You Have Your
History, I Have Mine
Brian Taylor for The Chronicle Review
June 8, 2015 By Ted
Gup
Recently,
it seems, one headline after another has been rooted in the long
ago. Poland’s prime minister
demands
an apology after the FBI director suggests that the Poles were
complicit in the Holocaust. Turkey’s president
rails against
the pope for saying that, a century ago, the Turks committed
genocide against the Armenians. Japan’s prime minister
asks
to amend an American history book that accuses Japanese troops in
World War II of forcing Korean women into prostitution — the
so-called comfort women.
Lies, all lies, they say.
Day after day, the news is filled with such
conflict, not over what is but what was. The past proves to be as
inflammatory as the present. "The past is never dead, it’s not even
past," observed William Faulkner. In grade school, we learned
history was composed of accepted facts and dates that neatly
yielded to true-and-false quizzes. As adults, we discover history
to be utterly fluid, a changeling that spurns hard facts and cold
truths. Far from the calm reflecting pool presented to us in youth,
we now see it as a caldron of resentment and recrimination. History
does not resolve. It festers.
But these days I am left to wonder what
remains of history, and what can be trusted of a past that is
forever at the beck and call of a self-serving present. Is anything
indisputable? The corpses, the annexations, the genocides are all
now punctuated by question marks and asterisks, entangled in the
dialectics of nationalism and identity politics. Does historical
fact even exist, or is it simply a relativistic
construct?
History has always been suspect. More than
2,000 years ago, Herodotus became known as both "The Father of
History" and "The Father of Lies." More recently, Henry Ford
declared that "history is more or less bunk." But today, more than
ever, it seems history has hijacked the headlines, become the fault
line between friends and foes, and a frontline in the culture wars.
It’s not as if we don’t already have enough discord to occupy us
without having to dip into the past. But there it is. Today’s
lesson: There is no "was," only "is."
Now I confess, I am no scholar. I am but a
journalist — a myopic creature of deadlines and foreshortened
horizons. But I have always been drawn to history, first as a
classics major, then as the author of three books that delved into
the past. I have no overarching theory of history, but I am left to
wonder whether our relationship with the past has itself undergone
a sea change.
Society appears to be in the midst of some
sort of tectonic shift, from a culture that identified certain
bedrock facts — the historical canon — to one rooted in evidence,
which is to say those renderings of the past that support an
argument, be it religious, ideological, scholarly, or
nationalistic. Even the word "facts" is cushioned by quotation
marks or air quotes. The abdication of a fact-based study (or its
evolution into a nuanced and inquiring discipline) is lauded as a
step toward enlightenment and universal enfranchisement. Those who
still speak longingly of facts as sacrosanct risk being seen as
parochial, shortsighted, and naïve — throwbacks to an earlier and
discredited regime. History is now a cafeteria: Take what you like,
leave the rest.
Teachers of history have both documented
the shift and promoted it. In a 2011 article in The Journal of
American History, Joel M. Sipress and David J. Voelker
chronicled the transition from broad
historical survey courses, laden with facts and chronologies, to a
new model. "Put simply," they wrote, "present-day reformers insist
that facts do not and cannot come first. … With the facts-first
assumption exposed as a fallacious lay theory of student learning,
the entire edifice of the coverage model simply
collapses."
In its place, we now have "argument-based
courses … organized around significant historical questions —
questions about which historians disagree. Students are
systematically exposed to rival positions about which they must
make informed judgments, and they are asked to develop their own
positions for which they must argue on the basis of historical
evidence."
In such a scheme, historians and students
become not merely scholars but litigants, and history the stuff of
advocacy in which point of view and identity — racial, ethnic,
nationalistic, gender, or sexual orientation — are all equal
partners. History becomes more personalized, more tribal, but less
communal. What matters is the presentation, not the verdict. In the
face of such change, the trick is to preserve logic and evidence,
and not have history descend into one grand
he-said-she-said.
But increasingly there are those who
gainsay the past to advance their narratives, and disregard
whatever contradicts them — be it the fossil record, the core
samples and global warming, or the abandoned shoes at Auschwitz.
For them, an inconvenient truth is no truth at all. Their
objective? To seed the clouds with doubt.
