The Decline of Popular Historical Knowledge
The Decline of Popular Historical Knowledge
Damien: Omen II, a film released in June 1978, covers the teenage years of Damien Thorn, the Antichrist. A scene designed to show his demonic powers runs as follows:
Teacher: What’s wrong, Thorn? Am I boring you? You, of course, know all about Napoleon’s campaigns?
Damien: Something about them, sir.
Teacher: Do you now? How many men did he lose on the march to Moscow?
Damien: 450,000, sir. The Russians played at surrender until the winter set in, and then he began his disastrous retreat. Despite Marshal [Michel] Ney’s heroic rearguard action, the Grand Army was cut down from 600,000 to less than 50,000.
Teacher: Date?
Damien: 1812. He was deposed as Emperor in 1814.
Teacher: And then?
Damien: After a brief exile in Elba, he went to France and began the so-called Hundred Days’ War, until he was defeated at Waterloo.
Teacher: A date?
Damien: 1815.
Teacher: Let’s stick with dates, Thorny. Emperor’s death?
Damien: 1821 .
Teacher: Battle of the Nile?
Damien: 1789.
Teacher: Trafalgar?
Damien: 1805.
Teacher: Thirty Years’ War?
Damien: Start or finish?
Teacher: Start.
Damien: 1618.
Teacher: The Black Death?
Damien: 1334.
Teacher: Abraham Lincoln’s death?
Damien: 1865.
Teacher: Charles I?
Damien: 1649.
Teacher: Oliver Cromwell?
Damien: 1658.
Teacher: Thomas More?
Damien: 1535.
Teacher: Thomas a Becket?
Damien: 1170.
Teacher: The Black Prince?
Damien: 1376.
Teacher: Jean Paul Marat?
Damien: 1793.
Teacher: Danton’s death?
Damien: 1794.
Teacher: William McKinley?
Damien: 1901 .
Teacher: Death of Socrates?
Damien: 399 BC.
Teacher: Aristotle?
Damien: 322 BC.
Teacher: Alexander the Great?
Damien: 323 BC.
Teacher: Er, Sir Francis Drake?
Damien: 1596.
Teacher: Julius Caesar?
Damien: 44 BC.
Teacher: Roosevelt?
Damien: 1945.
Teacher: Richard III?
Sergeant Daniel Neff: Thorn! Come here. Outside.
Teacher: Copy the blackboard.
Neff: What were you trying to do, Damien? What were you trying to do?
Damien: I was just answering questions, Sergeant.
Neff: You were showing off.
Damien: No, I just knew all the answers. Somehow, I just knew them all.
Neff: You mustn’t attract attention.
Damien: I wasn’t trying to. I just felt...
Neff: The day will come when everyone will know who you are. But that day is not yet.
Compare this with a scene, clearly an homage, in the third episode of the first season of Vampire Diaries in September 2009:
Teacher: Pearl Harbour?
Elena Gilbert: Um …
Stefan Salvatore [the vampire]: December 7, 1941.
Teacher: Thank you, Miss Gilbert.
Stefan: Anytime.
Teacher: Very well. The fall of the Berlin wall.
Stefan: 1989. I’m good with dates, sir.
Teacher: Are you? How good? Keep it to the year. Civil Rights Act.
Stefan: 1964.
Teacher: John F. Kennedy assassination.
Stefan: 1963.
Teacher: Martin Luther King.
Stefan: ‘68.
Teacher: Lincoln.
Stefan: 1865.
Teacher: Roe vs. Wade.
Stefan: 1973.
Teacher: Brown vs. Board.
Stefan: 1954.
Teacher: The battle of Gettysburg.
Stefan: 1863.
Teacher: Korean war.
Stefan: 1950 to 1953.
Teacher: Ha! It ended in ‘52.
Stefan: Uh, actually, sir, it was ‘53.
Teacher: Look it up, somebody. Quickly.
Student: It was 19 ... 53.
[In the hallway.]
Elena: How did you know all of that?
Stefan: Years and years of crossword puzzles. It’s a loner thing.
For the scenes to work, the set-up requires a tension to be managed: on the one hand, the people and events asked about have to be, if not quite familiar, at least fathomable to the audience, and on the other hand the average viewer should not know all the answers, hence asking about dates, which most normal people will not know off-hand. The intended effect is that viewers can broadly follow what is going on, while being impressed that anyone knows this level of detail, aiding in the suspension of disbelief for the implicit claim that no human could know this much.
What surely strikes anyone looking at these two scenes, separated by thirty years, is the precipitate decline in the expected historical knowledge of the audience.
In 1978, it was assumed the audience could cope with figures spanning the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. With the exception of FDR, the nearest in time asked about is the French Revolutionary period up to Waterloo in 1815. The ancient world figures might be the “big” characters—Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander of Macedon, Julius Caesar—though if we take “big” to mean “widely known” that is open to challenge at the present time. Most notable is that nearly all the post-Classical figures are British or French, people a mass American audience were expected to vaguely know, even if they did not know their specific death dates—it would have defeated the point of the scene if they did.
