History…?

A lot has happened since my last posting, but there's one thing I want to talk about. It is "history." I have a good friend who is actually quite an historian, and his insights are often useful. But there's another aspect about "history"—as a tool—that has begun to bother me deeply. Putting it simply, knowing about history—specific history—is, admittedly ,important. It helps us form a clearer picture of who we are, right now. But using history is dangerous, and it always has been. You see, whether we're talking about the US Constitution, the Magna Carta, or Das Kapital there is always an interpretive history that gets involved. The US Constitution is a good example. It is, whether we like it or not—and whether we agree about it or not—a snapshot of the intentions and desires of a fairly small but powerful group of people (landowners with the means and ambition to allow them the time to attend to matters of state) taken at a single, fairly narrow, point in time. Frankly, it might not have looked the same a year earlier or later, or if a larger "voting" group had been allowed to take part. Small changes in the "history" leading up to its writing would probably have introduced significant changes in the document itself. What kind? That's probably impossible to say. But some changes would be inevitable. If we had to rewrite our Constitution—or its Amendments—every ten years or so—life itself in this country would probably be radically different. Now there's a thought! But there are people who try to do just that, using "history" as their editorial tool (or weapon).

It is virtually impossible to see—from today's perspective—that moment in history (when the Constitution was written) with anything approaching clarity. But some folks like to pretend that they know enough—thanks to their views on history—to "know" what was in the hearts and minds of the Founding Fathers, and that this sacred knowledge gives them license to impose their views and wishes on our present world. There are two big problems with this: first, the writers of the Constitution would be unable to cope with trying to write such a supposedly "liberal" document today. The world has just changed too much. Those eighteenth-century people were credits to their age, but they also belonged within their own time. Second, history never works well going backwards, so to speak. As you move from "right now" to "ten minutes ago," to "yesterday," to "last year," and so on, the inaccuracies pile up, and we fill in the gaps with intuition and guesswork. That's all well and good; we need some amount of history, both culturally and psychologically. But it is entirely unreliable as a basis for more important concepts that underpin our world right now, like morality or ethics. History can help us see—a bit more clearly—who and where we are at this moment, but it cannot predict the future. We never—by the way—repeat history. We are, however, prone to repeat the mistakes others have made before us, and that's usually what is talked about when we warn others about "repeating history." But everything actually depends on us, right now, from this moment on. You see, WE influence the future as we make choices from one moment to the next. Dragging all that history along is only useful in hindsight, and as I've implied, that's certainly not 20/20…not even 20/1000.

We humans are actually a pretty strange lot; unlike other species, we cling to our history as though having that to cling to will make great differences in how we expand into our futures. And the "future," as we call it, will always be made by people who have little or no understanding of the past. It has always been that way. Relying on the past as a "standard" against which to measure either the present or the future is only useful to those who can manipulate what society calls "history" for their own ends.