The Uses of History

Americans have a love-hate relationship with history. On the one hand, history is often seen as something dry and dusty, composed of dates and events and people that hover on the borders of consciousness and relevance and make the eyes glaze over, like the Wilmot Proviso. Compared to other Western democracies, we are shamefully uneducated in history, even our own, and yet little sense of embarrassment seems to attend this deficiency. That's because Americans pride themselves on not being constrained or determined by the past, but on always surging forward confidently into the future, reinventing ourselves, our nation, and perhaps the world along the way. History? Leave it to the antiquarians and the Europeans.

At the same time, however, Americans have a thirst for the kind of history that seems to confirm those qualities that make the country special. From David McCullough's bestselling John Adams to Tom Brokaw's bestselling The Greatest Generation, the major figures and the major triumphs of the United States, like the founding fathers and World War II, have proven their enduring market appeal. This is the sort of history that grades into myth, and every culture needs its myths, those highly digestible, quasi-sacred, often misleading stories of the past that give a society its sense of coherence, meaning, and shared purpose. History becomes myth when conventional wisdom ceases to examine itself. Some myths, like George Washington and the cherry tree, carom here and there benignly. Others, like the myth of social mobility, have a profound impact on how Americans conceive of their lives and their relations to each other, and while grounded to some extent in reality, conceal much contrary evidence. Our country also likes to think of itself as justified by history (which has so often worked in our favor), and we have become adept at converting our national myths into history (as in the "liberation" of Iraq).

Our attitudes toward history, conscious or not, matter a great deal to how we act in the present, and neither of the common attitudes just sketched out -- the apathetic and the celebratory -- are adequate guides in that regard. To be more precise, our ability to confront the challenges and solve the problems of today depends in large measure on whether we approach the past in a spirit of inquiry, with an eye toward its usefulness. Approaching the past analytically enables us to extract from it meanings that help us explain the modern world -- to identify the processes, forces, trends, patterns, and analogies of history, not simply as an exercise in antiquarianism, but because they spring from the same basic wells of social thought and behavior today as they did then. This goes beyond the adage that "those who don't understand history are bound to repeat it," although that seems true enough. It has to do more broadly with the importance of critical thinking, a subject which the Commonweal Institute has addressed before (see, for example the Uncommon Denominator "Talking Points" for April 2004).

Unfortunately, we live in an age when many of our leaders, under the guise of populism and anti-elitism, deliberately undermine the role of active thought, on the part of the general public, in the making of culture. They do so through attacks on the universities, on professional science, on non-test-oriented public school curricula, on the right of access to government information, and on anything that smacks of "intellectualism." They have simultaneously used American myths, such as the cowboy or the city on the hill, as substitutes for an honest, robust debate about the intricacies of various policy decisions and the wisdom of broad national goals. Taken together, these strategies have seriously diminished Americans' ability to make the best use of history. In consequence, while most Americans have come to understand that the misrepresentation of history can be dangerous when it comes to matters like holocaust revisionism, they have not, by and large, really applied that lesson to their own view of history, and what relevance it might have to their, and their country's, ethical stance in the world.

An important factor here is religious faith. Increasingly, our culture seems to have adopted an millennialist understanding of history, in which the central monotheistic myth (the redemption of souls and the ultimate reunion of humanity and divinity at the end of time) substitutes for a rational understanding of the processes by which history actually happens. This millennialist worldview does not have to involve conscious belief, and it is not limited to Christians. This view can be recognized in such truisms as, "Have faith -- things always work out in the end" or, "Eventually they'll get what's coming to them." In most cases a framework of assumptions rather than an active ideology, this view of history tends toward passivity, toward accepting the existence of particular circumstances or social realities as inevitable rather than contingent, as necessary stages in some grand human narrative rather than as the byproducts of specific pressures, forces, and decisions. For example, it is easy to take traffic congestion for granted, to take it as a matter of course that every day, Americans spends millions of man-hours driving millions of cars on millions of miles of roadway, when the reality does not actually have to be that way. Indeed, that image is rather startling when we begin to contemplate it seriously, and the fact that we usually don't is a failure of the imagination.

