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I recently posted a poll in my community tab here on YouTube which asks the following question:
When you don't have time to do the research yourself and you want to know what happened
in ancient history, do you—and there were five choices—believe what you wish to be true, defer
to the consensus of the experts, assume what a cool maverick researcher says is true, believe the
same thing your friends do, or find an inspired holy person and believe what they tell you?
The majority voted for ‘defer to the consensus of the experts.’ But some people's feathers got
a little ruffled at that, so I want to spend a little time discussing the point of the question
and then addressing the role that consensus plays in history and history writing.
Welcome to the writing history series which offers strategies to help you write history better—better
history papers, articles, books, or video scripts. If this is your first time here
and you love ancient history or just history in general, I invite you to subscribe to the channel.
All right, so what was the point of the question? When you don't have time to do
the research yourself and you want to know what happened in ancient history.
Now, this is kind of interesting but six percent of people who voted--there were
1.8 thousand votes--six percent of people said ‘believe what you wish to be true.’
I don't know if they were just trolling or if they meant it, but. . . Then six percent also said,
‘assume what a cool maverick researcher says is true.’ Five percent said, ‘find an inspired
holy person and believe what they tell you.’ Now, the reason why I put all these in here is because
I kind of want to make it like a point, right? I’m trying to make a point that none of these
are good reasons except for one. That's why they overwhelmingly voted for ‘defer to the consensus
of the experts’ because you should never just believe something because you wish it to be true.
You should never believe something just because some cool person says it
or your friends say it—or even an inspired holy person
because there have been many of those throughout the centuries and many of them have misled people.
So the best choice is to defer to the consensus of the experts. A consensus in general is what
most experts on a subject believe to be true about a certain issue based on their collective analysis
of all the evidence that they have at their disposal. In other words, it is the
collective answer of historians to a particular question. Consensus is not unanimous, it's just a
super majority, you might say. And you can't have consensus on every issue because on some issues
there's such a difference of opinion among the experts that there is no consensus. Some people
recoil at the idea of an expert. “They're just people who want to lord it over other people.”
But an expert is just somebody who has studied a subject long enough and deeply enough to be
able to have a handle on the mountains of complex data there is on a subject.
Anyone can be an expert but it does require a lot of time and work. But I do understand that
if you have a general anti-establishment bias, this phrase, consensus of the experts,
might rub you the wrong way, you might find it a little bit repellent—a collective of experts?
That's the establishment, that's the man. You've got to defy them, stick it to them.
But despite what people may be telling you, a bunch of underpaid academics around the world
are not a group of powerful people controlling your government or your society. We're just
talking about a bunch of nerds who have devoted their lives to studying history.
That's pretty much it. As a group, they're not your enemy. Consider them a resource.
Some have made the claim that consensus is invoked only where the science is not solid enough.
Is that true? They say, “Well, nobody says the consensus is that E = mc2, they just say E = mc2.
So, therefore, it must be that when you hear the word consensus, the science must be weak.”
No, consensus is commonly invoked when someone disagrees.
So if a significant number of people started saying, “You know, E = mc2 is wrong,”
the scientists themselves might explain why it is correct, but you would start to hear the
non-scientists using the expression 'scientific consensus' to counter that. Hey, there was a time
when you hardly ever heard the word consensus with the fact that the earth is round. But now,
you do hear that and that's because the flat earthers have multiplied.
I’ve encountered people in the comment section and in real life
who are under the impression that consensus is how the experts arrive at their opinions,
that consensus is part of the process of drawing conclusions. This is not true.
Conclusions aren't reached through democratic means among historians.
Historians, archaeologists, scientists etc--they don't vote on what is correct. Consensus is
no part of the scientific method itself. Conclusions are reached through the historical
method and slowly over time through a long process of examination of the evidence, presentation and
publication of findings, peer review, scholarly debate, building on the gathered information.
And with all of that, a consensus is slowly reached. But consensus is not necessarily
a goal. It is just what happens when a large number of scholars from different backgrounds
around the world have considered the question at hand and have reached similar conclusions.
Consensus is not used or employed in history or science except in the presentation of information
to the public. So, for example, when a history textbook is created, the writers make an effort
to present the historical consensus because that is what students generally will want to know.
If the textbook writers are good, they will be honest about debates
and controversies in the historical community and they will let the students know about them.
