Category: Relativism

I May Be Wrong About This, But…

Before introducing the moral pairing of right and wrong to my students, I actually began with selfish and selfless because I believe morality has a subjective element, even in the context of religion, where we tend to decide for ourselves whether or not we believe or ascribe to a faith.

As I propose them, selfish and selfless are literal, more tangible, even quantifiable: there’s me, and there’s not me. For this reason, I conversely used right and wrong to discuss thinking and bias. For instance, we often discussed Hamlet’s invocation of thinking: “… there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (II, ii, 249-250). Good and bad, good and evil, right and wrong… while not exactly synonymous, these different pairings do play in the same ballpark. Still, as I often said to my students about synonyms, “If they meant the same thing, we’d use the same word.” So leaving good and bad to the pet dog, and good and evil to fairy tales, I presently consider the pairing of right and wrong, by which I mean morality, as a means to reconcile Hamlet’s declaration about thinking as some kind of moral authority.

My own thinking is that we have an innate sense of right and wrong, deriving in part from empathy, our capacity to stand in someone else’s shoes and identify with that perspective – look no further than storytelling itself. Being intrinsic and relative to others, empathy suggests an emotional response and opens the door to compassion, what we sometimes call the Golden Rule. Compassion, for Martha Nussbaum, is that means of “[hooking] our imaginations to the good of others… an invaluable way of extending our ethical awareness” (pp. 13-14). Of course, the better the storytelling, the sharper the hook, and the more we can relate; with more to go on, our capacity for empathy, i.e. our compassion, rises.

Does that mean we actually will care more? Who knows! But I think the more we care about others, the more we tend to agree with them about life and living. If all this is so, broadly speaking, if our measure for right derives from empathy, then perhaps one measure for what is right is compassion.

And if we don’t care, or if we care less? After all, empathy’s no guarantee. We might just as reasonably expect to face from other people their continued self-interest, deriving from “the more intense and ambivalent emotions of… personal life” (p. 14). Emotions have “history,” Nussbaum decides (p. 175), which we remember in our day-to-day encounters. They are, in general, multifaceted, neither a “special saintly distillation” of positive nor some “dark and selfish” litany of negative, to use the words of Robert Solomon (p. 4). In fact, Solomon claims that we’re not naturally selfish to begin with, and although I disagree with that, on its face, I might accept it with qualification: our relationships can supersede our selfishness when we decide to prioritise them.

So if we accept that right and wrong are sensed not just individually but collectively, we might even anticipate where one could compel another to agree. Alongside compassion, then, to help measure right, perhaps coercion can help us to measure wrong: yes, we may care about other people, but if we care for some reason, maybe that would be why we agree with them, or assist them, or whatever. Yet maybe we’re just out to gain for ourselves. Whatever our motive, we treat other people accordingly, and it all gets variously deemed “right” or “wrong.”

I’m not suggesting morality is limited solely to the workings of compassion and coercion, but since I limited this discussion to right and wrong, I hope it’s helping illuminate why I had students begin first with what is selfish and selfless. That matters get “variously deemed,” as I’ve just put it, suggests that people seldom see any-and-all things so morally black and white as to conclude, “That is definitely wrong, and this is obviously right.” Sometimes, I suppose, but not all people always for all things.

Everybody having an opinion – mine being mine, yours being yours, as the case may be – that’s still neither here nor there to the fact that every body has an opinion, mine being mine and yours being yours. On some things, we’ll agree while, on some things, we won’t.

At issue is the degree that I’m (un)able to make personal decisions about right and wrong, the degree that I might feel conspicuous, perhaps uneasy, even cornered or fearful – and wrong – as compared to feeling assured, supported, or proud, even sanctimonious – and right. Standing alone from the crowd can be, well… lonely. What’s more, having some innate sense of right and wrong doesn’t necessarily help me act, not if I feel alone, particularly not if I feel exposed. At that point, whether from peer pressure or social custom peering over my shoulder, the moral question about right and wrong can lapse into an ethical dilemma, the moral spectacle of my right confronted by some other right: would I steal a loaf of bread to feed my starving family?

For me, morality is mediated (although not necessarily defined, as Hamlet suggests) by where one stands at that moment, by perspective, in which I include experience, education, relationships, and whatever values and beliefs one brings to the decisive moment. I’m implying what amounts to conscience as a personal measure for morality, but there’s that one more consideration that keeps intervening: Community. Other people. Besides selfish me, everybody else. Selfless not me.

Since we stand so often as members of communities, we inevitably derive some values and beliefs from those pre-eminent opinions and long-standing traditions that comprise them. Yet I hardly mean to suggest that a shared culture of community is uniform – again, few matters are so black or white. If anything, the individual beliefs that comprise shared culture – despite all that might be commonly held – are likely heterogeneous: it’s the proverbial family dinner table on election night.