This failure has significant implications for how people understand human progress (and it is worth remembering that the myth of American progress lies deep in the national psyche). Viewing history as something that happens to us, rather than something that we make, renders "true" progress as something transcendent, as something beyond human effort. This is an abdication of responsibility, and it promotes, paradoxically, a materialistic, even nihilistic, view of the world around us, in that it limits the scope of human progress to the material, the technological, and the economic. In other words, what gets lost is a sense of how human beings themselves can take charge of the full spectrum of moral, emotional, and spiritual progress of which we are capable - progress in terms of social relations, our connection to the environment, and the encouragement of higher forms of thought.

Crucially, the debilitating power of faith is not the only impediment to a constructive approach to human history. Also problematic, and also common in American culture, are a pessimistic form of secularism that denies or underestimates the possibilites of social change, and a simple inertia or exhaustion that leads people, sheep-like, to follow their leaders wheresoever they may lead. The first shows up in everything from extremist postmodern theory, with its all-devouring skepticism toward claims of value and truth, to the various mindless hedonisms of an entertainment society. The second shows up in abominably low levels of civic participation and a general disinclination to demand accountability from our political leaders. These cultural shortcomings result in part from a refusal to accept the responsibility to grapple with the lessons of history.

As Warren Susman argued long ago in Culture as History (Pantheon, 1973), a good understanding of the uses of history makes it possible for one to act positively -- "not resign oneself to the myth of a second chance with some inevitable progress under God's benign direction, nor surrender to the essential tragedy of the human condition, nor carry on precisely as one had in the past under the leadership of one's betters."

Consider how these forms of moral debilitation might affect humanity's response to the global environmental crisis. The first attitude (faithful resignation) is to say that of course God would not allow his chosen species to perish, and so therefore we can treat the environment as we will without fear for our long-term survival. The second (tragic surrender) is to assume prematurely that we are already hurtling toward some kind of environmental apocalypse, and that nothing we do as individuals will make any difference. The third (apathy) is to act as sheep, or cowards, or lemmings, or invalids, in thinking that politics-as-usual will show the way out.

But what if the response were to educate ourselves in how previous environmental dangers played out? To see environmental history as something that we all have a hand in? To apply pressure on decision-makers to lead us in a sensible direction? To reform our own lives and communities according to sound ecological principles?

That may sound like dreaming, but only because of the siren song of myth, and the most dangerous myths are those that blind us to the possibilities for constructive reform in the present by substituting a sense of inevitability for a belief in personal agency, while putting self-justification before self-examination.

That, indeed, is a good way of defining political conservatism. And a troubling tendency in modern American conservatism is that, while preferring to operate in the realm of myth (cowboy boots, Mount Rushmore) when it comes to communicating with the public, its key leaders operate in practical terms out of a clear sense of historical mission and ideological purpose. So the public (much of it, at least) is spoon-fed pabulum while having history -- and the future -- constructed for them by others.

It is interesting, in this connection, that much of the rage of young Muslim radicals seems to stem from their feeling of historical powerlessness. That is, it arises from their humiliating feeling of alienation from the world's history, a sense of not being able to participate meaningfully in the creation of that history. In compensation, some of them cling fanatically to old cultural and religious myths, such as the vision of a pan-global Islamic caliphate, or the glories of martyrdom. Such myths -- in any culture -- seem to provide the dignity and the justice denied by history. Where history promises only the long hard slog, myth promises meaning and power in the here and now.

One wonders, as the global military and economic power of the United States slips away, and as our ability to determine history correspondingly diminishes, how Americans will react. Who will step up, and who will retreat? How will the lessons of history be heard, applied, or ignored? What myths will gain in power, and how will they manifest themselves? What kinds of rage or despair will seek harbor in these myths, and with what consequences?

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