Is History History?
The study of the past, I mean.
Victor Davis Hanson wonders:
I have routinely been stunned in conversation to discover how abysmally small most interlocutors' knowledge of the past is. How can one possibly process the great panoply of events and information which confronts us daily without accessing the wonderful framework provided by a knowledge of history?
Yet in an age where rolling rubbers on rampant fruit is considered essential academic instruction, is it any wonder that only your most advanced high school graduate (and precious few of your college graduates) have any notion of who Xenophon was and why his cry of "The sea! The sea!" should resonate through the ages? Is it not obvious why so few know who Leonidas was, the Winston Churchill of ancient history (I daresay most have no clue who Churchill was either, nowadays), whose sacrifice saved Western Civilization from being strangled in its crib by great Xerxes. I can assure you that had Leonidas chose to tend to his farm in Sparta rather than die at Thermopylae there'd be no political correctness to concern us---there'd be no notion of liberty from whence such spurious concerns inevitably arise, only the heavy yoke of eternal despotism.
If your knowledge of history is weak (and whose isn't, really?) I cannot recommend The Teaching Company's marvelous lectures enough. Why go see Ridley Scott's godawful treatment of The Crusades when you can get the real story in all its wondrous complexity from a top-notch medieval historian?
Sometimes I get asked why I'm angry to this day about the Soviet Union and its bastard offspring. There is no surer sign of one's ignorance of history than not being able to readily muster outrage at the depredations of mass murderers like Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Josef Stalin, who after all lived contemporaneously with our parents and grandparents just a few decades back.
Wear your "cool" Che shirt, ignoramus, blissfully unaware that it was Guevara who set up the Cuban gulags and devised the methods for torturing and executing their political prisoners before begging for his life like the coward he was as the Bolivians cut him down.
History is the most useful of academic disciplines, as it affords both the comfort that nothing lasts forever and the surety that however bad you've got it, most of humanity had it much worse.
Victor Davis Hanson wonders:
Why do we not carry with us at the least the whispers of those who gave us what we have, from the Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge to penicillin and relief from polio? In part, it is a simple ignorance of real history. The schools and university curricula today are stuffed with therapy -- drug counseling, AIDS warnings, self-improvement advice, sex education, women's/gay/Chicano/African-American/Asian/peace/urban/environmental/leisure studies. These are all well-meaning and nice -isms and -ologies that once would have been seen as nonacademic or left to the individual, family or community. But in the zero-sum game of daily instruction, something else was given up -- too often it was knowledge of the past.
I have routinely been stunned in conversation to discover how abysmally small most interlocutors' knowledge of the past is. How can one possibly process the great panoply of events and information which confronts us daily without accessing the wonderful framework provided by a knowledge of history?
Yet in an age where rolling rubbers on rampant fruit is considered essential academic instruction, is it any wonder that only your most advanced high school graduate (and precious few of your college graduates) have any notion of who Xenophon was and why his cry of "The sea! The sea!" should resonate through the ages? Is it not obvious why so few know who Leonidas was, the Winston Churchill of ancient history (I daresay most have no clue who Churchill was either, nowadays), whose sacrifice saved Western Civilization from being strangled in its crib by great Xerxes. I can assure you that had Leonidas chose to tend to his farm in Sparta rather than die at Thermopylae there'd be no political correctness to concern us---there'd be no notion of liberty from whence such spurious concerns inevitably arise, only the heavy yoke of eternal despotism.
If your knowledge of history is weak (and whose isn't, really?) I cannot recommend The Teaching Company's marvelous lectures enough. Why go see Ridley Scott's godawful treatment of The Crusades when you can get the real story in all its wondrous complexity from a top-notch medieval historian?
Sometimes I get asked why I'm angry to this day about the Soviet Union and its bastard offspring. There is no surer sign of one's ignorance of history than not being able to readily muster outrage at the depredations of mass murderers like Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Josef Stalin, who after all lived contemporaneously with our parents and grandparents just a few decades back.
Wear your "cool" Che shirt, ignoramus, blissfully unaware that it was Guevara who set up the Cuban gulags and devised the methods for torturing and executing their political prisoners before begging for his life like the coward he was as the Bolivians cut him down.
History is the most useful of academic disciplines, as it affords both the comfort that nothing lasts forever and the surety that however bad you've got it, most of humanity had it much worse.
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