Even “shared” doesn’t rule out some differentiation. Conceivably, there could be as many opinions as people possessing them. What we understand as conscience, then, isn’t limited to what “I believe” because it still may not be so easy to disregard how-many-other opinions and traditions. Hence the need for discussion – to listen, and think – for mutual understanding, in order to determine right from wrong. Morality, in that sense, is concerted self-awareness plus empathy, the realised outcome of combined inner and outer influences, as we actively and intuitively adopt measures that compare how much we care about the things we face everyday.

Say we encounter someone enduring loss or pain. We still might conceivably halt our sympathies before falling too deeply into them: Don’t get too involved, you might tell yourself, you’ve got plenty of your own to deal with. Maybe cold reason deserves a reputation for callusing our decision-making, but evidently, empathy does not preclude our capacity to reason with self. On the other hand, as inconsistent as it might seem, one could not function or decide much of anything, individually, without empathy because, without it, we would have no measure.

As we seem able to reason past our own feelings, we also wrestle echoing pangs of conscience that tug from the other side, which sometimes we call compassion or, other times, a guilt trip. Whatever to call it, clearly we hardly live like hermits, devoid of human contact and its resultant emotions. Right and wrong, in that respect, are socially individually determined.

One more example… there’s this argument that we’re desensitized by movies, video games, the TV news cycle, and so forth. For how-many-people, news coverage of a war-torn city warrants hardly more than the glance at the weather report that follows. In fact, for how-many-people, the weather matters more. Does this detachment arise from watching things once-removed, two-dimensionally, on a viewscreen? Surely, attitudes would be different if, instead of rain, it were shells and bombs falling on our heads from above.

Is it no surprise, then, as easily as we’re shocked or distressed by the immediacy of witnessing a car accident on the way to our favourite restaurant, that fifteen minutes later we might conceivably feel more annoyed that there’s no parking? Or that, fifteen minutes later again, engrossed by a menu of appetizers and entrees and desserts, we’re exasperated because they’re out of fresh calamari. Are right and wrong more individually than socially determined? Have we just become adept at prioritising them, even diverting them, by whatever is immediately crucial to individual well-being? That victim of the car accident isn’t nearly as worried about missing their dinner reservation.

Somewhat aside from all this, but not really… I partially accept the idea that we can’t control what happens, we can only control our response. By “partially” I mean that, given time, yes, we learn to reflect, plan, act, and keep calm carrying on like the greatest of t-shirts. After a while, we grow more accustomed to challenges and learn to cope. But sometimes what we encounter is so sudden, or unexpected, or shocking that we can’t contain a visceral response, no matter how accustomed or disciplined we may be. However, there is a way to take Hamlet’s remark about “thinking” that upends this entire meditation, as if to say our reaction was predisposed, even premeditated, like having a crystal ball that foresees the upcoming shock. Then we could prepare ourselves, rationalise, and control not what happens but our response to it while simply awaiting the playing-out of events.

Is Solomon wise to claim that we aren’t essentially or naturally selfish? Maybe he just travelled in kinder, gentler circles – certainly, he was greatly admired. Alas, though, poor Hamlet… troubled by jealousy, troubled by conscience, troubled by ignorance or by knowledge, troubled by anger and death. Troubled by love and honesty, troubled by trust. Troubled by religion, philosophy, troubled by existence itself. Is there a more selfish character in literature? He’s definitely more selfish than me! Or maybe… maybe Hamlet’s right, after all, and it really is all just how you look at things: good or bad, it’s really just a state of mind.

For my part, I just can’t shake the sense that Solomon’s wrong about our innate selfishness, and for that, I guess I’m my own best example. So, for being unable to accept his claim, well, I guess that one’s on me.

Deciding over Derrida’s Différance

As far as I understand Jacques Derrida’s différance, he observes that we understand our experiences as distinctive – but not exhaustive – communicated links or marks comprising an on-going decisive chain of experiential moments.

As to the language we use to describe our experiences, any word we use has contextual meaning, both from its usage at any given time as well as from its etymology over the course of time. I tend to agree with this attendance to context as furnishing meaning, and I can also spot the rabbit hole that it poses. For example, to understand some word’s definition, I might look it up in the dictionary and be left to rely upon the definition provided by [ whomever ], e.g. some editor, who decided what it meant. At the same time, I am faced with all sorts of words in the definition, and they need looking up, too – Sisyphean, indeed! Cruel but so usual. On the other hand, thanks to whomever for compiling the dictionary, a pretty utile compendium, I have to say.

