13    The Gulag Archipelago and the Uses of History

In 1973, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn published the first of his three-volume narrative history of the Soviet Gulag cum autobiography of his life as a “zek” (inmate) in the system of forced labor prison camps that spread like a chain of islands across the eleven time zones of the Soviet Union. The word “Gulag,” originally an acronym for the authority that ran these prison camps, has entered most languages as a proper noun meaning any political prison extracting forced labor from its inmates. Solzhenitsyn’s aim in The Gulag Archipelago was not only to indict Joseph Stalin, his henchmen, and, before them, Vladimir Lenin for the crime of creating and administering a system that killed one and three-quarter million people (Solzhenitsyn, 1973–1978). His aim was also to show that the Gulag was an inevitable outcome of the mind-set their October Revolution gave rise to. The Gulag was the unavoidable means to their ends; both men were inseparably harnessed to it by the Bolsheviks’ project.

Naturally, Solzhenitsyn was unable to publish the book in the Soviet Union. In fact, he had to keep the entire project secret for years. One of those who copied the manuscript hanged herself after revealing its location to the KGB. Once published in the West, however, The Gulag Archipelago was translated into more than thirty languages and became an international best seller. Three years before, in 1970, Solzhenitsyn had won the Nobel Prize in Literature for other works, which had also been suppressed in the Soviet Union. The worldwide acclaim he received meant he couldn’t be jailed again without serious repercussions; instead, in 1974, Solzhenitsyn was expelled to the West, where he would live for the next twenty years.

That The Gulag Archipelago had a major effect on the subsequent life span of the Soviet Union is hard to deny. It was evident that the KGB, the Politburo, and Communist Party hierarchy in Moscow thought so, evident, that is, if you can believe the theory of mind. They did everything they could to suppress the circulation of smuggled-in and “samizdat” (self-published) copies of the banned work and to counter its effects, even at great and evident cost to themselves and their interests.

Certainly, Solzhenitsyn’s narrative history had a greater impact than his Nobel Prize–winning fiction, his magnificent novels of Soviet life, The Cancer Ward, and The First Circle, both published in the West in 1968.

How much was done to unravel the Soviet Union by Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume narrative history of the Soviet Gulag cum autobiography of his life as a zek between its publication and the end of Communism in the Soviet Union? Some might cite the election of the Polish Pope John Paul II in 1978 as making a greater difference. Others might point to U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” or Strategic Defense Initiative or to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika,—or perhaps to Gorbachev’s wisdom, or his heroism, or rather his fecklessness as the decisive factor.

The trouble with narrative history is that it simply can’t resolve these questions one way or the other. As we saw in chapter 2, there are too many forces operating on the trajectory of human affairs even to be enumerated and that weighting them in any one individual case, let alone in more than one over time, is a fool’s errand. Certainly, there’s nothing in narrative history that would enable us to accurately weight the causal factors that led to the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. But what we can’t deny is that The Gulag Archipelago had a profound effect on people everywhere and on late twentieth-century events—not only in the Soviet Union and its successor state, the Russian Federation, but elsewhere as well.

The reason is obvious: it moved people; it had an enormous impact on people’s emotions and motivations. It provoked feelings—of anger and hostility, sadness and despair, outrage and revenge. It also provoked feelings of admiration for Solzhenitsyn and for those whose stories he told, even exhilaration at the courage and resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity. As the three volumes appeared from 1973 to 1978, they provoked people to action, to buying and reading them, and to talking, arguing, and writing about them. But they also provoked political activity and significant change in the values, especially among people of the Left, who found themselves surrendering illusions and forsaking commitments that had been among their most cherished.

Great works of history, especially of narrative history, have this emotional impact on us. They make a difference in our lives that is often much greater than the difference the greatest works of historical fiction make. The Cancer Ward and The First Circle did not seem to contribute much to the unraveling of the Soviet state, whereas The Gulag Archipelago clearly did.

Cognitive social psychology has a pretty good handle on how and why narratives move people to action by their impact on emotions. Perhaps the best understood emotions are fear and anger.

