Temples, Tombs & Hieroglyphs_ A Popular History of Ancient Egypt - Barbara Mertz [150]
The fact that acceptable theories of causation fluctuate is a disturbing phenomenon if we would like to believe that real reasons really exist. A number of theories have come in and gone out in the past century, in addition to the will of God. Causality is a dangerous word for a historian to play with; if he presses it too far he finds himself, sooner or later, locked in a death-grapple with a philosopher. Historians—and who can blame them?—try to avoid such encounters. Their causes are not philosophical profundities, as a rule, but prosaic, matter-of-fact explanations that are comprehensible to any well-read person. But historical causes are inevitably affected by the intellectual climate of the times. We no longer accept supernatural explanations—God and the devil are equally out of style—because our present worldview does not include a belief in the direct intervention of such forces in man’s affairs. Economic explanations are still respectable, despite the unfortunate use which has been made of poor Karl Marx, but most historians would not regard them as valid exclusive causes.
One very popular class of causes these days is the psychological, applied to nations or to individuals. It does not require much insight to identify the Egyptian who is most popular with the psychologists. Freud found Akhenaton perfectly fascinating, even though his childhood memories are irretrievably lost. One so-called psychologist has gone Freud one better: he not only supplied the missing details of Akhenaton’s childhood and pronounced him to be suffering from an Oedipus complex, but proposed the novel theory that Akhenaton was, in fact, Oedipus.
I am doing historians who employ psychological techniques a slight injustice by mentioning the Oedipus-Akhenaton theory, for it cannot be taken seriously, either as psychology or as history. It is representative of one of the lunatic schools, which flourish around the fringes of many fields of scholarly discipline, and it differs from the outpourings of the Pyramidiots only in the air of verisimilitude it creates. Its basic crime against true scholarship, the same error that mars the books of the pyramid mystics and more recent volumes on the age of the Sphinx and the identification of Akhenaton with various biblical characters, is that the author is not working with an open mind. He is not using facts to construct a theory, but is selecting facts to support a preconceived and unshakable belief. What ever the techniques a historian chooses to work with, he must use them without prejudice and be prepared to revise, or dismiss, his theory when he runs up against a fact his tools cannot handle.
An excellent example of the whimsy of historical fashion is given by the rise and fall of the Great Man theory. Simply stated, this is the biographical approach to history. The plot of the past is produced by the players; Great Men (and a few Women), by virtue of their personalities or their positions, not only influence the shape of events but bring them into being. After a period of relative respectability, this attitude was to some extent replaced by its converse, which has been called the Cultural Process. Men do not make events; events make men. Hitler did not “cause” World War II; the circumstances in Germany and the rest of Europe would have produced that fatal event even if Hitler had never been born, and some other leader would have been coughed up by the body politic to assume the role that the character of the times demanded. Akhenaton did not initiate a religious revolution; Egypt was ripe for an attempt at reform, and the general sentiment of the time would have forced such a move with or without Akhenaton.
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