The Case for Knowing Your History

We are beginning to see where our apathy will lead us, but the destination is not inevitable.

It has always troubled me when people express little interest in history, the more so the better educated and intelligent they are. All too often one hears such things as, ‘why should I care?’, ‘what happened in the past doesn’t matter’ or just plain ‘it’s boring’.

It is true that you will likely not need to know anything about the Punic Wars to get ahead in your career. Since you left school, factoids about Reformations and Revolutions have probably been as useful as the Pythagorean Theorem.

So, why, then should we care?

Let’s start with the reason that most can come up with when pressed, as expressed in the famous quote: those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

This appeals to common sense, but it is not really clear what most people mean when they say this.

Naturally, there is a difference between knowing one’s history and learning from it. So presumably, simply knowing is not enough.

One civilisation’s near total annihilation is another’s defining struggle. Moral values will differ around what lessons should be learned, as each circumstance is unique to its time and the particular people who inhabit it. It therefore makes little sense to speak of learning lessons without the imposition of some kind of universally accepted moral framework, which demonstrably does not exist and never has.

So that can’t be it. At least, not all of it.

Since the end of the last great global conflict in 1945, we have enjoyed an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. Nowhere is this more true than in the West, though the benefits have been felt the world over. Of course, there is still war, famine and poverty, but only the most ideologically compromised or historically illiterate would not concede that things have at least greatly improved for the vast majority of people.

Circumstances came to be as they are because other circumstances preceded them. This sounds obvious, but is actually far from it. Most Westerners will recognise that things are broadly better here than they are elsewhere, but will likely struggle to come up with reasons as to how or why without resorting to platitudes relating to ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’. The implication being that this the natural state of things.

The reasons why we Westerners have things so good, relatively, and why people in less fortunate parts of the world do not, are by their very nature complex. The good news is that an encyclopaedic knowledge of past events is not required to make sense of the modern world. However, it is dangerous to assume that we can take it for granted.

The modern West is, among other things, a product of the various Christian revolutions since the end of antiquity, the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Bomb and globalisation powered by mass communication and transportation technology. None of these or anything else you might mention are sufficient in isolation to explain either the peace or prosperity that we enjoy, but to disregard the past is to fundamentally fail to grasp how unique and precious our way of life is, and how easily we could lose it all if we decide to do away with our foundations.

That is not to argue that modern Western civilisation is ideal. Our societies have flaws which must be addressed, but I will not dwell on those here. There are plenty though, who would seek to take advantage of our disinterest either cynically or through their own ignorance.

We are constantly told that we in the West must atone for our past crimes, which are uniquely abominable and are the only defining aspect of our culture. Evidence is not required for these claims; nuance and context are foreign concepts.

Nonetheless, malicious, ahistorical ideas about the past are pushed by activists in established institutions and, given sufficient time, accepted by the public because they simply don’t know enough about the subject to form a different opinion.

A kernel of truth is stretched into wild assertions about the fundamental nature of our societies (discrimination against a group exists, therefore the entire society is designed to oppress said group). Convoluted logic and verbal sleight of hand are used to present a situation generally disliked by the public as something normal and to be accepted (actually, we were always like this). Your favourite historical role model was in fact a tyrant (and you should not seek to embody the values they exemplify).

The Anglosphere in particular has almost entirely given up on discussing history in any serious way. What little is presented by the mainstream is given an ideological slant such that it should more rightly be called historical fantasy, or hyper-focuses on the most morally outrageous chapters from our past, completely divorced from past or present context. This can only happen to a population ignorant about itself.

One may of course argue that this is nothing new. History has always been presented through the lens of the zeitgeist. The difference now is that we have created a blank slate to be filled in by those with their own agendas, and they will happily oblige. The ability to think critically is paramount, but will prove difficult without something to back it up.

This is not trivial. Bad ideas are able to take hold because people broadly lack the knowledge to challenge them, even when they are brave enough to do so. This problem will compound as each successive generation loses touch with the past, but there is no time like the present. It is time to start taking real history seriously again.

We live in history. We cannot understand ourselves or the world without knowing how we came to be as we are. Surely that is worth exploring.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

Marcus Tullius Cicero