,
23 tweets,
5 min read
Read on Twitter
1. What happens to our historical consciousness in historical moments like this one when the future seems so unrelentingly bleak? This question is not addressed head-on in this article, but it is the question this article left me with. newyorker.com/news/news-desk…
2. The "common sense" view of historical thinking is that it should "inform" the way we see the future. We look back to the past in order to generate a vision of the future. But I think that's backwards.
3. Frequently people first imagine a future (a Communist utopia, a liberal democratic free market world outside of history, a nation truly realizing its innate greatness, etc.) and then feel drawn to histories that help them connect the dots from the past into an imagined future.
4. Political abolitionists, for example, constructed a history of America that led from the egalitarian principles of the founding into a future in which those principles would be realized by ending slavery and creating a racially integrated society.
5. The extreme laissez faire libertarians of the 1950s and 1960s crafted an origins story of American capitalism that justified and explained the future, anti-regulatory utopia they hoped would replace the New Deal Order.
6. Our politics, in other words, always come wrapped in a historical narrative that stretches from the past, through today, and out into some future we hope will be made better by our politics.
7. Good histories are written by people who are very self-aware of this dynamic between past and present; and who try hard to be as true to their sources as they can, to allow their present selves to find things in the past that surprise them and perhaps even change their minds.
8. But ultimately, the extent to which we are invested in understanding the past often has a direct correlation to how invested we are in trying to shape the future. This is why politicians who write history books should be treated with much skepticism.
9. But to return to my original question...what happens to our investment in the past when there seems to be no future to invest in? I'm thinking primarily of climate change here, but we could also talk about the rise of technologically enabled right wing authoritarianism too.
10. Hypothesis: the extent to which one feels like they CAN shape the future in regard to climate change is the extent to which they're interested in historical narratives that can inform how we should tackle climate change.
11. Corollary: the extent to which one feels defeated in the face of climate change is the extent to which one keeps one's head down to focus primarily on one's present and near-future self interest.
12. It's not that we're failing to address the crises the world faces today because we don't know enough history. It's that we're retreating from history because we've resigned ourselves to a future in which we have not addressed those crises.
13. The "we" I'm invoking here is the "we" of the general public (or at least the college aged public) that has apparently determined that historical knowledge is not worth the time or the money to acquire.
14. To an end on a less downbeat note...there are plenty of signs that the general public is interested in history. I mean, @KevinMKruse is great and all, but come on, 288K followers hanging on the latest word from a history nerd?
15. And it's not as if the American public's knowledge of history has ever been all that stellar.
16. But what seems to be lost is our desire to tell stories about our past that inspire actions in the present aimed at building a better future. Emphasis on "better," because a bunch of terrible people are very invested in fake medieval histories that justify ethno-nationalism.
17. I'm not sure I've said much here that Carl Becker didn't already say in 1931. historians.org/about-aha-and-…
18. But what scares me most these days are the powerful, self-serving historical myths being spun by right wing nationalists around the world...myths that, in the absence of other historical narratives, will have the power to shape the political reality we all inhabit. 
19. Our capacity to act effectively as a collectivity is dependent upon our ability to inhabit a relatively shared, mythic world that ties our past to our present and future. That's what history provides, a story of who "we" have been, who "we" are, and what "we" should do.
20. These mythic tales are always only partially true & always unravel in hindsight. A collectivity without such a mythic tale, however, is a community more easily broken & dominated. Someone in the comments said a world w/o history is what neoliberalism aspires to. Makes sense.
21. The history of the United States as a polity begins with the words "We the people..." in the constitution. The historical stories that have been told on behalf of the unruly subject of that sentence have always fallen short and always will.
22. But if "we" seek to inhabit a polity that is more rather than less self-governing and which seeks to advance the interests of the many rather than the few, we're going to need more, not less, historical stories to get us through the mess we find ourselves in.
23. And those stories will need to be grounded in visions of human solidarity other than those espoused by today's ethno-nationalists that revolve around pseudo-scientific conceptions of race or pseudo-historical visions of some eternal "national identity."