As noted briefly in chapter 4, some emotional responses are close to hardwired, especially, for example, fear of spiders and snakes, in whose presence it takes most infants almost no experience at all to feel the emotion of fear, an evolutionary adaptation selected for over millions of years of hominin experience in sub-Saharan Africa, where dangerous spiders and poisonous snakes were endemic (Öhman and Minetka, 2001). As the emotion is aversive and unpleasant, fear brings about a highly adaptive flight response. Other emotional responses are shaped by the environment during early development. “Anger” labels the emotional response whose display is generally reinforced in people from childhood onward when they are subject to treatment they and others deem as failures to reciprocate in games or small acts of disloyalty. In most normal adults, this response has been shaped into one felt when they experience injustice or unfairness or observe it inflicted on others (Henrich et al. 2004; Fehr et al., 2012). It’s easy to see how the very same facts shaping cooperation and coordination on the African savanna would exploit the availability of an emotional response to failures of reciprocation to strengthen cooperation and coordination in the face of the challenges hominins faced. In fact, exploiting the emotion of anger at unfairness might have been indispensable to the enforcement of cooperation. Strategic interactions between subjects in controlled experiments show that opportunities to impose punishment on free riders substantially strengthens cooperative behavior. The same experiments show that in the absence of punishment cooperative behavior breaks down even when its continuation is to the benefit of all participants, who invariably identify feelings of anger at free riders as the motivation for acts of punishment (Fehr et al., 2012). Other studies show that people generally express more satisfaction watching or hearing stories in which offenders are punished rather than forgiven (Haidt and Sabatini, 2000).

Our conscious awareness of feelings of anger is followed by movement, behavior, action. We no more understand how this happens than we understand why consciously willing an arm to rise is followed the arm’s doing so. Our ignorance of how this happens is actually disguised from us by the sensory data we mistakenly treat as giving the content of “willing an arm to go up.” The same goes for anger. But fMRI data on emotions help us understand how an emotion such as anger leads to certain behavior. Even when no action ensues from the conscious feeling of anger, neural circuits that fire on such an occasion include portions of the motor cortex. Anger is a brain state constituted not just by the felt emotion but also by the beginnings of a process of bodily movement (Hortensius et al., 2016).

Cooperation-enforcing anger is an emotional response that relies on and requires the normal working of our mind-reading ability (Frank, 1988). That much is obvious. In the Pleistocene, when our ancestors would observe their fellow hunters or gatherers failing to discharge their roles, it would have been important to respond appropriately to their failure. Would anger have been an appropriate response? Anticipating a failure and preventing it would have been equally important; feeling and expressing anger to do this may have been highly adaptive. Once mind reading and language together produced the theory of mind, very specific linguistic content would have been attached to the emotion of anger, something like “I was just furious that he wouldn’t carry his fair share of the load.”

Narrative history’s stories thus have an important impact on us, owing to their role in provoking our emotional responses, especially the responses that lead us to action. Although, in this respect, narrative history is no different from other cultural artifacts that move us—art, music, drama, narrative fiction—it’s often much more effective than they are in moving us to action. The Gulag Archipelago shaped the history of the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century owing to its impact on people’s emotions, especially their anger at its portrayal of injustice on a vast scale.

Alas, the same thing can be said of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It, too, mobilized millions of people to engage in atrocities unrivaled by anything except those ordered by Stalin. Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Hitler’s Mein Kampf is tough sledding. I suspect hardly anyone, not even the most ardent Nazi, was able to read it all. The book is a farrago of lies about Hitler’s own life combined with hundreds of pages that seem to scream with Hitler’s hard-to-forget voice (as preserved in newsreels, documentaries, and propaganda films) about history, some of it verifiable, but most of it just made-up narrative explanations, easy enough to understand (although just as easy to disbelieve since the “evidence” Hitler offered was laughable).

There are vast differences between these two. One is the work of a great writer reflecting decades of careful research, a factual chronicle of profound moral force. The other is the illogical, disconnected scribbling of a madman, a disorganized screed of hateful fiction masquerading as history and implicated in the death of millions. But both proceed by employing the same explanatory theory: their stories are driven by the theory of mind. And both changed the world in profound ways because their readers held both to be true. It’s tempting to suggest that if they’d been read as simple works of fiction, they would surely not have had the impact they did.

But this confidence in the greater power of recognized or believed truth to move us in ways falsehood and fiction cannot would probably not be justified. Take, for example, two famous works of fiction that were both highly popular and extremely influential in their day—Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and D. W. Griffith’s 1915 pro–Ku Klux Klan film The Birth of a Nation.

It’s commonly reported that when Stowe was presented to Abraham Lincoln, the president said, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more copies in the nineteenth century than any other book but the Bible, and the anger that it provoked toward slavery was evidently every bit as fervent as the anger that The Gulag Archipelago provoked toward Soviet Communism. For its part, Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation is widely recognized to have greatly helped fuel the revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

What both these works of fiction share with narrative history is, of course, their narrative structure, the stories they tell, and the theory of mind they rely on in doing this. But they are fiction, and they were intended as such, received as such, treated as such. What this reflects is obvious: narrative alone, all by itself, can move us to action.

