began to plunge. Sowell's argument is that if there was a protracted period of time where the socioeconomic measures were converging, then you can't link the effects of the distant past (pre-1865) with the current outcomes (post-1965). I am not completely confident in Sowell's argument, but I think he has made it very hard to draw a simple line between purported past cause and current effect owing to the demonstrated discontinuity in the middle.

Third Example. From memory. I recall reading many years ago some early anthropologists/linguists doing research in the Pacific Islands in order to discover how the Pacific was peopled, where they came from. I think it was a German group that did the initial research in the latter part of the 19th century, visiting numerous island chains and asking about folk tales, myths and legends. The Germans were convinced that the islanders had come from some particular direction, say the northwest, and asked in particular about any stories of ancestors coming from the northwest. The research was completed, reports written, conclusions drawn and everything published and filed away.

Some thirty or forty years later, a different group of linguists/anthropologists are similarly out in the Pacific, still trying to put the pieces together of where people came from, which language groups are involved, how the languages evolved, etc. They are unaware of the earlier research. As they proceed around island chains, they discover some puzzling anomalies. Whereas most island groups have very generalized origin stories, some few have very specific tales anchoring their origins in a migration to the islands from the northwest.

In trying to understand the anomaly, they do more research once they return from the field, trying to find earlier accounts. In doing so, they come across the earlier German research. What they discover is that the islands with specific stories about coming from the northwest were all visited by the Germans a couple of generations earlier. What had happened was that the persistent questioning of the German anthropologists had effectively inserted a narrative meme into the local legends. In other words, there was a discontinuity created by the earlier research, that the current legends were not a product of an uninterrupted chain of stories from the distant past.

So three data points to support a posited Historical Continuity Fallacy. Once named, you can look for it. I suspect I will see more examples in the future.