It is the Fourth of July weekend! I am off from work on Friday, so that theoretically gives me time to sit and work more on this Saturday Note. In practice? Uh…. don’t know about that, champs. I had trouble coming up with a subject. I know I told you guys I was going to do Star Wars, but given the holiday I thought it might be nicer to do something related to the country or history or something.
The filler title in my planner was ‘Hope for the Future’, but, uh… it’s not that I have no hope, okay, it’s just that I’m not someone who can exactly do rousing calls for hope. It’d probably end up making me sound stupider than usual.
I also finished Andor and Dragon Age: Inquisition! Next game will probably be God of War, while the next television show is… probably back to Burn Notice. Although the new Librarians is also on Hulu right now.
The Importance of Learning History
What is the point of learning history?
That sounds like it’s an easy question, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people didn’t know. Because a lot of people don’t know their history. Many of them are in positions of power in our government. That sounds like a knock against the current administration and its leader (and it is, because it’s especially pronounced there), but it’s been A Thing in our country’s past that our leaders do not acknowledge, or want to acknowledge, things in our history that contradict what we want to believe about the world. Infamously, Wilson called the incredibly racist movie Birth of a Nation, which I remind you features the Klan as heroic figures, “History written with lightning” in his hearty recommendation.
So it can be difficult to understand why we should be historically literate when our leaders aren’t. Plenty of people argue that we don’t need to be–I distinctly remember overhearing a conversation in which a woman was obviously frustrated and upset that her daughter was being taught about Mesopotamia in high school history class. “That’s not history, that’s geography! You’re supposed to teach her about the Presidents and stuff!” As if the world’s oldest civilizations and the first recorded written work of our species weren’t important to know compared to the Presidents of the United States. Not that you shouldn’t know the Presidents! But this is not a trade-off.
And after all, we live in the Information Age–if you do not know something, you can look it up with the device sitting next to you, can’t you? You shouldn’t have to know things when you can confirm it all whenever you want.
The problem is that Information Age has transformed into the Disinformation Age, when people are learning from people with ideological leanings who may not be informing them of the whole truth, or increasingly, from AI which is incapable of telling the truth, only regurgitating what it thinks its user wants to read or hear.
[ChatGPT is not a search engine!]
People generally blame the right wing of this country for historical information, and they are absolutely right to do so often enough. Recently, because we live in the Bad Timeline, it came up again that people were defending Robert E. Lee, claiming him to be a good, honorable man who simply refused to take arms against his countryman, and for that he was admirable. As if fear of loyalty to one’s state can possibly override one’s duty to God and fellow human beings (a point made by W.E.B. DuBois). He was a man who supported the institution of slavery, and decided he was willing to go to war to defend it.
It cannot be forgotten, though, that people with motives other than right-wing causes can also spread misinformation regarding history. I have a very liberal friend who seemed to buy hook, line, and sinker everything stated by authors like Graham Hancock and Dan Brown, because they confirm his suspicions of an “evil, reactionary Church” that’s hiding knowledge from the People for its own nefarious ends. That both authors are plainly hacks is lost on him–like the defender of Lee, it builds on a pre-established worldview that takes no questions, only convenient answers.
I am tempted to say that this is why we should learn history, that people ought to know when they’re being lied to for someone else’s gain. I don’t think that covers all of it, though. The purpose of learning history is to learn from it. How cliche that sounds–stay with me, though. I don’t think history repeats, at least, not in the cyclical way that some pretend. We still need to learn from it! Sometimes, that means having a basic idea of what happened, what’s significant, and what that means for us now. An American who did not know why there was a monument for Pearl Harbor should rightfully be dismissed as an idiot unfit for public service, for instance.
More pressingly, though, I think it should be about advice on how to act in the future. A person who studied history would know things such as that torture didn’t work to get reliable information, that attacking civilian targets hardens resolve instead of weakening it, that citizens don’t like their countries being dragged into long, expensive foreign wars, and that authoritarian governments are never as efficient as advertised. He or she would know that often the discoveries of the present are inspired and built upon the knowledge of the past, that war should be avoided when possible, and that collecting and sharing knowledge will always help a people build themselves up stronger.
I’m worried we’re not learning these lessons, though. Instead, our people are being led to ignorance by people who profit from keeping them there. History departments are being defunded, libraries are being stripped, and people (often leaders) openly admire authoritarian states or wax nostalgic for a time where they think they’d be privileged to wield violence against those they don’t like.
I can’t say, “Let’s all learn history, it’ll make everything better and peaceful!” I don’t know that it will fix everything, and I don’t know how to implement that if it did. Chances are that we’d all disagree on what the history means. But at least we’d know it. We’d all agree on some of the basics, like who the obvious Bad Guys are. And we sure wouldn’t complain about learning more just because it happened long ago and far away.
The Founding Fathers, with all their faults and flaws, built a country with the notion of continuity, that they were building on ideals and history that came before. They were far from perfect, but they understood the notion that important things happened in the past, and they wanted to use that knowledge to build something better. Maybe just better for a certain group of people, admittedly, but those small steps are important. If we keep that ideal in mind, that we can continue building instead of tearing down, we could go far.
I’m not sure if we’ll be allowed to, though.
Learn history; learn how we can do better.
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