The emotive and affective power of narrative history and fiction masquerading or mistaken for narrative history is hard to overstate. Especially since the rise of romantic nationalism in the nineteenth century, ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups have been mobilized by their proprietary narrative histories of mistreatment, discrimination, even genocidal suppression into the mistreatment, discrimination, and genocidal suppression of other ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. Politicians are far from alone in employing narrative history to appeal to their followers’ sense of grievance or destiny. Many great creative artists and, of course, not a few sincere and scrupulous historians have done so as well. Two hundred years of nationalism that made the preservation of “historical memory” into a moral imperative are at the source of most of the violent episodes in history since the Congress of Vienna.

It was only in 2016 that someone finally noticed that this use of narrative history might not be such a good thing. In Praise of Forgetting is David Rieff’s reflection on the contemporary “moral authority” of narrative history:

[M]ost arguments in support of collective memory as a moral and social imperative … seem to take as their point of departure George Santayana’s far too celebrated false injunction, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This is the view that has become the conventional wisdom today, and the conviction that memory is a species of morality now stands as one of the more unassailable pieties of our age…. To remember is to be responsible—to truth, to history, to one’s country, to the traditions of one’s people or gender or sexuality (in this last instance what is usually meant is a group’ suffering, the history of its oppression). Anything less is an act of irresponsibility that threatens to undermine both one’s community and, in our therapeutic age, oneself as well. And even to question this consensus is to disturb what Tony Judt, writing in praise of Hannah Arendt, described as “the easy peace of received opinion.” (Rieff, 2016, pp. 58–59)

Rieff’s book identifies some of the motivation of the search for histories that have been made invisible by the hegemony of the West (or men or white people or Christians or straights). Some of the marginalized histories are laudable enough, well intentioned, indeed admirable. Some seem indispensable to prevent repeated genocides. Others aim at reconciliation: truth and justice. But too many of these marginalized histories have inflamed the irredentism and revanchism of the twentieth century and unabated continue to do so into the twenty-first. How much ethnic cleansing—of the Greeks and Armenians by the Turks, of the Hutus by the Tutsis (and vice versa), of the Croatian Muslims and the Kosovars by the Serbs, of the Arabs by the Israelis, was justified by such histories? “The crucial point is this,” writes Rieff,

we do not have to deny the value of memory to insist that the historical record (the verifiable one, not the mythopoeic one) does not justify the moral free pass that remembrance is usually accorded today. Collective historical memory and the forms of remembrance that are its most common expression are neither factual, nor proportional, nor stable. To be sure, were the political implications of this largely positive, or failing that, at least largely neutral, then arguing for a more skeptical view of remembrance would be both disrespectful to all those people to whom it provides strength and solace, and unnecessary. But is this the case? (p. 36)

The situation is actually much worse than Rieff’s rhetorical question suggests. It’s not just that “collective historical memory” is “neither factual, nor proportional, nor stable.” The same problems arise in the best, most disinterested, archivally scrupulous, primary source–driven historical scholarship. If the historical record is anything more than a chronology, it’s not verifiable. It’s wrong. And wrong in the most dangerous way, the way pretty much guaranteed to ensure that the mayhem of the last 5,000 years of recorded history will continue into the future.

Narrative history is not verifiable because it attributes causal responsibility for the historical record to factors inaccessible to the historian. And they’re inaccessible because they don’t exist. The causal factors narrative history invokes—the contentful beliefs and desires that are supposed to drive human actions—have all the reality of phlogiston or epicycles. So narrative history, even at its best, is just wrong about almost everything besides the chronologies it reports.

But, as Rieff realizes, it’s also dangerous. What makes “the historical record” presented by narrative histories dangerous is obvious, at least from the perspective of the cognitive sciences: reliance on the theory of mind is what makes narrative histories breed the emotions that have wreaked the havoc of recorded history: anger, shame, jealousy, retribution, vengeance.

By now, it’s obvious why narrative history is a poor guide to the future, why its track record for providing usable knowledge that actually enables people to cope with their futures is abysmal. Matters are far worse, however. Not only has historical storytelling led us astray in our expectations about the future. It has more often than not led those who believe it into moral catastrophes. No one can seriously suggest that, on balance, narrative history has been a force for good since it began to be written down some 5,000 years ago. There are, of course, exceptions to this woeful track record, ones we honor even as we try to overlook the atrocities sincerely perpetrated in the name of history.

