I think you both may be slightly missing what I'm saying.
Let's suppose that people do simply want to be told what to think. Well, in such a case, it would be simple to get a viewer of, say, CNN, to watch FOX instead. After all, they just want to be told what to think.
But we know this is not the case. It is nigh impossible to get a viewer of CNN to stop viewing CNN and watch FOX instead. And it is an equally sysiphean task to get a FOX viewer to stop watching FOX and watch CNN full time instead.
I'm positing that this is because we all adhere to some preexisting world view that, for most, won't really change in any case.
Same with history, studying history by studying primary sources has fallen out of favor because most primary sources don't align with our world views.
Certain reliefs in Egyptian temples displayed an alarming, to us, amount of explicitly sexual activity among everyone from the pharoah, to the high priestess, to the slave. So we erased it where we could erase it, and don't talk about it where we couldn't erase it.
Ditto for pagan rituals, so we replace them with good, clean, Christian rituals that weren't so lascivious. But I mean, hey, it's an Easter BUNNY out hunting for eggs. You figure it out.
Again, the Declarations of Causes explicitly state that maintaining slavery is the principle aim of the states in the Confederacy. So if we want the spark of that conflict to be something else, we just ignore those documents and focus on the material put out by historians better aligned with our thinking.
I posit that in all of these cases, we do those things to protect our belief system.
> It is nigh impossible to get a viewer of CNN to stop viewing CNN and watch FOX instead. And it is an equally sysiphean task to get a FOX viewer to stop watching FOX and watch CNN full time instead.
Both CNN and FOX are terrible sources, mostly consisting of bloviating pundits with very scarce factual content. Both come with heavily pro-corporate pro-military pro-US-government viewpoints. The main difference is that CNN has at least some basic standards of journalistic ethics, and wasn’t explicitly set up to be one political party’s propaganda arm. But if someone wants to learn the basics about the daily news, watching CNN is also not a very effective use of time.
> studying history by studying primary sources has fallen out of favor
What exactly do you think happens in undergraduate history classes? What do you think historians spend their time doing? The historians I know all but live in archives and libraries.
> I mean, hey, it's an Easter BUNNY out hunting for eggs.
Yes, both hares and eggs are fertility symbols. But I’m not sure what your point is exactly. Having a hare bring decorated eggs to children isn’t especially pornographic.
>Having a hare bring decorated eggs to children isn’t especially pornographic
That's not how many of the original pagan celebrations worked. That is the sanitized Christian replacement though. I guess I should have made that more clear.
>Same with history, studying history by studying primary sources has fallen out of favor because most primary sources don't align with our world views.
I can definitely see this for individuals. But are you seriously claiming that actual professional historians aren't working from the primary sources? Because if that is your argument, I'm afraid you're mostly wrong. For the most part, they are spending their lives in the archives looking at all the primary sources[1]. But this is an artifact of the specialization of knowledge and work: they trust that I'm over here writing code that works, just like I have to trust that they are over there synthesizing the primary sources into something understandable.
Now, some historians are like Fox/MSNBC in that their work is more about flattering the prejudices of their consumers than actually informing, but just like there are plenty of good journalists, there are plenty of good historians. Your nihilism feels unwarranted to me, because there are plenty of people writing interesting new books by tackling new topics, or old topics from different angles.
[1]: Source: Before I went into computer programming, I strongly considered going to grad school in history (not the civil war, that example was because I grew up in Virginia so everyone interpreted "history" as solely the War Between the States; I learned to use it as the example of why new history was written) so I spent a lot of time shadowing history professors.
