Are these people really history majors?

"To generalize is to be an idiot." - William Blake

I hate to rag on my fellow students in the class I'm taking at Penn on memory in American culture (as I already did once), but some of the things some of them say astonish me. And yes, this is another one of the entries where I put on my intellectual snob.

I wish I had written down the exact quotations that bugged me so much this week, but I do have two words written down in my notebook that I subsequently underlined and annotated with WHAT?! in red ink (I always try to have a second pen color with me for just these moments...).

Those two words: timeless and inevitable.

Again, I neglected to write down the precise context in which people used these words, but anyone with a smattering of training in history knows to avoid these words like the plague (just like they should avoid tired clichés, right?). It would be one thing for the always useful Man on the Street to make claims about a particular development being inevitable or a specific value that American society has always held. But everyone in this class is a history major and should know better.

Historians try to explain the past. Arguing for inevitability or timelessness is typically an intellectual cop-out. That's not to suggest that no change is inevitable. Instead, you've got a whole lot of work to do if you're going to claim that something is inevitable or timeless.

In the first case, you need to carefully examine the situation and show that there is no point at which history could have taken an alternative course.

Timelessness is just as difficult to prove, if not more so. Can you provide evidence that the value or belief you're exploring has been present at all moments within the society or culture you're study?

Good luck with both of those.

Blake's just a bit off. It's not that generalizations are the products of idiots. There are generalizations to be made about the past. But you've got to be awfully careful about how you make them. Here's a better way of saying it.

To generalize is (often) to be lazy.