LEARNING FROM HISTORY
Any individual embarking on a study of history needs to predicate their study on a simple underpinning fact, and with it several associated appreciations. Without these, history offers few lessons, but instead becomes the agenda-driven realm of the rent-seekers trying to justify privilege in the present through selective interpretation of suffering in the past.
FACT: YOU ARE ONLY HERE BECAUSE OF HISTORY ...
You are here because every single minutia of history happened as it did. ALL history ... every single past heartbeat, every single blink, every single hello or nod of the head, every single drunk great grandfather, every single past interaction. Change so much as a single historical beat of a butterfly's wings and you would not be alive. Think on it ... you would not be alive ... and to imagine otherwise would be the most extreme form of illogical narcisssitic arrogrance.
APPRECIATION: AND WHERE ARE YOU?
And exactly where are you? If the answer is living twice as long as all your ancestors, in well-fed, warm, healthy environments with literacy, education and opportunity for yourself and children, with a functioning society with representative governance and one law, with the benevolent welfare of your fellow citizens, without restriction of belief, oppression, slavery, cannabalism, fear of violence or warfare, without ethnic or religious division, tribalism or the other evils of history .... then you are living the life not even the most privileged elite of all humans could imagine such a life but a mere generation or two ago. Think on it ... not even the kings and queens of privilege could have envisioned such lives.
so tell me again, before you proceed any further, what microsecond in history do you want to change?
Be thankful for the past;
but for every instant passing as it did, we would not be here.
Be thankful for the present;
for our lives transcend even the wildest dreams of our ancestors.
Be protective of the future;
for all is easily lost through complacency and lack of vigilance.
APPRECIATION: AND HOW LONG WILL IT LAST?
The Egyptians though forever, the Greeks thought forever, the Romans thought forever, the Chinese thought forever, the Japanese thought forever, the Khmer thought forever, the Mongols thought forever, the Zimbabweans thought forever, the Incas thought forever, the Aztecs thought forever, the Mayans thought forever, the Polynesians thought forever ... all wrong, all societies are transient. The tenure of a society depends upon its defence and maintenance, both internally and externally. The demise of both democratic governance and the benevolence of the welfare state are now well underway, after a surprisingly short tenure, and many of the most destructive aspects upon the principles upon which they are founded have come from within our societies ...
APPRECIATION: NOW IS LIKE NO PREVIOUS TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY ...
Strangely, history offers few parallels to the present. History no longer repeats. We are no longer a few thousand wandering around Stonehenge or the Pacific Islands constrained by the limits of our immediate environment, going through relatively insular waxing and waning cycles in isolated socieieties and cultures, as we were for millenia. We are now in numbers beyond historical imagination ... we are now 7,000,000,000 demanding, competing hominids, in a globally integrated context couched in modern technology ... a world for which history offers only limited comparisons of the trivial. There is no going back in an imaginary time machine to an imaginary past.
APPRECIATION: OUR ANTECEDANTS DIDN'T LIVE WITH THE UNICORNS IN FANTASYLAND ...
An imaginary past? Strangely, our predecessors were not kings, not chiefs, not queens, nor princesses ... they were not living in cosily-warm centrally-heated Disneyland 'King Arthur' castles and 'Moana' pas until they stoicly departed at age ninety five ... they did not enjoy cornucopia feasts spontaneously appearing with room service ... they did not live in peaceful fairylands of pampered existence with angelic kisses of kindness by all those around as they sang Earth songs and did yoga ... There was just the misery of survival in a short brutal life, warring collectives, with abundant pain, death and tragedy ... real history, not romantic revisionism of modern privilege.
APPRECIATION: INSPIRING PRIVILEGE-SEEKING BEHAVIOUR IS EASY ...
Inspiring people to believe that something in history was 'injust' and they can therefore transfer their responsibilities and demand extra privilege at others' expense and effort is easy - be it Scots in UK, Catalans in Spain, Republicans in Northern Ireland, Cornish in Cornwall, Quebecois in Canada, Hutu in Rwanda, Maori in New Zealand, Corsicans in France, Southerners in the USA, Highlanders in Scotland or any other of the multitude of the fragmenting divisions being evidenced in the world ... the 'past' offers an unaccountable pool of blame for everyone if you find the right interpretation. Blaming others and seeking power advantage and preference are addictive alternatives to assuming personal responsibility and making individual effort in the present, and even more so in times of duress. It is human nature at its ugly finest, and the destruction of social capital and cohesion through division, blame and scapegoating have now sadly become the game of the modern pivileged and the political gravy-trainers ... who sadly think their society can survive their destructive influences.
Only once you truely appreciate these characteristics of the passage of time, the transience and fragility of societies and the nature of human character can you can begin to examine that which has passed with an objective lens, see those that foment division for what they are, and hope that you may glean something useful from the past for the future.
20 October 2021
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