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We live in a country whose citizens — make that residents — are increasingly averse to complicated thought, indifferent to veracity, and reductionist in their thinking (every thing and every thought and every person is and must be either one kind of thing, or another kind of thing, no additional choices allowed). In such a country history has few friends.
History is too hard. You have to find out what happened, and then you have to figure out the context of the events — what led up to them and what followed — so you can tease out their significance for your time and place, and even after doing all that it may not be clear. Far easier to decide first what history means, and look up a few facts to “prove” it. Works for Fox News. And what they have made of journalism, we are making of history.
The stories of contemporary history are short and punchy, crafted for an audience suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder; their lessons are simple and obvious, as befits an audience capable of obeying rules, not of evaluating them — you know, nine-year-olds. (Soon we will have a population of adults who will not cross the street without holding a grown-ups hand, because, you know, that’s the rule.)
A recent case in point: the American Civil War. It is now almost universally spoken of as a war that was about only one thing, slavery. Knowing that, as all right-thinking folks do, it follows that everyone who fought for the Confederacy was fighting to maintain slavery. Period. Because they were wrong to do so, a very popular line of “thinking” goes, we should scrub from our history and our world every vestige of their existence, eliminating their flag from our sight, rooting out and destroying their statues from our county seats and capitals (you know, like ISIS is doing in the cradle of civilization) and reducing their biographies to simplistic diatribes.
Now we could see in this an evil hand, an intent to make sure that our children never learn that good people fight in bad wars for good reason, that bad people support good wars for bad reasons, that causes and outcomes are complicated, and can be both good and bad at the same time. Because if they do learn that, they are far less likely to allow some tinhorn president to fight any damn war he wants to for trumped-up reasons.
But the reality is probably dumber than that. While I was trying to figure out how to express my view of it, Ken Burns did it better, not the first time that has happened. He delivered the commencement speech to this year’s graduates of Stanford University (damn him, he still looks too young to be a graduate, let alone advise them). Most of the news coverage hyperventilated over his blistering condemnation of Donald Trump. But mostly he talked about history and our misuses of it:
… we live in an age of social media where we are constantly assured that we are all independent free agents. But that free agency is essentially unconnected to real community, divorced from civic engagement, duped into believing in our own lonely primacy by a sophisticated media culture that requires you—no—desperately needs you—to live in an all-consuming disposable present, wearing the right blue jeans, driving the right car, carrying the right handbag, eating at all the right places, blissfully unaware of the historical tides that have brought us to this moment, blissfully uninterested in where those tides might take us.
We are, in other words, in the grip of a terminal case of cultural Alzheimer’s Disease, increasingly unaware of the people around us, unable to remember where we came from and who we are, deprived, in other words, of the resources we need to set a rational course, we are reduced again to children who can only follow orders. So we grasp the nearest grown-up’s hand and await instruction.
penury on Fri, 1st Jul 2016 10:57 am
There used to be a saying that “those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.” Or something like that. People today are more interested in the plot of the TV show than what is happening in the real world, In the U.S. people are wrapped in a cocoon of indifference waiting for the outcome of an election whose outcome was announced five months ago. No one cares about the military actions around the world because we are well protected in “Fortress America”. A rude awakening awaits.
Sissyfuss on Fri, 1st Jul 2016 11:15 am
The devolution of culture and education go hand in hand with the deterioration of living conditions due to overpopulation, overconsumption, and climate disruption.
If people can’t find happy endings surrounding them they will turn to any form of distraction that keeps the dopamine flowing.
Anonymous on Fri, 1st Jul 2016 1:18 pm
In the vile amerikan empire, history is constantly being re-written to support whatever narrative, or, nonsense, the elite are peddling at any given time. Look at HollyJewWood. Constantly rewriting history, from ancient Rome, to WWII and beyond. Amerikans watch these, and believe these HD, high-production value films are either accurate, or at least, very accurate reflections of history(and reality). Often times these films, books etc, recast amerika as hero-savior or whatever. Other times, its meant to imply cultures in the past shared ‘amerikan values’. Movies like U-571 or the odious Zero Facts Thirty as good examples. Mass media,books constantly whitewash amerikan history of many inconvenient truths.
Clearly, there is more going on than amerikans trademark intellectual laziness and stupidity. A lot of effort goes into re-writing the past in the empire. A broad-based, top down effort. Sound familiar? It should…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe9I0QhV08w
ghung on Fri, 1st Jul 2016 1:30 pm
“Movies like U-571 or the odious Zero Facts Thirty as good examples. Mass media,books constantly whitewash amerikan history of many inconvenient truths.”
Anonymous; News flash – Movies and books are meant to make money for the folks that produce them. If “whitewashing history” sells more books or puts more asses in seats, that’s what you’ll get. Do you really think there’s some ‘Ministry of Propaganda’ controlling theses things in the west?
Bystander on Fri, 1st Jul 2016 2:25 pm
“Anonymous; News flash – Movies and books are meant to make money for the folks that produce them. If “whitewashing history” sells more books or puts more asses in seats, that’s what you’ll get. Do you really think there’s some ‘Ministry of Propaganda’ controlling theses things in the west?”
Yes!
Don’t take it from me, take it from them:
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/dec/19/opinion/oe-stein19
ghung on Fri, 1st Jul 2016 4:48 pm
So Jews are more creative and better at making money? You equate that with a “Ministry of Propaganda?” Please…..
Italian Holiday Maker on Sat, 2nd Jul 2016 12:29 am
“A recent case in point: the American Civil War. It is now almost universally spoken of as a war that was about only one thing, slavery”.
