lifestyles

History Abuse
Joshua Lee

For lots of people with political or religious aspirations, there is a great draw to agitate the masses by abusing historical knowledge. Some politicians just love to try to hypnotize people with cries that we should return to an idyllic past as represented by the 1950s / 1800s / Dark Ages Europe / Rome. Whether it's a guy saying that we ought to protect family values (that he claims were more universally respected in the 40s), or a bunch of people waving a sign demanding the Great Awakening 4: The Awakening vs. Jason, many people see the good aspects of a time in the past and say, "Gee, returning to that would be a great idea." Others will delve back five-hundred years in order to find examples from ancient groups who only have the most tenuous connections to organizations that exist in the modern day, as though continuity of names was more important than continuity of actions and beliefs.

Unfortunately, they don't realize that almost all of the glories of the past were built on foundations that we would be aghast at today.

This is because most people are content to take references to history in bite-size pieces with no greater context linking them. While this may make for interesting talk at parties over some cheese based hors d'oevre, it also means that you are opening yourself up to being manipulated by people who are either malevolently intelligent and know that they can impress upon you that some past era was fantastic, or terrible by only telling you about the aspects of those eras you would consider admirable or terrible.

This leads to people who will do horribly annoying things, like walk into my room and raise their eyebrows quizzically at my bookshelf and then state, in their most innocent and bewildered voices; "But I thought Africa never had any civilization." Most of the time this isn't from simple ignorance of the area - after all, even if you never heard any details about, say, Laos, most people aren't going to assume they never had native civilizations until Europeans came just because it takes effort to learn about those countries instead of learning about them by picking up on pop culture “facts.”

It's because most people are surrounded by people who exaggerate primitivism for an ideological reason. Either they are racists and get bonus points by talking about "savages," or greens who want a return to living with the earth, or missionaries who are trying to wow their audiences with ideas that civilization can still be brought to people. None of these people have a reason to contextualize African history by telling you about Axum or the height of Malinese civilization.

But it's not just African history. People are bizarrely content to condemn other cultures past actions when our own were just as bad. It's not even as though they are condemning modern bad actions, they are content to point out that some country had a questionable past and therefore their descendents are guilty of that sin, all the while ignoring the fact that if we are all to pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, we have at least as much repentance to go through.

Recently I was reading about an Ismaili community center that was scheduled to be built in Hoover, Alabama. The Ismaili are considered “esoteric” Muslims, with all the interesting bits that comes along with that. The request to build the community center there was denied based on "traffic issues," but most of the blogs and talk radio discussions about the issue simply worried about the "assassins" coming to murder people in Hoover, as though the Ismailis hadn't already been living in Birmingham for years and years and weren't generally considered to be peaceful-but-devout hippie types there. It seems that hundreds of years before any of us were born, some Ismailis assassinated some people and therefore that is significant now because… Well, it agitates the masses even though I doubt some prestigious medical doctor from Hoover is really secretly trying to liberate a homeland in the middle east by assassinating people from the American south. These people went back hundreds of years ago to find a stereotype, strictly devoid of context, in order to condemn a group that they were scared of, whether it was on purpose or because they themselves were equally deceived by others.

Ruminating on the past for the sole purpose of demonizing groups in the present or providing an idealistic “goal” that ignores the evil bits of the society that produced those “good” things is just another form of deception, and ought to be treated as such.