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Controversial Historical Opinions You Have

Arawn_Emrys said:
Personal Opinion Only: when the Mongols destroyed the House of Wisdom, it was part of a general destruction of the city and just gets lumped in with that, conversely the Christians burning the Library under Cyril (after they skinned the librarian alive with sea shells, set her on fire and literally tore her apart for the crime of being a powerful female opposed to Cyril) it was with the express intent of destroying knowledge.
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None of that happened though.

She was killed by being pelted with roof tiles (apparently a favorite of Alexandria) over a political dispute between Cyril and other religious leaders decades after the last remote vestige of the Library of Alexandria, a temple called the Serapeum, was torn down after an incident where a group of pagan philosophers killed several Christians in the city and barricaded themselves inside the temple.

historyforatheists.com

The Great Myths 5: The Destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria - History for Atheists

If there is a story that forms the heart of New Atheist bad history, it’s the tale of the Great Library of Alexandria and its destruction by a Christian mob. It’s the central moral fable of the Draper-White Thesis, where wise and rational Greeks and Romans store up all the wisdom of the...
historyforatheists.com historyforatheists.com

historyforatheists.com

The Great Myths 9: Hypatia of Alexandria - History for Atheists

Hypatia of Alexandria is often portrayed as a martyr of reason and science, who was killed by anti-science fanatics. This bears little relation to reality
historyforatheists.com historyforatheists.com

I'd quote paragraphs directly, but I am currently on mobile. Any in-depth debate will have to wait ~6 hours. I definitely recommend reading the pages I linked, and the rest of the blog as well if you find it interesting.
 
Z-Cosmonaut said:
While, I don't believe in Great Man Theory, I sometimes think people take it too far in the other direction.
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No you don't understand! Everybody in history gets a nice liberal participation trophy. Random Man A and Random Woman B in the ditch who nobody knew in life and nobody knows in death are just as important as Alexander and other famous folks.

It's pure elitism and fascism to point out most people lives thoroughly insignificant lives while a few really smart or really lucky people changed the course of human civilization forever.
 
Nikkolas said:
No you don't understand! Everybody in history gets a nice liberal participation trophy. Random Man A and Random Woman B in the ditch who nobody knew in life and nobody knows in death are just as important as Alexander and other famous folks.

It's pure elitism and fascism to point out most people lives thoroughly insignificant lives while a few really smart or really lucky people changed the course of human civilization forever.
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Nice strawman.
 
The rise of Great Man Theory is deeply tied to the death of the RTS and the rise of MOBAs where instead of controlling multiple units, we control one hero and everyone else is just second fiddle. In this essay I will
 
Hykal94 said:
The rise of Great Man Theory is deeply tied to the death of the RTS and the rise of MOBAs where instead of controlling multiple units, we control one hero and everyone else is just second fiddle. In this essay I will
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I have no evidence for this but believe it wholeheartedly. Or maybe it's the shift from wargaming to adventuring rpgs, like d&d?
 
Controversial, yet originalish take on Great Man Theory: it's true in that the historical forces which drive the majority of events throughout history are anthroposophontic entities with personalities and quirks, which interact with each other on an interpersonal level to drive history forward.

("Isn't this just polytheistic traditional religion?" No, gods are one level of abstraction down, duh! Read some Plotinus.)
 
Also as far as it goes, it's never going to end because powerful people have basically every reason to intentionally delude people into thinking they're the focal point of all things. Rulers throughout history have basically intentionally told myths and lies, and for a long time historians just swallowed them whole. "Of course Lenin was the guiding heart and soul of the Bolsheviks, the indispensable man without whom none of it, none of the Bolsehevik's rise to power would have happened. After all, Lenin told us this. Repeatedly. And wouldn't Lenin know?" to use an example at random.

If he'd said it a thousand years ago we wouldn't have been able to fact check him at all, honestly. :V
 
There have definitely been many cases in which one man decided what millions of other people would do. There are obviously limits on what's physically possible, what people will tolerate, what's going to get pushback from surrounding culture, etc. But wars have started and ended based on the whims of an autocrat.
 
Mopman43 said:
I only looked into it briefly, but the House of Wisdom that was in Baghdad seems like a more impressive institution than the Library of Alexandria.

Don't know why I never see anybody going on about the destruction of that library.
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Hard to be a more impressive institution when the House of Wisdom... wasn't one to begin with.
And why its destruction (if greatly exaggerated) by the Mongols is often overlooks (by who? It is impossible to talk about the Mongols without someone jumping in how they set us back 500 years for it) compared to the one in Alexandria, the answer is pretty simple, proximity creates familiarity. Egypt is located right in the Mediterranean, Ancient Egypt has been a influent polity in the region for a long time, eventually being conquered by the Greeks and the the Romans, which much of Western traditions and history comes from, meanwhile Baghdad is located at Iraq, a land peripheric and mostly unknown for Western intellectuals until the 19th century.
Never wondered why we have so much media about mummies, pharaoh, Cleopatra compared with ziggurats, cunneiform and Gilgamesh? The same goes for Roman Egypt and Abbasid Iraq.
 