Another form of historical presentation that uses consensus is what we call state of the
field papers. University students are often encouraged to do state of the field papers to
demonstrate their knowledge of a subject and where matters presently stand within their field.
They then can go on to present their own theories, but always after they know the state of the field.
Dissertations frequently have a state of the field
section at the beginning. In these cases, consensus is commonly referred to.
Many YouTube videos are done as state of the field presentations. And, yes,
these are based on consensus as well. I do videos like that, so there is a place for it,
but it is usually public facing. If you look around, you will notice that when someone
appeals to the historical consensus as some kind of proof in itself, that person is likely to be a
non-specialist. Specialists don't usually do that. So if you look at my question here,
here's the way I worded it: When you don't have time to do the research yourself, and you want
to know what happened in ancient history. . .”When you don't have time to do the research yourself.”
Ideally, you would do the research yourself. In fact, I would encourage you to do the research
yourself. Doing the research is good. Historians do the research. This is only for people that
don't have the time to do the research, they can't do the research for some reason. Then
what do you do? Then you defer to the consensus of the experts, that's all I was trying to say.
Now, some of you wrote in the comments, ‘Well if I don't have time to do the research, I just
don't form an opinion. How about that? I just don't have a belief. It's up in the air. I don't
have a belief because I didn't do the research.’ You can't research every topic in the universe.
And, in fact, you have beliefs right now that you hold that you didn't do the research for.
How far away is the sun from the earth, for example? 93 million miles. How do you know that?
You didn't measure it, right? There are so many things that we believe
that we believe because, yes, the consensus of the experts.
So I don't think that that answer is being entirely truthful or at least not being
consistent. If you do it for other areas, why wouldn't you do it for ancient history? I defer
to the consensus of the experts because I’m not an expert in every part of ancient history.
Some parts of ancient history are just better known by other historians. So you know what?
I see what they all think about it. And that's what I often present to you here on this channel.
A lot of these things I present to you are not my own theories. In fact, most of them are not,
hardly any of them are because this is a public facing channel and I’m supposed to be teaching
you history. This is what teachers do. Teachers in school teach you, yes, the historical consensus.
But some might say (and some have) well, wait a minute, the consensus has been wrong before
you know. Yes, it has. Many times. People make mistakes, people have biases. In fact,
we should expect that the consensus will be wrong again on certain points. History, archaeology,
science do not claim to be always right. These fields not only expect revision and adaptation,
they require it. They must change. I mean, think about it. A historian studies documents and
finds something that hasn't been noticed before. They share it and opinions change.
An archaeologist finds something in the ground, new things are learned,
opinions change. That is what is supposed to happen. So why would you then say, “Ah,
but that means they were wrong before! They were wrong. Those archaeologists can't be trusted.”
Changing your opinion in the face of new evidence is about the most honest thing that you can do.
Consensus is the best approximation of reality that we can come up with at present. And yes,
it will be revised in future, often by the work of individual scholars. That's not
evidence of groupthink. A consensus can only be achieved if all evidence has been accounted for,
no assumptions without evidence need to be true for the explanation to work,
and the overwhelming majority of experts actively working in the field all draw the same conclusion.
Now, yeah, a consensus is always provisional but we can consider it the
least wrong approximation of reality supported by the full array of observed evidence and
a supermajority of professionals in that field.
Now, having said all that, challenging the consensus is a necessary component
of historical investigation. If you want to be a historian, you're going to have to
challenge the consensus somewhere. But in order to compete with it, you have to identify
where and how the consensus opinion breaks down and to demonstrate where your preferred
alternative not only succeeds where the consensus fails, but to demonstrate its success in every
place where the current consensus also succeeds. It will take a mammoth amount of evidence
to change the consensus. And yet, that is what every historian tries to do.
The key to making advancements in history is to understand the limitations
of the current consensus position and to identify the criteria necessary to overthrow it.
I hope that clears things up. Thank you for watching the video. I'll be putting
out more polls in my community tab, so look out for them. And if you like this video,
please give it a thumbs up! Also, if you want to support the channel in other ways,
like monetarily, you can do so for as little as two dollars per month
at patreon.com/worldofantiquity. Thank you for watching.
You might like my little e-booklet, Why Ancient History Matters. It's designed to persuade people
that the subject is important even in the modern world. You might also wish to use it
to help spread the word. So feel free to share it with someone you know. It's free for anyone who
wants it. I’ve left a link in the description box below the video for you to grab a copy.
Catch you later.