D.L.S Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

D.L.S - Essay Example So they don’t think there’s any way to extract information regarding this period Now I will mostly be interested in stating Smail’s ideas and supporting them with the excerpts from his book called ‘On Deep History and the Brain’. Before actually explaining the above mentioned points, one thing that must be clarified is that Smail is against the typical psychological treatment to the history. In fact, he prescribes a rather neurophysiological treatment to this case. The reason to support this sort of view is that such an approach will bring interdisciplinarity to the study of history which in turn will help in exploring history from different perspectives. Moreover, this will also tackle the presentism brought in by psychological treatment of the subject. In his words, ‘What do we gain from a deep history centered on the neurophysiological legacy of our deep past? Well, one bene?t is a new kind of interdisciplinarity that joins the humanities an d social sciences with the physical and life sciences. This is, I hope, something we would all like to aim for. This kind of interdisciplinarity, in turn, provides an opportunity for escaping the sterile presentism that grips the historical community.’ (Smail 1) According to Smail, the first and the most important of the facts that kept historians from including the prehistory to history is their dependence on the Sacred Scripts for the point of origin and the different marks of the history. Historians believed that the history started from the Garden of Eden. This point of view can be for any reason including religious, racial or political. This is how historians neglected the Paleolithic Era and in doing so they alienated a large number of audiences who were keen to know the happenings of this remote past. Smail pinpointed this loss in these words: ‘Historians risk alienating this audience if they continue to ignore that part of our history which consists of the deep past.’ (1) Smail suggests that in order to peek at the remotest past we have to move from ‘Sacred’ to ‘Human’ – our history must be centered on brain and biology rather than religion. Although Sacred History plays a major role in giving a historical account of the events that were of religious importance but it must not be the base on which the history building is to be erected. The most important reason is that it has only three major marks to go back to the past viz. Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the Universal Deluge and the Destruction of the Tower of Babel. So it does not offer much. Latin and Greek historians generally worked in this genre as their emperors were influenced by Christianity. For those historians who were influenced by this Judeo-Christian style of history writing, history began at Eden or from Genesis. So they don’t know what happened before Expulsion from Eden. Secondly, their scope is limited to religious trea tment of the events so all they were available with for help were religious scripts or scholars who molded every aspect of history to religious mold. Not only this religious treatment but also any other treatment whether it is philosophical or