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09 Jul 09

Salon.com Books | History is bunk after all

So much of this pertains to the histories in the Bible as well. Much more complex than the simple and dangerous ways they're represented in our cultures today. Prof. Hayes' Open Yale lectures on the Old Testament explicate this beautifully, if only implicitly.

www.salon.com/...print.html - Preview

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Some people embrace "bad history" because it reinforces their national, regional or ethnic identity, as in the case of the Serbs or those Japanese conservatives who want archaeologists kept out of the ancient tombs of the royal family for fear that the remains found there will indicate that the emperors have non-Japanese ancestors. People seeking to keep the Irish divided once perpetrated the myth that only Protestants fought alongside the British in World War I, when in fact 210,000 Irish Catholics and nationalists volunteered. Others use the past to deflect attention from their own mischief, like the governing elites in China, who dwell on its history of colonialism, persecution and victimization at the hands of the West in order to invalidate any criticism from outsiders as more of the same.
"Dangerous Games" calls for "professional historians" (by which I think MacMillan means "academics") to "contest the one-sided, even false, histories that are out there in the public domain. If we do not, we allow our leaders and opinion makers to use history to bolster false claims and justify bad and foolish policies."
4 more annotations...
- According to MacMillan, political and economic history, if properly studied, can offer much-needed guidance to today's leaders and can encourage skepticism in the public when demagogues try to justify themselves using distorted images of the past. Like quite a bit of "Dangerous Games," this statement seems so obvious that it hardly needs to be made in the first place. And surely there must be more to it than simply boning up. After all, George W. Bush reportedly spent most of his presidency reading one historical work after another without gaining much in the way of political wisdom. Instead, he scoured the books in search of validation for his own preset ideas. Reading an account of France's battle against Algerian insurgents, he concluded that it failed not because oppressive French tactics alienated Algeria's population but because "their bureaucracy was not up to the job." He launched his war on terror while reading about Churchill, but he finished his presidency by harping on Truman, an unpopular president whose reputation recovered after he left office.
- Noting that Churchillian hero worship is far more prevalent on this side of the pond than in Britain, where more people have had "direct experience" of the prime minister "in other roles than that of the great World War II leader," MacMillan speculates that the fascination lies in the conviction that WWII was "the last morally unambiguous good war." But lack of ambiguity is precisely what makes history "bad." Bad history dispenses with "nuances in favor of tales that belong to morality plays but do not help us consider the past in all its complexity." The British historian Michael Howard calls this species of fairy story "nursery history."
- Bad history may be more likely to lead to bad analogies, but it's clear from the dozens of examples she offers in "Dangerous Games" that you can also draw a bad analogy from good history. And MacMillan doesn't really explain how to avoid that particular pitfall. Perhaps that's too much to ask. The most important lesson to be gained from history, she writes, is simply "humility ... Knowing that classical Chinese civilization valued scholars above soldiers or that the Roman family was very different from the nuclear one of the modern West suggests other values and other ways of organizing society."
  
  To recognizes this is not, she maintains, merely "relativism," but rather the awareness that the threats, incentives and tactics that work on us won't necessarily persuade people in other cultures and situations. Americans, who often have so little understanding of what it's like not to live in an affluent democratic superpower, are especially prone to mistakes in this department, as our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan have amply shown.
- Which is why seemingly lightweight examples like Highland kilts and wedding veils -- pace MacMillan's concerns about the diversions of culture studies -- remain enlightening. When a contemporary dispute with historical foundations is as explosive as, say, the Arab-Israeli conflict or the debate over whether Turkey perpetrated genocide on the Armenians, it becomes very difficult to acknowledge how history can be rewritten or overlooked in order to satisfy the desires of today. By contrast, we can laugh about the booming business in peddling Highlander trappings to people of Scottish descent or about the truly titanic dimensions of the wedding-industrial complex. When the stakes are lower, we can admit that some of our dearest traditions have very shallow roots indeed, however much we'd like to believe otherwise. The past can't be changed, it's true, but perhaps it can be overcome more easily than we realize.