The Lens of History...

Business trips over, so hopefully more consistent writing the rest of the month...

We saw the movie One Hour Photo on TV, recently--just the kind of psychological thriller "The Baroness" (a psych major) and I enjoy...  The plot is irrelevant to the discussion, only that Robin Williams plays a photo development tech at a supermarket, and often muses in voiceover on the philosophies of picture-taking.   Pictures are almost always of happy events and smiling faces, because "nobody takes a picture of something they want to forget".  Pictures are a means of recording history...but obviously you can't take pictures of everything, and thus the choices you make in deciding what to immortalize in a print and what not to are significant.  How do those choices affect the natural bias of the 'history' that photo albums record?  Would someone looking at a family's photos deduce that they were a lot happier than true history indicated, simply because of the unbalanced subset of things that were photographed?

Journal writing, including blogging, can be considered in much the same way.  The purpose of keeping a journal or diary is essentially to record history.  But obviously you can't write everything that happens to you and those around you...   What criteria do you use in recording certain things but not others--including the words you use to describe an event?   How do those choices influence the natural bias of your writing?

For example:  In 1st Nephi we read that even though Nephi was tied up for several days by his brothers:

Nevertheless, I did look unto my God, and I did praise him all the day long; and I did not murmur against the Lord because of mine afflictions. (1 Ne 18:16)

Now there is little reason to doubt that Nephi was a righteous man.  Nevertheless, we could perhaps consider the fact that this record was being written by Nephi himself.  The record indicates that Nephi was seemingly always patient in his afflictions.  The interpretation of the events of 1st Nephi in the Book of Mormon Movie, though, shows Nephi as being at times a little tempermental and emotional during his afflictions (while still remaining within the bounds of righteousness behavior).

I found this entirely believable and one of the movie's (few) strengths.  No one knows what really happened, but can we discount the possibility that Nephi, knowing that others would be reading the record made by his own hand, may have exaggerated (a little) his patience and long-suffering throughout his family's travels?  He might have been entirely patient at all times, or maybe he let his emotions out a little, but didn't find it significant enough to mention in his record.  Maybe he was afraid of giving future readers the wrong impression, or of taking away emphasis from the principle that we in our time could and should be patient in our afflictions as well.

History, even our own personal history, is filtered through the lens of the people writing it.  Someone who faithfully keeps a journal is doing so for the purpose of recording the events in their lives, yet surely there is the temptation (even subconsciously) to phrase things in such a way that makes you come out better--especially if you think future generations are going to be reading your record.  You soften things up a little, you leave a few minor details out that you consider to be unimportant, and your history is still accurate...yet perhaps different than someone else recording the exact same events might have written.  (If there was a book of Laman, he might have had quite a different view of things within the 'history' of 1st Nephi than Nephi did...)

As mentioned last month, this exemplifies the vast uncertainty of any kind of historical study--you're forced to deal with the inherent biases of everyone who ever recorded anything.  History is written by the winners, as they say (see this article for a good example of a 'revisionist history' controversy), and in the end that's all we have to go on.  It may turn out that the difference between what really happened and what got written down in all aspects of human history, including scriptures, might be large indeed...