Social Matter

American political discourse has 1776 disease. If it happened before 1776, most Americans don’t want to hear about it. Maybe this makes sense. The American political project was supposed to be a break from the past, even though the founders to the last man had a better classical education than any pundit working today. Even their pen names were references to Greek and Roman history.

This is not a type of problem that is entirely limited to Americans of our time and place. Time horizons tend to be limited, because language changes, it becomes more difficult to identify with the people of the past, and the ordinary self-regard that people have tends to lead them to praise the society that they’re in as having all the right ideas and values compared to the ignorant past. Our mental time horizons are also limited because historical records are often poor quality. It is difficult to tell the difference between well-written propaganda and authentic documents.

Although in theory, professional historians work to corroborate and test narratives by cross-referencing primary source documents, in practice, the only people with budgets for historians  are government agencies and emperors, so the process tends to bend towards the people in charge. Despite this, even when the details are pastiche, we can tease out some important themes from the past that we can apply to current conditions.

Returning to the title of the post: it’s good to be backwards, to be backwards-looking, especially in a culture that obsesses with the present and the recent past. It is good to look upon the lives of past people, dead people, to recognize their humanity, to understand the decisions that they made, why they made those decisions, and whether or not their decisions had their intended results.

This is particularly important when examining eternal issues. Herodotus had nothing interesting to say about nuclear fission. Adam Smith has a lot to say about economics, but it isn’t going to make much sense to you if you don’t comprehend the detailed historical context in which he was writing. When most people go to the past today, it tends to be in the guise of an invading force. They’re raiding the past to show the superiority of the present. To declare that today’s man is the best man, and that his ways are the best ways. Contemporary writing about Smith as a case in point: it’s usually either from the left (Smith as cartoon oppressor divorced from his life and writings) or from the right (Smith as statist tool), with a mushy-headed refusal to set aside present political conflicts and to instead attempt to understand history on its own terms.

Approaching the past with humility, with curiosity, with an openness to the notion that even though they did not have germ theory, the lives of dead people might teach us some lessons anyway, is increasingly rare.

The project of the press is to heap on new words and pictures to prevent you from thinking upon either your personal condition, the past, or your future. The purpose is to get you to fixate on other people in the immediate moment. To blot out your life with their lives, their dramas, and their snake oil cures. It is burying the vitality of history with the putrid slideshows of the present.

Contemporary people looking backwards at history are ironically similar to Edward Bellamy’s main character in the defining progressive novel Looking Backward, even though you will rarely hear it discussed on MSNBC today. A brief synopsis is that a time traveler from the 19th century wakes up in the late 20th century and is astounded by how much better everything is under Communism.

The rhetorical pattern is the same. I am only overreaching a little when I say that contemporary teaching of history resembles the novel entirely, and indeed Progressives have cribbed from its style so repetitively that they tend to know it in their bones even if they have never read it. Even when the facts of today do not support their rhetorical habits, it still does not stop them, because it has become a crucial part of their characters. This approach of treating the past as enemy territory also tends to afflict conservatives, sometimes with greater severity than it does on the left.

If you take one thing from reading this, it’s that I want you to be open to learning from dead people.

Try to value their expired lives. Even if you disagree with them, strive to understand why they did what they did, why they believed what they believed, and why they acted in the way that they acted. Suppress your instinct to be on the attack at all times. Dead people are already dead — often their empires have already been conquered, so there’s nothing you can do to them that nature hasn’t already taken care of for you.

I even encourage this approach with progressives and their short history — not because I’m not their contemporary political enemy, but because I think understanding an enemy’s internal ways of thinking makes it easier to help ease them into the graveyard of history. I reiterate the mental importance of suppressing the need to be aggressive at all times when learning about something. Understand people according to their own rubrics of morality, or you are going to muddle your own values with those of the people that you’re examining, and your perception will be tainted thereby.

The reflex for righteous outrage has a use: it sells books, earns cable viewers, and even mints a few $0.0002 cent pageviews. It defines ingroup and outgroup. It does not organize effectively, but it does well at assembling disorganized mobs unified only in their shared sentiment. It is rabble-rousing in the intended meaning of the idiom. You raise your rabble, the other side raises their rabble, and your two rabbles fight until one wins.

This is the way to go if you want to win elections. It is not the way to go if you have higher goals.

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