Which History?

Do We Really Want To Know?

UPDATED:  Full-disclosure — the first version of the below was…well, a bit of a mess (really needed an editor, at the very least).  Hopefully, this version makes a little more sense, of the essence anyway.  At the very least, a little more readable.

I've been thinking more about last Wednesday's post.  

When considering the nature of history, it seems important to ask a question pretty quickly — which history?

I know, for example, that I grew up quite differently than many other people — not necessarily in my neighborhood, but certainly in my geography.  It wasn't better per se, just different.  Is that important to recognize?  If not, when could it be?

As a society, we have and continue to discover the diversity of our lived experience historically.  So much so that it, in fact, surprises us.

You could have the impression right now, especially in some sectors of our society, that the value of history (other than the one I'm familiar with) is relatively insignificant.  It could seem as if the only thing that really matters is our present experience. Certainly, our present experience matters. But, we must acknowledge that the way we experience the present is highly conditioned by our particular past.  And, the ideas that our mythologies have brought us influence the ways we try to understand the present experience we have.  This is especially true collectively, which of course translates to how we see and do things personally. By asking this question about history, we both acknowledge and potentially address the reality that the experiences of different groups of people can vary greatly.

We can have a kind of cognitive integrity and acknowledge that any recording or documentation of history is influenced largely by the context that the person or people who are doing the recording are living in. Obviously, this is a given, because you can’t record something that you’re not seeing or experiencing. This would have to mean that history itself is largely a recording of specific sets of experiences, even if experienced commonly by other people, due to things like circumstances, or technologies, or whatever else the context may be.  Any particular recording of history involved is a record of what felt important to record at that place in that moment of time. 

We know, for example, that a record of history in eras when transportation was nearly exclusive to animals would have had all kinds of implications in terms of both what was experienced and what wasn’t (simply because of technology that was yet unavailable). Or, what about astrologers?  They were able to deduce through observation (mostly using the human eye or perhaps primitive versions of telescopes). Obviously, they could not portray what can be seen now, in both depth and range, with  telescope technologies available today.  So, the rate or extent of understanding, at any given point, by any given person or people recording things, was obviously constrained by what was able to be a) seen and b) recorded. 

We could go on and on, but a question might be bubbling up, so what is the significance of what we’re saying? I think there are certainly dynamics in play in this particular moment within our country, and around the world, that call on very selective elements or pieces of history.  Perhaps more significantly, to the exclusion of the broader meaning of history itself — namely the exclusion of whatever is not being selected. We have to remember that history, for the most part, has been recorded by people or institutions in power.  This, almost by definition, means that significant portions of history (at the very least versions of it) are being highly edited, if not excluded.

Perhaps one of the more significant contributions to this recognition now is the fact that nearly everyone has technology to record their experiences (including people who have little or no power). This can be, and most certainly it is, disorienting to those who are trying to retain and maintain a version of history that contributes to their ability to imagine how power should be and what it should look like, not to mention what is portrayed to be true.

Can the proliferation of the notion of fake news not be attributable to this dynamic? Certainly, people can intentionally go the other way and portray nuances and slices of things that actually are not all that representative of a greater and broader experience. But this is why, at least in part, a disciplined approach to history is so valuable.  It tries not to start from the premise of what it necessarily wants to exclude (even though that most certainly is happening all the time), even for those that are attempting to highlight new versions of history. 

The question quickly becomes something less about history and more about something else. What is it, after all, that we really want to know and understand? Do we really want to understand the experience, and therefore the resulting consequences of that experience, of people on the margins, even if those groups of people are in fact, closer to the masses than to minorities?

Do we, really, want to know? Sometimes, it looks more like we don’t want to know…