Not Knowing, Nor Wanting To Know History

GENERALLY,THE AMERICAN PEOPLE have little interest in history, including their own. Surveys consistently reveal this. Yet, the very moment the historically uninformed become involved in an intellectual disagreement, especially over politics, they become not only interested in history, but ostensible experts in it, and proceed to make use of it in framing their arguments, without letting their personal ignorance impede their argument. This underscores two salient facts. That history is extremely important, even to those with no knowledge of or interest in it under normal circumstances, and that lack of historical knowledge rarely if ever dissuades the ignorant from the formation of strong opinions. Someone expressed to me a personal distaste for "politically correct" history. As I watched red flags unfurling and ascending, I took this to mean that this erstwhile profoundly intellectual person was strictly opposed to any historical material which does not reflect a decidedly conservative, traditional point of view. I immediately resolved to never mention to this pseudo scholar that Christopher Columbus, who for centuries was portrayed as only an intrepid explorer, was also a genocidal monster, due to "politically correct" but accurate revisionist historical scholarship, that the people who established the colony at Jamestown in 1607 were motivated by nothing but greed, having been previously portrayed as seeking freedom above all else, or that both U.S. presidents whose last name was "Bush" deliberately involved the United States in costly wars under false pretexts. Conservative Americans want their history straight and narrow, biblical and hagiographic, self serving and self praising, just the way they were taught it. This particular conservative who engaged in a disagreement with me took offense that the politically correct crowd now takes offense at those who use descriptions which are now considered offensive, such as "redskin", and "savage", or "nigger", but once weren't; and that we the politically correct disparage those past generations who did in fact use terms offensive to us now. He thinks that monuments to confederate generals and political leaders should remain in place, regardless of how we the politically correct new feel about the behavior and motives of the people depicted by the monuments, because the people who put them there meant well, although in fact the monuments were erected by people who did not necessarily mean well, but sought to reinforce subjugation of African- Americans through historical monument building. My response was that we should remove them because most of us find them offensive now, notwithstanding that those who erected them did not. After all, those who erected them are dead. I tried to further explain that history is not written in stone, that new information leads to new interpretations, that history is inevitably a matter of interpretation and reinterpretation, and that we must act according to our own interpretations of history, not those of past generations. Confederate monuments were erected to heroes who fought for a noble but lost cause. Now, they commemorate people who fought for an unjust cause. How can history not be written in stone, he asked? It is what it is. Well no, history is what we think it is, and what we think it is is different from what they thought it was a hundred years ago, which was itself revised and different from what historians thought two hundred years ago, and so forth. Just as there is a new, born again Christian religion every century, distinctly identifiable, with different beliefs and ideology form those past, so it is with history. History, alas, is as much a subjective as objective matter, as much art as science, partly because in trying to understand the actions of past people, we must discern their motivations, which at best is speculative, and greatly influenced by the unique perspective of the respective historian. And that's what makes it interesting, if complicated, confusing, and frustrating. Once upon a time we refused to accept the rather obvious fact that the quarrel over slavery precipitated the Civil War, and that Lincoln's election triggered it. We settled for accepting that the confederacy fought for "state's rights", which, by the way, was, ironically, far more "politically correct" than our current understanding. This explanation, the political correctness of its day, was an attempt to replace a morally dubious motive with a noble one. Finally, we dug a bit deeper, and asked: "What state rights"? The right to do ..what? The right to own slaves and maintain, unimpeded by federal power, a slave based economy? Well, actually, yes. Finally, southern history began to appear which was written by people other than southern politically correct sympathizers. If history is written by the winners, which it in fact isn't always, then we are fortunate that, often as not, the winners are the people whose winning benefits society, and history, a bit more than might otherwise be the case.