Here again it’s worth distinguishing between the theory of mind and mind reading as an ability we share with other primates and, indeed, most other mammals. The ability to mind read is a skill hominins deployed face-to-face long before Homo sapiens emerged. It was responsible first for their and then for our survival, if only by making possible the domestic division of labor, mutual protection, and the teamwork of hunting and gathering. Mind reading has certainly been harnessed by the prosocial emotions of love, sympathy, and empathy right down to the present day. Indeed, in the history of our species, the positive uses of mind reading may, for all we know, far outnumber the harmful uses to which the theory of mind has been put. It’s impossible, of course, to tot up the uses of each and decide.

But mind reading becomes malevolent when the theory of mind enables it to unleash our hostile emotions against people we don’t even know, people who may even be long dead or far away.

Teleological “thinking” about—divining purposes in—the past was narrative history’s bane for as long as it was its raison d’être. Darwin banished purpose from biology just as rigorously for humans as he did for other animals. But no one noticed. Academic historians sought with great success to drive teleology out of their discipline, though not for the right reasons. They rejected the notion that history was going anywhere because they rejected the Christian, Muslim, Marxian, capitalist, racial, patriarchal, and nationalist eschatologies that identified history’s end, goal, or purpose.

Most people, especially those who drag narrative history into politics, didn’t get the message. National narratives especially move people by giving meaning to the chronicle of their history. People mistake the emotions such narratives foster for understanding. When the broad sweep of a narrative history comes packaged in a story—Manifest Destiny, The White Man’s Burden, “the civilizing mission [la mission civilatrice],” “blood and soil [Blud und Boden]”—it’s hard for anyone to shake it just because of the way it’s packaged.

The search for meaning in particular episodes, eras, or epochs in national narratives is driven by this teleological mistake. It takes its inspiration from the meaning people find in their own actions and in the stories they tell about why they acted. National narratives imbue groups, classes, sects, races, peoples, cultures, and movements with the same kind of motives and values, the same kind of recognition that ends require the means that the theory of mind accords to individuals. These national narratives are as hard to shake as a good biography or a powerful work of literature is. This book has sought to show exactly why such stories are addictive.

One tipoff that these master narratives are driven by the same machinery, the same theory of mind we employ in everyday life can be found in the morals so often drawn from them. Almost every national narrative underwrites a claim of rights or an accusation of responsibility, and these are collective, group rights and collective, group wrongs. But there’s only one way such judgments make sense, and it’s also the only way history in the form of a national narrative can justify them. Only agents acting on motives—good or evil—and beliefs—right or wrong—can be praised or blamed for outcomes. So either it’s the nation as a whole acting in ways the theory of mind informs us about, or it’s individual people who are, thereby defending their nation’s rights, committing their nation’s wrongs on others—or both.

In the nineteenth century, the first of these two alternatives was seductive. Under the influence of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel, nationalist idealists asserted that a “world mind” (from the German Weltgeist) invisibly controlled the path of history with the emergence of the nation-states (of Europe especially). In asserting this, they were only articulating an idea that comes naturally to hyperactive agency detectors like us.

But absolute idealism went out of fashion in philosophy, and twentieth-century international jurisprudence rejected “collective responsibility” just in time to try individual Nazis at Nuremberg. Still, the personification of the nation, the people, the race, the culture has persisted, thanks largely to demagogues.

If there is meaning in history, if national narratives have significance and a moral for the future, it can only be through the meaning and significance of the acts of the individual people that drive narrative history. But, as neuroscience reveals, there’s nothing that can do the work required to give people’s actions the meaning or purpose that narrative history—whether national or personal—requires.

What should we rely on to cope with the future if not narrative history? We need only look back to chapter 12 to find the resources we require. They’re the same resources we employ to cope with the biological, climatological, ecological, agricultural, demographic, and medical future. We need only figure out how to apply the tools that, with ever increasing success, have enabled us to cope with nature to our psychological, social, economic and political futures.

Stories are for children and for the child in us all. Nothing will ever stop us from loving them, at least not until natural selection radically changes our neurology. Narrative historians, like other storytellers, will never want for an audience. But we will all benefit by recognizing what narrative history at its best and most harmless actually gives us—not knowledge or wisdom, but entertainment, escape, abiding pleasure. That should be enough.