When I first switched over to WordPress a few years back, I did a series of posts on the nature of history. Since that point I have not written much on the subject, though I think a lot about it, and hints of it seem to leak into much of what I do write. Next to covering films and television, writing about history seems a little dull and unsexy. Also, since my real job involves teaching history, I like to avoid it here as a means of keeping myself sane.
Nevertheless I do think about it, a lot. I think about it as I see people post nonsensical, ahistorical opinions on current events on Facebook. I think about it as I look around at the myriad of ways in which we hide from the past in our cities and our lives. I know I’m a cynic and pessimist when it comes to human behavior, but looking around I despair at the ways in which we talk about and teach history. [CYA note: as always, these views are those of me alone. They in no way reflect the opinions of the faculty or administration of the Tulsa School of Arts and Sciences]
For one, there’s the GOLLY GEE method of history teaching, in which one assumes that kids have not matured much since their early years and what they really need to keep them interested is a set of random WOWZER facts drudged up from storehouses where they were better left undisturbed. Witness the history teacher, shit eating grin plastered across his face as he forces enthusiasm at yet another of HISTORY’S BIGGEST BLUNDERS. And so the line between the academy and a reality show on Fox blurs that much more.
More pernicious by far, however, is the history lesson that sets out to teach a tidy moral lesson to the student. Occasionally these lessons will be of the hagiographic sort, but most often they follow the lead of a philosophy encompassed by the most famous – and noxious – statement ever uttered about history. That would of course be George Santayana’s dictum that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Often this gets morphed into the even more grating “Those who cannot learn from“.
These statements encapsulate everything I find distasteful about general attitudes toward history. First off it cheapens the past, turning it from the terrifying, intoxicating jumble of passions and ideas it is into some larder that we visit at our convenience. You really think Caesar crossed the Rubicon so you could gain some insight into how to be a better CEO? Screw off.
Underneath this toxic self-absorption lurks a serious problem in the way we approach history. C.S. Lewis referred to it as chronological snobbery, the assumption that your own time period is naturally the best and that the past had better well remain that way. That chronological snobbery pervades our thinking should be no surprise while we cling tightly to our cherished notions of progress. Progress (my bugbear, if you didn’t know), presumes that human society is ever on the march upwards and onwards. Oh, it may hit a rough patch now and then, but overall mankind is pushing forward, making life better, more reasonable, and more profitable.
Little wonder, with this account in hand, why we view the past as a series of lessons to learn from. There is more than a trifle of condescension here. Sure, certain things might have been ok in the barbaric past, but by today’s standards these struggles are gauche and unsophisticated. Today we need not grapple with the questions which have preoccupied generations before us; we simply need to take the distilled answer we get from these strugglings, the “right answer” drawn from the winning side, and move on. Thus the idea of being “condemned” to repeat the past. Granted, each historical period certainly does have events and structures which would not be fun to live in again, but most also have many that would be worth living again.
Rejecting the ghosts of the past cannot be about “progress” – it must be about justice. About divining in each era what calls to mind the good and true and beautiful, and condemning that which falls short. We must avoid on the one hand nostalgia, that sickly sweet longing for eras that never really existed, and dismissal, essentially a nostalgia for the present in which the past exists as a set of bogeymen waiting to be vanquished by the light of superior knowledge.
Most of all – most difficult of all – we must strive to bring forward that earthy musk of history, that which is wonderfully yet terrifyingly human about the past. In trying to draw out tidy lessons we neuter the real power of history, which lies in its ability to connect us somehow with our ancestors, to show that underneath changes in dress and plumbing and marriage customs and religions lies something common to us all. That’s not a very popular idea, sadly, banished by those who hate studying ideas as forces in history, who want to content themselves with material goods. No surprise these people want to bury the past by making it sterile and compartmentalized.
There’s much more to say about all this, and I’ll likely pick up the thread sometime soon, but I want to propose one small step initially. Not much – a symbolic change, nothing more, but those of us who still believe in the power of symbols might find it helpful. I propose that we throw out Santayana’s quote as our banner, our marching song. Instead, let’s put in one that does a better job capturing the strange, shimmering goal and promise of teaching history. William Faulkner, in his book Requiem for a Nun, writes that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” A riddle, an enigma, a rallying cry.
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