"I find it quite hard to see what you are bothered about what people in general believe or read". OK, if you wish to make it the issue of Liberty of Speech...;-) I am not prohibiting you to write anything. I am just using MY freedom of speech to comment...Anyway, this is an interesting debate, please, don't be offended, we are touching important issues.
1) You might be surprised, but I won't deny your accusation that I am bothered by what people believe or read in principle. However impopular my attitude might be for the liberals, I might be often bothered about what people in general believe or read. To give an extreme example: If people believed the Earth is flat or read anti-semitic propaganda, then I feel I have a right to be bothered, don't you think? Call me didactic and paternalist, but yes, I'd be bothered.
2) "There are elements of fiction in any retrospective narrative, actually, whether it proclaims itself to be creative or historical" - Thank you, I have read Hayden White, too. However, from there to "if the past is unknowable anyway, what's wrong with people doing as they like with it? At least fiction-writers generally admit that's what they're doing, whereas soi-disant historians are just as likely to be driven by personal agendas." Well, having a personal agenda does not mean for a historian the possibility to write that America was discovered by Columbus in 1945. That's the difference that still separates history from fiction, even for the post-moderns ;-) For however postmodern and relativist I may be, I can still criticize Schama for his factual errors or for moving the Robespierre's "Danton, I love you" quote a year ahead.
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OK, if you wish to make it the issue of Liberty of Speech...;-) I am not prohibiting you to write anything. I am just using MY freedom of speech to comment...Anyway, this is an interesting debate, please, don't be offended, we are touching important issues.
1) You might be surprised, but I won't deny your accusation that I am bothered by what people believe or read in principle. However impopular my attitude might be for the liberals, I might be often bothered about what people in general believe or read. To give an extreme example: If people believed the Earth is flat or read anti-semitic propaganda, then I feel I have a right to be bothered, don't you think? Call me didactic and paternalist, but yes, I'd be bothered.
2) "There are elements of fiction in any retrospective narrative, actually, whether it proclaims itself to be creative or historical" - Thank you, I have read Hayden White, too. However, from there to "if the past is unknowable anyway, what's wrong with people doing as they like with it? At least fiction-writers generally admit that's what they're doing, whereas soi-disant historians are just as likely to be driven by personal agendas."
Well, having a personal agenda does not mean for a historian the possibility to write that America was discovered by Columbus in 1945. That's the difference that still separates history from fiction, even for the post-moderns ;-) For however postmodern and relativist I may be, I can still criticize Schama for his factual errors or for moving the Robespierre's "Danton, I love you" quote a year ahead.