Marat is an instructive case here: he might not have been known, exactly, to the average cinema-goer in the late 1970s, but it was expected they would understand he was related to the French Revolution—and by implication that viewers would know roughly what and when that was, at least comparatively (after the American rebellion, before the American Civil War, that kind of thing). There is no such expectation three decades later.
By 2009, there are far fewer events and people asked about, they are all American, and the questions are drawn from the second half of the twentieth century, with the exceptions of Gettysburg and Lincoln’s assassination, events that it would be most unusual high-school pupils could not make a reasonable guess at. Similarly, the chosen twentieth-century events are either “big” events that absolutely everyone knows, like Pearl Harbour and the fall of the Berlin Wall, or “activist” milestones on civil rights and the Sexual Revolution that are instilled in every child in America. The most obscure event—one a teacher can apparently mistake—is the Korean War.
A defence one can imagine—especially for fewer cases being used in 2009—is that a forty-minute television show has to be condensed, as against a 107-minute film, and that Vampire Diaries was aimed at a younger audience who have not yet had time to read much history. Set aside that the logic on the timing probably runs the other way: in a twenty-two-episode season, the TV show has more time to play with. As a counter-example, look at Doctor Who, which in the mid-1960s had a runtime of twenty-five minutes and, while wildly popular across all ages, always skewed towards younger viewers. Doctor Who used the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre as a setting, telling the story from the perspective of the Huguenot (Protestant) victims. Given the episode length, there was an obvious limit on how much information could be conveyed: the writers had to rely on the audience having some level of familiarity with the story of the Massacre. It would be a most audacious script writer who relied on any such thing now.
Take it away from history and the same pattern recurs.
During the original run of Yes Minister, back in 1981, the British disparagement of the French and Germans was expressed thusly:
Permanent Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby: Let’s look at this objectively. [The nascent European Union] is a game played for national interests and always was. Why do you suppose we went into it?
Minister James Hacker: To strengthen the brotherhood of free Western nations.
Sir Humphrey: Oh, really. We went in to screw the French by splitting them off from the Germans.
Hacker: Well, why did the French go into it, then?
Sir Humphrey: Well, to protect their inefficient farmers from commercial competition.
Hacker: That certainly doesn’t apply to the Germans!
Sir Humphrey: No, no. They went in to cleanse themselves of genocide and apply for readmission to the human race.
The wit, density, and sheer length of the dialogue was one of the running themes of the 1980s Yes Minister. By the time of the Yes Minister remake in 2013, the writers—the same team, be it noted—were reduced to having the Minister make reference to “frogs” and “krauts”. The use of these terms—so ludicrously unimaginative and dated that not even a British xenophobe unselfconsciously uses them—was evidently because of a practical concern that the average viewer did not have a linguistic comprehension that extended far beyond this, and one can hardly dismiss the concern. It should be said that the change also reflects another transformation from 1981 and 2013, especially at institutions like the BBC, which is the expansion of politics into everything.1
There is a lot of evidence that grade inflation since the 1980s is a real phenomenon—in other words, the level of competency that now scores top academic grades at schools and universities would have scored a lower grade in the past. After a long struggle, we appear to be past the denial phase on this point. The ground has now shifted to philosophical debates about whether this matters, with arguments that exam results tell us little about a person’s capabilities and some activists discounting the value of measuring attainment wholesale, leading to a quite extraordinary attack on standardised tests in the United States over the last few years, something that thankfully seems to be subsiding.
In this haze of conceptual sophistry and statistical manipulation, it can get lost that the broader societal question being got at, with grade inflation as a useful proxy, is: Has the overall educational level in Britain and other Western countries declined? Governments and sociologists have a vested interest in answering “no”, because the next question is, “Why?”, and the answers there are not flattering to them.
Looking at popular culture products is a way to cut through this obfuscation because the dominant incentive for filmmakers and TV producers is to obtain the largest possible audience—their financial well-being depends on it. By definition, this means focusing on the bulk of the population, not those at the upper and lower fringes. Film and television creators are, in short, experts at reaching the average citizen where he or she is, and their judgment, as seen in the vignettes above, is that the average citizen knows a lot less about history and is generally less educated now than they were a few decades ago.
NOTES
The original Yes, Minister, was about politics as a sector, but it was not political: the centre of the show was the comedy derived from the struggle between the elected officials and the civil service. Whatever political issue an episode in the 1980s was framed around, including those as then-controversial as unilateral nuclear disarmament, were presented completely even-handedly because the point was not to push one or other view on that issue. The politics was incidental, featuring only insofar as it buttressed the situational comedic mission. Such an approach was out of fashion by 2013. Despite one of the writers personally complaining about the ideological biases at the BBC, such biases crept in anyway, and weaving them in subtly was not an option since there was no confidence the audience would receive such messages. Viewers had to be hit over the head so they understood that anti-EU Ministers are contemptible morons.