Preview
  • How History Gets Things Wrong

  • The Neuroscience of Our Addiction to Stories
  • By: Alex Rosenberg
  • Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
  • Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
  • 3.8 out of 5 stars (36 ratings)

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How History Gets Things Wrong

By: Alex Rosenberg
Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
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Publisher's summary

Why we learn the wrong things from narrative history, and how our love for stories is hard-wired.

To understand something, you need to know its history. Right? Wrong, says Alex Rosenberg in How History Gets Things Wrong. Feeling especially well-informed after reading a book of popular history on the best-seller list? Don't. Narrative history is always, always wrong. It not just incomplete or inaccurate but deeply wrong, as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative? Our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long Darwinian pedigree and a genetic basis. Our love of stories is hard-wired. Neuroscience reveals that human evolution shaped a tool useful for survival into a defective theory of human nature.

Stories historians tell, Rosenberg continues, are not only wrong but harmful. Israel and Palestine, for example, have dueling narratives of dispossession that prevent one side from compromising with the other. Henry Kissinger applied lessons drawn from the Congress of Vienna to American foreign policy with disastrous results. Human evolution improved primate mind reading - the ability to anticipate the behavior of others, whether predators, prey, or cooperators - to get us to the top of the African food chain. Now, however, this hard-wired capacity makes us think we can understand history - what the Kaiser was thinking in 1914, why Hitler declared war on the United States - by uncovering the narratives of what happened and why. In fact, Rosenberg argues, we will only understand history if we don't make it into a story.

©2018 Brilliance Audio, Inc.by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History
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What listeners say about How History Gets Things Wrong

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only read biography & history books for enjoyment

a thorough dismantling of the structure of modern society via puncturing reliance on the theory of mind & mind reading used when recording narrative history if the purpose of studying or reading it is in order to interpret history as a primary tool to build for the present or plan for the future rather than for sheer entertainment and enjoyment.

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Excelente book

these book is quite interesting and the facts and histories presented stressed the why this book is really important to read.

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Brilliant

Although there is at least one theoretical problem attached: how can we have a historical ontology without narrative history? Besides that: strongly recommend for listening!

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Misleading title

This book was awful.
The title is inaccurate.

The language is overly academic. The format is tedious. It never comes to any real conclusion.
Irony is railing against narrative history while using a narrative to do it. My eyes rolled so hard into the back of my head, I’m now blinded.
Save your money and your time.

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1 person found this helpful