I’ve a piece up today at The Partially Examined Life on Nietzsche’s On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and whether it still holds up in a time in which our problem is not having an excess of historical awareness.
Money quote:
The real problem, it seems to me, is that the past always exists in a dialectical relationship with the present, whenever we do history. As thinking people, as feeling intellects, we cannot avoid the confrontation with the alterity of the past, which judges us much just as we judge it. If we make the past “live again,” it casts its aspersions upon the present. There are some historians who seem to feel its judgments particularly intensely, and to tend toward conservatism or reaction. A friend and mentor from grad school recalled for me doing research at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France one summer and eating his lunches with Leo Strauss, who was of a close age and, like himself, a brilliant intellectual historian who had fled Nazi Germany as a Jew, but Strauss was to the right, while my friend had wound up on the radical left. Nevertheless, I think the two men enjoyed each other’s company greatly. “What was he like?” I naturally asked. “I had the very strong impression,” my friend said, “that he was deeply unhappy with the modern world and wished that he could have lived in ancient Greece.”
I’ve mulled over this for a day now. (and on Columbus Et Al Day, appropriately enough). I don’t agree with the postulate, “our culture’s lack of historical memory”.
Take Columbus Day (please). It was a huge honking deal for the 400th anniversary, and as recently as the early 1980s was still a pretty significant event in the school year, but by the 500th anniversary, the wind had pretty much completely gone out of the sails of ‘celebration’ except in Italian American communities. (it could be, however, that perception is heavily colored by the difference between being in grade school and being in college).
Nonetheless, we’re still fighting the US Civil War over flags and whatnot (one whatnot being Meryl Streep). If anything, the problem isn’t a lack of historical memory, it’s a panoply of historical memories, many mutually inconsistent.Report
Oh no, we’re still fighting over whether slavery was the root cause of the Civil War. The flag is merely a very public symbol of a much nastier fight, which often takes place in public school textbooks.
I occasionally troll the odd relative or friend when they get on their “The Civil War Was About State’s Rights” rants by posting quotes from Texas’ letter of secession.Report
I tend to troll folks like that by quoting reasonably obscure bits of Civil War trivia.Report
Has anyone here written about the Meryl Streep thing? Seems right in Tod’s strike zone. And worth writing about, actually. Just intensely stupid. From what I’ve read about it, anyway.
And your right about still fighting the civil war. I don’t know that the current “war” is about differing histories as much as attempts to redefine history, tho.
Adding: as an example, there was a rally at Stone Mountain recently to protest placing a MLK statue amongst all the confederate heroes, and the “rebels” objected on the grounds that doing so would introduce race into the history of the civil war.Report
What is the Meryl Steep thing?Report
The worst part of the internet. 🙁
Here’s a linky (which I’ve only skimmed for ” “accuracy” ” (double scare quotes!)Report
That’s an actual story?
Man, I should ban you just for saying that’s up my alley. 😉Report
Why if I was a front page poster I’d write the rear-end outa that story. I find it mind boggling, myself, and a perfect example of ….
{{cliff hanger! you’ll just have to wait for The Rest of the Story}}Report
GUEST POST!!!! GUEST POST!!!!Report
That’s what I’m sayin. We just gotta find someone with the chops and background to do it right. But who…Report
After reading the linked article – which presents an interesting and I think unusual take on the issue – I found a clue in the following quotation as to who should write the post:
Historians have a word for all of this. They call it “presentism,” an assertion that current values should be reflected in the telling of the past.
Now, I don’t know how that view actually addresses any of the issues in play, or why it’s even relevant, for that matter. But Gabriel Conroy is clearly our man tease all these strands outa the intellectual s’getti.Report
Oh, my god!
Damn wankers… I suppose they’ve just coincidentally forgotten that british feminists used bombs?
“Rebel not a slave” is a good term for terrorists, yes.Report
So Streep is a terrorist too?
That sucks. I really liked her films….Report
She did try to destroy a nuclear power plant in Silkwood.Report
Can’t blame her really, a dingo took her baby.Report
Some people are slaves to ignorance.
Oops.Report
Heh.Report
The Indigenous People’s Day seems to have taken a hold with the general public rather fast. I think the big difference between Indigenous People’s Day/Columbus Day and the fights we are having over the Civil War still is that there are many more African-Americans than Native Americans and many more contemporary issues can be traced back to slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Columbus Day involves fewer contentious contemporary issues.Report
I don’t really think any of this really contradicts my basic assertion that the average person is not carrying around a great deal of historical knowledge with them though. They may have a vague opinion about Columbus Day or the Civil War, but that’s basically what you’d have after elementary school.Report
I suspect your view of the ‘general public’ is somewhat skewed.Report
I admit that I’m getting a lot of my evidence from my Face Book feed and blog reading so it might be skewed. Most Americans probably do not care one way or another because Columbus Day is just a day off for a lot of them. The actual historical events are of little consequence as long as they get the paid day off.Report
I always celebrate Columbus Day by getting lost, then claiming a stranger’s house as my own.Report
Make sure you have a nasty cold when you do it, to make it more authentic.Report
And calling him and his family Hoosiers, even though you wound up in Arizona.Report
We do that on St. Pats. day, if by claiming a strangers house you meen waking up on the lawn.Report
Mine, too. I have literally never heard of it.Report
Rufus, I really wonder if “our problem is not having an excess of historical awareness.” In the places where the masses have a really strong historical awareness, what most people are aware is really national or tribal mythology rather than messy actual history. Its all our group against their group for what they did to do us for the most part. To use the most neutral example I can think of, look at the Balkans during most of the 20th century but especially after the fall of Communism. There was a lot of historical awareness of a sorts among national the populace of the Balkans but it tended involve a lot of tribal myth than actual history. The Serbs hated the Muslims for ruling over them for centuries, the Albanians and Bosnians despised the Serbs for dominating them, and the Croatians wanted an independence they dreamed about but never really had for most of their history unless you go way back. There was an element of truth in all of this histories but it tended to get overwhelmed by a lot of storytelling for some really atrocious real world consequences.
I sometimes get frustrated with the lack of historical awareness among the general population but when you think about, widespread historical awareness never really works out the way that liberals want it to. We might wish that the average American or citizen of whatever other country had a better grasp of actual history and it’s importance but this tends to usually workout as more of a historical mythology than actual history. Sometimes this mythology is relatively harmless like with romantic views of the Wild West or Pilgrims and other times it is more deadly like with the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, or the dispute between the Tamils and Ceylonese in Sri Lanka. Maybe the best thing is that we have a populace that really doesn’t think that much about the past and is sort of content with the present.Report
What I said above about your view of ‘most Americans’ being skewed? Copy and paste here.
Out on this side of the country, pretty much no one has the day off.Report
Yeah, same in my neck of the woods. I don’t know anyone who cares about Columbus day, one way or the other, and the only reason for that is a non-reason: they simply don’t care.Report