Historical Lessons
Was it George Santayana who posited: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it?” I’ve heard that idea formulated in all sorts of ways. Maybe the strongest paraphrase of it is: Those who fail to learn history’s lessons are condemned to repeat them. It is kind of like the kid who has to keep repeating a grade at school (Although that may be an artifact of the school system. Then again, so could failing to learn historical lessons. Check out Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen.)
Do we have a tenuous relationship with history in the U.S.? Has it always been that way? Or is it something new? It is hard to say for me. I’ve only been alive since the late 1970s.
If it has been a long-term problem, have things been getting worse in more recent years? Do we keep repeating the same historical patterns? Especially ones that don’t really seem to work? That is a pretty interpretive question. Who decides what constitutes what is “working” or not?
Hasn’t our tendency toward hierarchical thinking led us to create hierarchical societies over and over again throughout human history? Plebeians and patricians? Serfs and nobles? Female and male? Dalits, Brahmins, and the other castes in between? Proletariate and bourgeoisie? Working class and professional class? Black and white? There are countless other examples, and I could go on ad infinitum.
Have these hierarchical social structures “worked”? Have they “worked” for a certain segment of those societies? Maybe for the people that find (or place) themselves at the top of those hierarchical structures? What about all the people that have found themselves in the lower or lowest rungs of the social structures? Have these social structures worked for them? Or just ensured their lives would be poor, nasty, brutish and short?
If the majority of the people in a society have to live in a precarious, near Hobbesian-like state of nature, of endless struggle against each other over scrappy, scarce resources with fear of violence (from neighbor or state) and the prospect of never enjoying stability or security, is that “working”? Maybe for the ruling classes, the nobles, patricians, whatever they were called in different periods and different societies? Because they benefitted from the labor, the services, the suffering of the underclasses? So, why not call that social structure the natural order of humanity? Why not justify it in the most airtight way by calling it “natural”? Who does such a so-called “natural order” benefit? We've got to fulfill the book. Sure, nature is cruel, but is this cruelty really natural?
We all know the answers to those questions. Does how we answer them depend upon our status in the social structures we inhabit? Would the wealthy and powerful classes ever acknowledge that their status depends upon the existence of lower classes who are only afforded a comparatively meager life? Or is it just easier to blame it all on some “natural order” that we have no control over? Can that shut down discussion? Is it easier to live with themselves if it’s natural and there’s nothing to be done about it.
What if we dispense with that idea? That there is a natural order of human societies because human societies themselves are not natural? Does that clear the canvas for us to imagine something different? To imagine social structures where there is a much greater measure of equality, harmony, security, prosperity, joy, and longevity?
How might that look? Can you envision it?
Would there be a disparity of rights and legal protections?
Would there be poverty?
Would there be racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, hatred or discrimination of any kind?
Would there be violence?
Would there be insecurity?
Would there be cruelty?
Could we create a more egalitarian society?
A society where everyone shared in the prosperity more equally?
A more pluralistic society?
A more peaceful society?
A more secure society?
Haven’t we also tried maintaining hierarchies in many ways too? Haven’t we tried dehumanizing certain groups again and again? In order to show that they are not worthy of equality, justice, fairness, etc.? Haven’t we tried theocratic governments over and over? Haven’t we also tried suppressing facts? Banning books? Controlling narratives?
In the U.S. today, there are a lot of people worried about the demographic changes brought by immigration and changing birth rates. They fear they are being replaced. They fear becoming a white minority. Why? Is it because they can’t imagine a society where minorities are considered equals and treated as equals? Because they have largely benefitted from a social structure that afforded them some form of status and opportunity not given to minorities? And they fear that the demographic changes will relegate them to the bottom rungs of the social structure once they become the minority? Then, they will become the marginalized? Those bereft of opportunity and status? Are they grieving for what has not yet happened to them? But what they think will be terrible based on what has happened to marginalized groups throughout our history?
Do they have as much incentive to dismantle the current structures as the current minorities? At least a future-oriented incentive? Maybe to end the cyclical effort to maintain the unnatural order that we have called the natural order for millennia? See: that’s the thing about social hierarchies — they maintain themselves. They often do so by means of dehumanization.
There are also people in the U.S. who want to go back to the great old days. When a man could do what he wanted to women. When a white man didn’t have to worry about competing with a Black man for a job. When you could speak your mind about non-whites, non-males, non-Christians. Do we really need to return to the days of strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees for them to remember that those weren’t such great old days for a lot of people? Maybe most people? That there were even more cruel periods in our history? Or, do they think that is why it was the great old days?
