Why Ridley Scott Is Wrong

The great physicist Richard Feynman once said: “Outside of their particular area of expertise scientists are just as dumb as the next person.” Well, it transpires that that is the case with film directors too, and Ridley Scott proves the point. When challenged about the historical inaccuracies in his recently released biopic of Napoleon, Ridley Scott retorted that his critics ought to “get a life.” He also informed The Sunday Times last week that when historians point out what his films get wrong, he asks, “Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up, then.” Scott has blessed the world with films of genius such as Blade Runner, but when it comes to history, he is talking bunk and here is why.

Historians for the most part do write about events they have never witnessed, but to get at what happened, they will consult sources created by eyewitnesses or by those who had information from eyewitnesses, and through a process of source analysis decide which sources can be trusted and to what extent. If there are no first-hand accounts, historians will do their best with what sources they have. The very fact that Scott has made a film about Napoleon depends, ironically, upon historians who never met Napoleon being correct in asserting that there was such a man. If historians must observe events for themselves before their narratives can be accurate, most history is impossible. And so too are other subjects whose specialists accrue knowledge about events they have never witnessed, such as cosmology, evolutionary biology and geology. A lot of personal knowledge does not depend on direct acquisition. A person who has never travelled outside of his or her town may form justified, true beliefs about other towns by learning about them from guidebooks and encyclopaedias. Indeed, a person could learn about Scott’s film Gladiator without ever having seen it, simply by asking a trusted friend who has.

Someone might say that it does not matter if Scott’s Napoleon erroneously attends Marie Antoinette’s beheading and orders his troops to fire at the Pyramids, because he is not writing a history book but creating a film fiction. That line of argument would be fine if the only people watching Scott’s film were those sufficiently educated to spot the inaccuracies. But with the continuing decline of reading as a pastime and the increasing dependence of people on screens for knowledge, we now have generations of people for whom the moving image is their prime source of education. Therefore, if they see Scott’s Napoleon leading cavalry charges-which he never did, renowned as he was for being a hopeless rider-that is what they will believe he did. Wiser than Ridley’s obscene retort is the view of the historical novelist Philippa Gregory, who says that makers of historical fiction ought to stick to the facts when they are known and when they are not known, present what seems most historically likely.

This is, however, more than an issue of people having correct historical information, although that alone is significant. It is also a political and cultural issue. Scott’s agenda with his film Napoleon is to give cinemagoers a good time. Yet, there are those who wish to change the historical record to suit their ideological purposes, and they can only be stopped if people know their history. Political extremists on both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of this. The far right seeks to ignore any role in British history made by non-whites, whereas the far left seeks to foreground their role to an inflated degree. The proper vision of history is a conservative one to which the moderates of either political wing and centrists can subscribe. It is found in the writings of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), for whom society is a contract between the dead, the living and those yet to be born. Civilisation, Burke goes on to declare, is best constructed when weight is given to the deeds of the ancestors which have made present society. In other words, we can best understand and manage our present society by knowing as well as we can how it got to be what it is in the first place. Without accurate history, we will fail to understand ourselves as well as we might, and to hand on the best society we can to our descendants. Detached from our ancestors, we will become rootless and consequently detached from our descendants, to whom we will leave a distorted cultural inheritance. For those leftist traitors who seek the downfall of the West, that might not be a bad thing. As Xi Jinping has noted, and he ought to know, “To destroy a country, you must first eradicate its history.” But for most of us who are sane and enjoy the liberties and prosperity of Western civilisation, it is time to defend historical truth from both film makers and fanatics, because our future depends on it.

Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).

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