History weighs like a nightmare on the living if they are ignorant of basic facts
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
William Faulkner’s dictum that “the past is never dead – it’s not even past” has rarely been more troubling. The conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Taiwan, and many smaller disputes, are based on contested history. So are the West’s culture wars, obsessed with 17th and 18th-century misdeeds and their supposed present-day consequences.
I cannot think of a time when the past (in Marx’s phrase) has more weighed like a nightmare on the brains of the living. History is filling a contemporary intellectual void, as once dominant ideologies have faded. Even when ancient beliefs are still potent, they conceal themselves behind a veil of secular history. Today’s “social justice” activism draws not on present-day inequalities, but on the perpetuation (as Lord Sumption has put it) of “grievances on account of past events that have no practical relevance to modern lives”.
The truth of quasi-historical claims may not be believed by those making them, but they calculate that plenty of others will be convinced. Weaponising history is made easier by the common “postmodern” view that there are no objective historical truths, only a cacophony of “narratives”, with those of the “oppressed” having moral authority as “my truth”. Such imposition of new orthodoxy was grimly satirised in 1984 by George Orwell, whose anti-hero Winston Smith’s job is “rectifying” the past to serve the ever-changing present. “But you could prove nothing,” muses Winston. “There was never any evidence.” Scholars today are praised for making evidence “tell a different story” to fit a contemporary agenda.
History can more easily be retrofitted if people don’t know much about it, or are even uncertain about what is truth and what is fiction. Many of us were astonished to see televised interviews with people demonstrating in London for a Palestine free “from the river to the sea”, without knowing which river or sea. Some polls indicate that many young Americans think the Holocaust was a myth, and a notorious British poll suggested that many young people believed Churchill was fictitious.
Ignorance opens the way for those claiming expertise, such as Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, who has stated that Churchill’s “ideas are the very same ideas through which the Nazis came to power. They’re not even parallel; they’re the same, right?”
Given these alarming levels of historical ignorance, one can confidently assume that the number who could in any way assess the truth of Russia’s claim to Ukraine or China’s to Taiwan is infinitesimal. Yet here history is central. Putin insists that Ukraine is not a nation, but merely a rebellious province of Russia. The Chinese Communist Party makes the same assertion about Taiwan.
In fact, Ukraine was only annexed to the Russian Empire in the late 18th century and Taiwan, an independent kingdom, to the Chinese Empire in the late 17th. Both are former colonies with rights to independence at least as great as (let us say) those of the Irish Republic. As for the position of Israel, which some characterise as a “colonial” and “apartheid” state, the present conflict cannot be understood without knowing that both Israelis and Palestinians include a high proportion of refugees, the former not only from Europe but from across the Muslim world.
Yet while knowing something of history is essential to understanding the present, we must not place on history a weight that it cannot bear. The past – Marx’s “nightmare’”– must not dictate the present, or subordinate the rights of the living and the yet unborn to those of the dead. Doubly so when a distorted past is being used as a weapon.
We must sometimes accept that the past is indeed past, that history gives no imprescriptible right to determine the present. The historian Heinrich von Treitschke insisted that the people of Alsace were German whether they liked it or not, to which the French philosopher Ernest Renan replied that a nation was a voluntary association.
No nation has been as willing as Britain to adopt Renan’s idealism in an extreme form. Our electoral system places the UK’s continuance in the hands of a momentary plurality among a minority of voters. This fragility is one reason to be concerned about the historical “narratives” purveyed within our (present) borders: Renan, after all, believed the cohesion of his voluntary nation relied on a common history.
What is happening to our history? We are constantly subjected to negative readings. No subjects are today as sensitive as slavery and empire. Yet surely we all know – at least those with any interest in the past – that slavery was practically universal, and Britain, once a major participant, became the principal actor in ending openly practised slavery around the world. Yet the story now being actively pressed is that Britain was uniquely guilty, that its wealth is based on slavery, that its anti-slavery efforts are irrelevant, and as a result it is racist today.
Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum ignores African and Arab slavery and downplays British abolitionism. The implicit theme of the “Black Atlantic” exhibition at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum is that Atlantic slavery was worse than all other forms, because it was uniquely based on a racism which, it claims, was central to British culture. This is clearly untrue, and moreover it makes abolition incomprehensible.
From such “narratives” come demands for shame, apologies, reparations and privileges for supposed victims today. Scholars who pointed out glaring errors in an academic article linking industrialisation with slavery were sternly told that empiricism was a colonial construct and that they were supporting “white domination”.
Contentious claims, in Moscow, Beijing or Cambridge, cannot be judged by people with no knowledge of history. I am glad to be a member of an advisory committee helping to draw up a model history curriculum for schools – an initiative of Kemi Badenoch. But no curriculum can or should teach everything. What I hope it can do is to inculcate historical knowledge and awareness: looking at evidence and at causes, thinking logically and being sceptical of subjective “narratives”.
Britain is highly unusual in not giving much time for teaching history at school. In today’s world this is an expensive luxury.
Robert Tombs is the author of ‘The English and Their History’, an updated edition of which has just appeared
