Some historians engage in historicism (a sort of search for laws of historical evolution that are taken to
explain or even predict historical phenomena) that can sometimes end up in reconstructing and re-construing the meaning and perception of the history itself - as if you could! ("It was what it was.")
This is sometimes used by Totalitarian regimes to deny responsibility for something - a historical act - that was usually a horror and morally reprehensible and as such
is politically incorrect and which must therefore be denied under the prevailing regime's ideology or official position. For example, the Turkish objection to the US declaring the Turkish oppression and massacre in Armenia as being "genocide". The same applies for the Japanese "Rape of Nanking", or the Japanese "Comfort Women".
The rule for such atrocities is thus:
You must not name a horrific crime against humanity for what it was.
This sort of wish to rewrite history is a deliberate bending of historical knowledge to fit a current paradigm - you could call it a form of crime against knowledge
per se - and it is generally reprehensible. But across the planet in schools, colleges and in our own minds, we seem to daily do a similar sort of thing to our knowledge of
literature with nary a qualm, with the sort of phrase. "I think that what the author really meant when he wrote this was [insert your opinion here]."
That is presumably what annoyed Ray Bradbury, per the quotes above.
We do this to fictional writing and factual writing. I have watched an academic read Deming's 14-point philosophy and then declare of points 10 and 11, "I think that what Deming probably meant by these was [insert opinion here]."
However, the language for the 14 points is clear, simple, unequivocal and unambiguous, though difficult for many (myself included) to understand and
accept because it runs contrary to our training and beliefs about management theory.
(Points 10 and 11 kill two sacred cows of Western management thinking - targets/quotas, and MBO.)
To educate and grow ourselves, we need "habits of mind" that enable us to make the intellectual effort to understand what has been written in its own context, rather than forcing it to fit our paradigms.
