Pondering the importance of the past...
I think for this second post that I’m going to go back to first principles.
As a historian, I’ve made studying the past my life’s work. I enjoy it immensely because there’s so much there that’s rich: love, hate, silliness, war, betrayal, poetry, art, sadness, joy, and the list goes on and on. The stuff is usually so good we couldn’t make it up if we tried. And the past also provides an excellent means of escape, if one is so in need. But that’s just how I feel about it.
For many others it begs the question that everyone in my line of work has heard, and that I’ve spent a fair amount of time pondering:
Why should we care about history?
I mean, it’s just things that happened to people a long time ago, right? Done and dusted, as they say. It’s dry and boring, just names and dates to learn and then forget. Why care about that?
Often the first response that people come up with is that old chestnut about being doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past if we don’t learn from them. Fair enough. But so often we seem to make the same mistakes over and over, so it seems we rarely heed this advice anyway.
But I don’t think that’s a reason to give up and turn our backs on the past.
In our world right now there seem to be plenty of issues that could be helped with a little knowledge of what came before. How did people handle climate change? How did people deal with plagues and pandemics? Or economic downturns? Or immigration? Or political conflict? Or new means of communication? Or just dealing with each other?
Believe it or not, the world has seen these issues before. Many times. And yet we are often blind to this fact because we don’t spend any time looking. Or learning. I’ve seen it in my college classroom over the years many times. Students who seemingly have been taught almost nothing about the past, or at least not taught it in a way that engaged them enough to remember it and think it’s worthy of taking into account. A common mindset is what could history possibly say to us about our lives now?
Granted, times were different in the past. That’s the number one lesson I want my students to learn always: historical context matters. But just because the times weren’t exactly the same as ours, it doesn’t mean the past doesn’t have anything useful to tell us. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel all the time. There are lessons there that if ignored will keep us locked in a perpetual state of arrested development – or worse, even set us back.
But we often don’t consider that. I think our modern fixation with “progress” is partly to blame and has been both a blessing and a curse. It has given us hope and maybe something to strive toward, like the “golden age” is in the future, which can be good. But it has also given a false sense that we live in a linear fashion, and that once something is done it’s simply in the rearview never to be seen again and somehow worthless to us. It has also given us the sense that we are somehow smarter, more advanced, or just plain better than those who lived before us. This is a delusion that we accept at our peril and speaks to another important thing I’d like to say…
We need more humility.
It’s okay to be humble in the face of big challenges. It’s okay to admit we don’t know everything and that we need help. The people in the past did stuff and knew stuff that might help – why not take advantage of that? All we need to do is look and listen and get out of our own way.
Humility also means we accept our position in the continuum of human existence. People came before us and there will be people after us. If we accept that we can learn from our ancestors, then maybe we can hope to have a few lessons to teach our descendants. And that they will be humble enough to at least give us a fair hearing.
Another reason to study the past?
You might not get so stressed out about the present.
I was recently talking about this with my friend Dan who is also a history geek with a podcast. We both agree that there are benefits and curses to having a historian’s brain, but the upside is we generally take the long view. This means through our investigations of the past we’ve seen patterns and reoccurrences over time not only in the problems people faced but how they dealt with them. And this often provides a sense of comfort because when you’ve seen or experienced something before, it’s not so scary the next time. You know what you’re up against and maybe, just maybe, it gives you the knowledge and courage to face the challenges in front of you head on.
The real reason I think we should care about history?
Because it’s just damn interesting in its own right.
It contains all those things I mentioned at the start of this post and more. It is the story of US. We are all on this ride on this funky little goldilocks planet. Do you know the odds of us all being here to share this time together in the vastness of the universe? I don’t, but I’ll bet they’re damn near infinitesimally small. So take from our collective history what you will: learn from it, be entertained by it, be warned by it, be amazed by it, and ultimately be part of it. Just don’t ignore it. The history of humanity is a cosmic gift.