Great Man Theory is incredible because it's basically a "theory" that just happened to crop up in the time of your Napoleon's and Bismark. When the idea of a singular centralized autocrat being the solution to politics was in vogue. Only for that ideology to contribute to horrendous suffering over the next century. But instead of fading away just as fast like shit like occultism did it just stuck around in the public consciousness despite this wealth of anti-evidence.

Mostly just because it's a theory that flatters the people in power and those who consider themselves temporarily inconvenienced Napoleons.

Sulemain said:
For me Great Men (and Women and so forth) make clear and solidify what the great sweep of history has to offer.
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You realize that this sentence itself lays out why Great Man Theory is fucking stupid? Like, unless you think that women only started becoming capable of being great around the time when feminism kicked?

Great Man Theory is completely incompatible with gender equality. Because aside from it literally being in the name, GMT would have to explain that if history is driven by great individuals regardless of their gender, then why are most of the names written in the history books men?

It's like trying to spin a progressive interpretation of scientific racism. It just doesn't work.
 
The Laurent said:
Also as far as it goes, it's never going to end because powerful people have basically every reason to intentionally delude people into thinking they're the focal point of all things. Rulers throughout history have basically intentionally told myths and lies, and for a long time historians just swallowed them whole. "Of course Lenin was the guiding heart and soul of the Bolsheviks, the indispensable man without whom none of it, none of the Bolsehevik's rise to power would have happened. After all, Lenin told us this. Repeatedly. And wouldn't Lenin know?" to use an example at random.

If he'd said it a thousand years ago we wouldn't have been able to fact check him at all, honestly. :V
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To be a pedant, Lenin didn't really say that, but it was the official line of the USSR pretty much the instant he actually died, so your example still works, it's just that he himself wasn't that self-aggrandizing :V .
 
My controversial opinion is that the Great Man theory of history isn't completely garbage. Sometimes major events do in fact revolve around the decisions of a few powerful, influential or otherwise critical figures. They don't summon history, ex nihilo, from their foreheads obviously but if you change a decision or remove a person then you're going to see massive effects down the line.
 
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." - Karl Marx
 
Relato said:
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." - Karl Marx
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No one, even the people most opposed to the theory think individuals are entirely irrelevant. That'd be silly.
 
Nyvis said:
No one, even the people most opposed to the theory think individuals are entirely irrelevant. That'd be silly.
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As I've said before, it's actually proponents of the Great Man Theory who most think that individuals are irrelevant. I mean, go up there and look at how Nikkolas talks about literally 99.9999% of all humans that ever existed. His is not a vision that has room for social history, or cultural history, or history from the bottom up, or literally any of the innovations in technique and method that historians have spent decades using once they actually made the turn towards intense archival research.

They (or at least Nikkolas, and I've seen it in other Great Man proponents) claim to exalt the individual while belittling and demeaning them, to exalt 'humanism' while writing off humanity.
 
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Since this thread is now relitigating an argument from 11 months ago, I think I'll just repost a comment from then that I liked. :V

Memphet'ran said:
1) I get the feeling that in this discussion "Great Man theory" is being used to name two different things. One of these things is the idea that sometimes the ideas, choices, and actions of an individual have a profound effect on history. The other is the idea that the mass of humanity receives most progress and culture as gifts from a handful of geniuses, and without that handful of special people we'd all still be living in huts and hunting dinner with obsidian-tipped spears and also we'd eat raw meat and communicate by grunts cause fire and language were invented by Ug and Thogg on January 4, 3,264,072 BCE and July 12, 52,166 BCE, respectively. I think the "geniuses invented everything and did everything important" version of Great Man theory is the one people usually have a problem with, and the one people are usually thinking of when they say "Great Man theory" with a sneer. It's obviously the version that's easier to argue against, if nothing else because it makes a much more specific claim about how society works. It's also the version that's obvious catnip to defenders of hierarchy.
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I lean fairly heavily towards Type 1 Great Man Theory myself (with the caveat that I don't see it as incompatible with materialistic or ideal-driven conceptions of history), but most of the "Great Men" I can think off of the top of my head were profoundly harmful in their impact.
 
If someone is a Great Person isn't really a mark of morality, more of a mark of their impact on world history. A singular individual can change the course of history. Alexander the Great, Aurelian, Belisarius, to name but three. Sure, all the ingredients were there but it was they who took them and made something of them. Just imagine what the world would be like if say, Catherine the Great or Hannibal Barca never existed.
 
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