narrative and history

This is a very strange essay. Alex Rosenberg writes that narrative history “fails to explain anything because it attributes causal responsibility for the historical record to factors that contemporary neuroscience reveals to be fictions — convenient ones, but fictions nonetheless.” The causal factors narrative history invokes, such as the beliefs and desires that are supposed to drive human actions, rely on a scientifically unwarranted theory of mind. It‘s one that breeds emotions such as anger, shame, jealousy, retribution, and vengeance, and has wreaked havoc throughout recorded history. But Rosenberg illustrates this point by pointing to works of narrative history that, he says, have been enormously consequential in shaping people’s thoughts and actions: they have “changed the world in profound ways.” That is, he “attributes causal responsibility” to these works of narrative history: he says of one work that it “provoked political activity and significant change in the values,…