History is messy. It is often unpleasant. It is seldom as simple as we would like it to be. Historical myth is the opposite: neat, generally pleasing -- at least to our prejudices --, and comfortably black and white.
The myths are essentially "alternative facts" or "fake history." Not surprisingly, myths tend to dominate if not obliterate actual history in the popular consciousness. FOX news could not survive if this were not the case, and Donald Trump would long ago have been relegated to the dustbin of history.
By "actual history" I do not mean the "truth" but the result of painstaking historical research, writing, and interpretation. Often the result is only an approximation of the truth. In that sense, history resembles science, although science is a more exact business.
Scientists can use repeated experiments to confirm their hypotheses. Historians do not have that tool. They cannot repeat history, and in general they would not wish to!
Historian Sir Lewis Namier wrote that the writing of history "is not a visit of condolence." He might have added that the same is true of reading it. Learning our history is often troubling and confusing. If it never is, we are reading the wrong stuff.
Some people avoid all the trouble by ignoring history. The inventor and businessman Henry Ford is supposed to have said, "history is bunk." He didn't say exactly that, but he did reject the past as dead and meaningless, not worth thinking about.
Abraham Lincoln would have disagreed. In his Second Inaugural Address he declared, "My Fellow Americans, we cannot escape history." He understood that the terrible war that was nearing its end was the direct result of the country's failure to abolish slavery. *
Novelist William Faulkner held a similar view: "The past isn't dead. It is not even past." His characters are prisoners of their history, in this case the history of the Deep South.
Karl Marx wrote in much the same vein in one of his lesser-known works, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."
Marx prefaced that statement with "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."
You don't have to be a Marxist to agree with that viewpoint. Like it or not, our history like our biology constrains us. And that is not necessarily bad. It is a cliche by now, but an awareness of evils past can help us to repeat the same mistakes. True, we seem to keep repeating many of them anyway, but things could be far worse if we lacked any awareness of the past.
People do learn lessons from history: some good, some bad, some irrelevant. The difficulty is to learn the proper lessons, the ones that will improve life on this planet -- and not just for humans.
History often resembles a chaotic scene, like this 19th century Christmas cartoon by George Cruikshank, "At Home in the Nursery." But the party goes on and tomorrow it will have a history.
*Comparing Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address to that of Donald Trump in 2017 provides a good measurement of how far the Republican Party has fallen since the days of the first Republican president.
Thanks for putting the present (unpleasant) moment in perspective. I was reminded of the poem by Philip Larkin, which begins “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,/They may not mean to, but they do./They give you all the faults they had/and add some extra just for you.”
ReplyDeleteGood one, and as a parent, I cannot escape that one either.
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