The only real reason why slavery was abolished had nothing to do with supposedly superior Yankee moral qualities but was the rise of the application of fossil fuel in a rapidly industrializing north.
The truth is that the Uncle Tom business model had outlived itself. A slave owner needed to house the slave and his family, pay attention that he would not walk away. It was much cheaper to give him a low wage instead.
Anonymous on Sat, 2nd Jul 2016 12:48 am
Quite right holiday. The mis-named ‘american civil war’, was a struggle over what form, who would control, and how future american empire would be organized.
Gentrified farmers, running vast plantations, using mostly non-mechanized means, basically a modified form of feudalism, where land formed the basis of wealth and power. OR, would it be run by industrialists and bureaucrats, utilizing the latest in technical and scientific advances from Europe. When the south decided to go it alone, the industrialists in the north, could not tolerate an large, independent entity like the confederacy. The industrialists, required a continental, integrated state,(and markets), to realize *their* vision of the american future.
When these two competing visions of the future collided, war, was used to settle the issue. Slavery, was just the window dressing used to motivate the citizens of the north to support the war effort. A ‘moral’ justification if you will, for utterly destroying the south militarily, least they rise up again at some point down the road to threaten the cohesion of empire.
But you wont learn any of that from a uS history book, or hollywood. Instead, you’ll get movies like Glory, or Gone with the Wind.
Italian Holiday Maker on Sat, 2nd Jul 2016 12:48 am
@ghung,
You don’t find it significant that in the US MSM information comes from a single source?
please…
You have a horse in this race?
It takes a brave African American congressman to tell the truth about who has America in a iron grip:
https://youtu.be/d7tUEqjmIWE
(11:02-14:43, 2nd part after 13:55 the best)
Dutch leftist MSM documentary about the Israel Lobby
theedrich on Sat, 2nd Jul 2016 3:46 am
On the so-called American “Civil War”: Anonymous is right. It was not a “civil war” in the normal sense of the term; it was a war between two different nations: one called the U.S. and the other called the Confederate States of America. The self-righteous wacko dictator of the north, Abraham Lincoln, just couldn’t endure the prospect of losing power due to secession. The north won, not because of superior morality, but because of superior economics and firepower. As usual, might makes right. Afterwards, the conflict was called a “civil war” to make the masses think they had had God on their side.
But on the issue of American stultification. It starts with religion. While there are all kinds of knee-jerk bibliolatry among large segments of the U.S. population, only a minuscule percentage knows anything at all about the actual history of the Bible. Few have even heard of scholars like Ziony Zevits who explained the myth of the Garden of Eden, or Ann Killebrew who showed that the “Exodus” was not a case of Israelites leaving Egypt, but of Egyptians leaving Canaan. Nor do most know of the first Jewish War (described by Josephus) which severed the Jesus movement from Judaism and created Christianity, nor about pseudoepigraphy through which most books of the New Testament were compilations under false names, nor the “charter myth” of the Acts of the Apostles, a pious lie invented out of whole cloth, nor about Marcion, the author of the first New Testament (around A.D. 144) composed of an early (gentilized) version of Luke and ten letters of Paul, or the four centuries it took to establish something resembling a “canon.”
No, the masses prefer fantasies in their religious thinking as in their politics. Today young “snowflakes” make infantile demands of their instructors to make courses easier and inflate grades. And college presidents berate Whites for being White. It’s all intellectual and moral progress, you see.
If some preternatural power were somehow suddenly to make it undeniably clear to Americans, say, that Adolf Hitler was right and we were wrong — or even that the Kaiser in WW I was right and we wrong, the American populace would have an immediate mental breakdown due to cognitive dissonance. For facts must never, ever be allowed to intrude on deeply held fantasies. That would be un-American.
Davy on Sat, 2nd Jul 2016 6:59 am
“You have a horse in this race?” Some Americans get irritated at the obsession non Americans have with America. I have been quiet lately mainly because the anti-Americanism is so pervasive it is normal. We do have a horse in the race because we live here. We resent the generalizations and the anti-American agenda. Extremism is wrong. The ends does not justify the means despite what many here think. American critical discussions are vital in a world that has been influenced so much by destructive US policy but when this becomes personal and nasty that’s when it is wrong. Mostly these anti-Americans need to look in the mirror.
JuanP on Sat, 2nd Jul 2016 7:59 am
Davy, I’ve been thinking about your milkweeds since your comment on the subject. What you are doing with your farm is really cool. If only 1% of farmers did that on part of their land it would make a big difference. We should build milkweed corridors up and down the USA! They should give tax exemptions for letting the milkweeds grow.
In Uruguay, for example, we do the exact opposite. Land that is forested with environmentally destructive commercial mono crops of pines or eucalyptus that are literally mining the topsoil don’t pay taxes. Could we be any more backward? It’s a topsy turvy world!
Davy on Sat, 2nd Jul 2016 8:24 am
Juan, I have made a big effort to support milkweed, thistle, and wild carrot. I see monarch on all of these plants. There are many wild flowers on the farm mainly because we have taken large chunks of the place as ” set asides” to grow naturally. There still must be disturbance for succession so I have to mow and burn in routine. I make an effort to keep a species balance and attempt to control invasives that try to dominate. Modern landscaping and industrial agriculture has done its damage with species that have disturbed the original balance. Seeing monarch migrating and knowing I am doing my part is special. This is especially important in our epoch of extinction.