In the U.S. today, the Christian (usually white Christian) Nationalist movement would prefer to jettison secular democracy in favor of a Biblical style theocracy. Never mind that many Europeans migrated here in the colonial days to escape religious conflicts and persecution in their home countries. Never mind that our founders (who were more deists than Christians) built freedom of religion and separation of church and state into the Constitution. Never mind that there are still theocratic regimes in a few countries today that are extreme, cruel, intolerant, sexist, restrictive, arbitrary, and non-consensual. Something we can all aspire to, I guess.
Will we ever learn the historical lesson that hierarchical social structures just create inequalities and cruelties of all kinds, increase civil strife and human suffering? Is there a point to all of that? Or is it just the cynical way that those with wealth, power, and status maintain their wealth, power, and status? Conferring some measure of status and opportunity on some segments of society to keep everyone pacified in their so-called “natural” place? Will we ever learn that theocratic governments just create cruelty, fear, hatred, and conflict? We watch it playing out in other countries today. Didn’t a lot of our ancestors migrate here to escape it? For religious freedom?
Hierarchical social structures also maintain themselves through controlling information and narratives.
Hasn’t the U.S. always been a pluralistic society, even before it was the U.S.? From before the very beginning there were Native Americans of varying cultures, European colonists from many cultures, Africans from many ethnic groups forcibly brought as slaves, religious groups of all kinds — literally a plurality of cultures. Why do we often act like a society that has been singular? A white society? That is Christian? Why is there such grief over the perceived loss of this heritage that was not really true from before the beginning? Are we nostalgic for something that never was? Are some of us?
What about efforts to ban certain aspects or events of history from being taught? Or banning the books that may reference or depict that history? How about banning entire courses and claiming they have no educational value? Hasn’t that been tried over and over in societies — real and fictitious? So much so, that we know how it will play out? Or even attempts to control and change the official narrative to suite the needs of a certain political agenda in a certain moment? Now we are at war with Eurasia because that is politically useful? But next week we are at war with Eastasia and have never been at war with Eurasia, our dear ally?
Is it all an effort by the ruling classes is to prevent the rest of us from learning the lessons of our history so that they can continue to maintain power in the way they want it? To keep us all divided, conquered, and pacified to eliminate threats to their “natural order”? The “natural order” they so conveniently find themselves at the top of? As the beneficiaries of? As Michele Norris has asked, who is invested in keeping us divided? Is that investment in division the utmost self-serving intellectual dishonesty?
Is it that we do not know our history? Never learned its lessons? Or that the official narratives of the dominant groups obscure facts and lessons that are inconvenient for their agendas? Or, is it all so complex that it is really hard to understand what happened in the past, how it affects us now, and how to make sense of it all today?
I don’t know.
Throughout our history white people have made extraordinary efforts to discriminate against, oppress, and not share the benefits of living in a so-called democratic country with Black people and other minorities. As Heather McGee points out in The Sum of Us, these extreme efforts often affected white people in negative ways too. She recounts largely untold histories of towns that would close their public pools and fill them with concrete rather than sharing them with Black people after the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional. White people could not longer swim for free, and hence private pools opened that charged entrance or membership fees. She also describes how the American National Elections Studies survey showed a major decline in white support for government programs that guaranteed jobs and a minimum standard of living as the Civil Rights movement succeeded in attaining more rights and opportunities for African Americans. According to the survey data, white support has remained low for such programs that benefitted workers of all races and ethnicities. Everyone was worse off because of strict adherence to old ideas that really don’t work for anyone.
Maybe Tupac was right that The Hate U Give Little Infants F#%¥s Everyone. I mean, really, who benefits from hate?
We’ve tried imposing hierarchical social structures on people. We’ve tried theocracies. We’ve tried dehumanizing people. We’ve tried outlawing information and controlling historical narratives. We’ve made grand social experiments with all of these things. Where has it gotten us? We constantly argue over who deserves what because of the social inequalities we’ve engineered. We constantly argue over who counts as human and who gets rights or is worthy of consideration. And we constantly fight about what we have done and what we are willing to tell our children that we have done.
Do we forcibly condemn successive generations to repeat the historical lessons we prevent ourselves and them from learning?
What if we try thinking differently, try different social experiments? Seems radical, right? Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds. Maybe that is what redemption is: we finally learn history’s lessons.