Across
the globe we war against history. Denial of the past takes many
forms. In Japan and Turkey, it is left to the diplomats. In the
Middle East, it takes a more virulent form. The Taliban dynamited
the 1,500-year-old Buddhist sculptures of Bamiyan. ISIS blew up the
ancient walls of Nineveh. The futility of such desecration serves
only to remind the world that history does not reside in artifacts
but in culture. Toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s
Firdos Square in 2003 did not end deadly rivalries but rather came
to symbolize our inability to grasp history’s sway.
History is a canvas upon which the paint never
dries. It is the stage upon which proxy wars are waged between
those in power and those who are oppressed. Nowhere is this more
evident than in China, whose long history is rightly perceived by
the Communist Party to threaten the regime. It is why the party is
not fooled when its critics cloak criticism in ancient anecdotes,
or why, upon the party’s 90th anniversary, in 2011, the government
banned TV and film depictions of time travel — lest,
observers
said, it make happiness
seem like a thing of the past. Mao Zedong’s epic war on China’s
past during the Cultural Revolution merely reaffirmed that a
country can neither erase nor defang history. That has not stopped
it from trying. In February it
convicted a publisher for
collecting stories of persecution in the 1950s.
"Happy is the country that has no history,"
the proverb says. America’s history is shorter and perhaps less
constraining. Still we have much to discomfort us. Counterintuitive
as it may sound, the way to distance oneself from the past is to
embrace it. This year, finally, Boston’s public-school curriculum
will
include the city’s dismal
record on desegregation and race. And a Southern civil-rights group
has
proposed memorials at
sites of race-based lynchings — though many prefer not to be
reminded.
Australia’s National Sorry Day atones for
sins committed against aboriginal peoples. Past wrongs cannot be
righted, but by acknowledging them we may find some peace and
reconciliation.
For every drive to acknowledge past shame,
however, there is a counteroffensive. Oklahoma legislators
were
concerned that the
Advanced Placement history courses were insufficiently patriotic.
Colorado students
protested efforts to elide
civil disobedience from history curricula while emphasizing
patriotism, respect for authority, and free markets. Millions of
Texas students have
texts that critics say
exaggerate the influence of Moses on lawmakers and extol
capitalism. They will learn a different history from that taught in
Massachusetts, adding to a schism that will shape not the past but
the future.
Like the fish that is oblivious to water,
each culture has its historical blind spots. America condemns Iran
for denying the Holocaust, but refuses to release an official
history of U.S. covert actions in Iran, though they were undertaken
more than half a century ago.
In 1994, I visited Hiroshima’s Peace
Memorial Museum. The then-director spoke of the controversy at the
Smithsonian Air and Space Museum surrounding a coming exhibition of
the Enola Gay to mark the end of World War II. He accused the
Smithsonian of sanitizing history, giving short shrift to
Hiroshima’s civilian deaths out of deference to U.S. veterans. As
compelling as his point was, I was thinking of my own search within
the Hiroshima museum for mention of Pearl Harbor. I failed to find
it.
I for
one would not want to return to a history that is linear and
scripted, populated by heroic stick figures in moralistic parables
of dubious origin. I see that today’s take on yesterday is more
honest. Still, something has been lost. I am all for intellectual
honesty, but tolerance and ambiguity have their limits. Beauty may
be solely in the eye of the beholder, but history isn’t. I cannot
respect a history that does not recognize some kernels of hard
fact, some core that resists manipulation.
I fear history by referendum, which,
democratic as it may sound, is no more honest than the old survey
courses. The Poles may have a point, but allowing Turkey and Japan
to pretend that atrocities did not happen is an affront both to
those who suffered and to our own moral and intellectual integrity.
Japan’s press secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
writes that "we should be
humble before history." Agreed. But humility demands putting
historical reality before self-interest.
What the past teaches is that few things
are self-evident, that the truth is less unbending than we might
wish. The European Union has already
approved the "Right to Be
Forgotten," a measure allowing individuals to scrub their past from
the Internet and opening the door for despots and rogue states to
do the same.
Still, there is a part of history, small
though it may be, that is worthy of conservation, shielded from
those who would distort or erase it. Would that we could set
portions of the past aside like national parks that would be off
limits to mining and the degradations that beset the present,
circumscribing some narrow set of sacred facts, rising like great
redwoods, that would inspire us to honor what we know to be true
even when we wish it were not. There, on common ground, would be a
fit place for our arguments to take shape.
But today’s headlines make that seem less and less likely. For now,
the narratives of nationalism, political correctness,
self-interest, all converge upon the past, claiming it as their
own. It is destined to be contested ground. That does not make it
any the less worth fighting for.