To be clear, I am not intending to invoke logocentrism, by which all our words are accorded a decided meaning from a cultural centre, which propagates existing biases or “privileges”; Derrida would roll over in his grave. Granted, I may already have laid grounds here to be accused of logocentrism, myself, by writing with words (and I confess to using English because I didn’t think anyone had the patience to muddle over Wingdings). My present aim is to suggest how we might address the afore-mentioned rabbit-hole dilemma by searching for or (… almost afraid to say it) by deciding upon some definitions of our own. Not like a dictionary, but more like – – well yes, okay, like a dictionary, but one that we’ll fashion from the ground-up, like when the light bulb would go on above Darla’s head, and Spanky would snap his fingers to say, “Hey, everyone! Maybe we can put on a play!” So, in the spirit of dissemination, hey everybody, maybe we can compile a dictionary! A real, deconstructive, crowd-sourced dictionary!

I’m not really compiling a dictionary. I’m just trying to make some sense of Derrida and différance. Let me try to illustrate what I mean from my own experience. Sometimes I play Walking Football, a version of the game where players are not permitted to run. Naturally, the debate is over what differentiates walking from running. We’ve agreed that walking means “always having at least one foot in contact with the ground during the striding motion.” Running means “having both feet leave the ground at some point during the striding motion.” This makes for certainty, and so long as our eyes are trained enough to spot feet in motion, which I can spot sometimes so clearly, with such immediacy, that its more like I’m watching, not playing – I’m even ghinding it tuff right now to ghet the right words, but trust me. And so long as each player is willing to obey the rules – and, ohh my, there’s always that one player who just won’t. You know who I mean… *sigh… Anyway, so long as they’re not just words uttered, which then float away in the breeze, then our definitions of the rules for ‘walking’ and ‘running’ are useful.

Luckily, too, I might add, when we clarify the rules, we do so out loud, together, and don’t whisper it around in a circle, like when my daughter plays Telephone at a birthday party – after all, we want everyone to be clear. Finally, even if we have trouble spotting feet in motion, because it all happens too quickly, or even if that one player is a cheater at heart, the definitions themselves remain clear, and usually at least one or two of us can remember them well enough to recite back, as needed, usually with a lot of furrowed brows and finger-pointing. One time we even wrote the no-running rule on the gym chalkboard, and even though no one challenged this on the grounds that writing is secondary to speech, everyone still understood why it was scrawled there, by which I mean everyone knew exactly who should read it the most – wow, does every game have that player?

Bottom line: accountability is down to the sincerity and respect offered to each player by every other player who decides to participate. As an aside, the need for a referee, an arbiter, is all the more clear when the stakes are as high as bragging rights and free beer. But, even as we play for fun, the rules exist or else the game, as such, does not. (On that note, I find a lot of players simply don’t like Walking Football and would rather play with running, and that’s fine, too: it’s their decision, and plenty other like-minded players keep both games afloat. I find the Walking game amplifies decision-making, so maybe this feature just appeals to me. And I still play traditional football, too.)

My broader point is that any one person must decide to accept what has been defined and, likewise, any group of people must reach a consensus. Shared meaning matters because, otherwise, as I say, we don’t have a game, or else we have a very different game, or we just have anarchy. But whether that person, alone, or the group, altogether, searching for a way to decide upon meaning, has the patience to delve down the rabbit hole… well, yes, context does indeed matter – both usage and etymology. I’ve said and written as much, myself, for a long time. So, in light of all this, I hope I’ve gathered a little something of Derrida’s différance. I’m still learning.

Another illustration: in my teaching, I occasionally introduced this matter of contextual meaning by offering students a list of synonyms: “slim,” “slender,” “skinny,” “thin,” “narrow.” Each word, of course, has its own particular meaning. “If they meant the same thing,” I offered, “then we’d use the same word,” so just what explains the need for all these synonyms? Well, students would say, there are lots of different things out there that possess or demonstrate these various ‘adjectives’ (my word, not theirs), so we’ve come up with each adjective to describe each thing (and I think that’s a charitable “we,” like the Royal “We.”)

During the ensuing discussion, I might ask which of these words typically describe human traits versus those – leaving aside metaphors – that typically do not. Next, which words typically possess positive connotations, and which negative, or neutral? And, as it pertains to the personification metaphors, which words are more easily envisioned versus those that really stretch the imagination, or even credibility?

Eventually, I would shift from ontology to epistemology, posing the questions at the heart of my intention: For any of the previous questions about these synonyms, how do you know what you’re talking about? For what each of these words could mean, where have your assurances come from? Of course, the most frequent reply to that question was “the dictionary,” followed by “my parents” or “books I’ve read,” or “just everyday experience, listening and talking to people.” Occasionally, the reply was something akin to “Who cares… it just means what it means, doesn’t it?” In every reply, though, one common thread was detectable: the involvement of other people as part of the meaning-making process. Fair enough, we can’t all be Thoreau.

One more illustration: when is “red” no longer red but perhaps orange or purple? Well, for one thing, if you’re colour blind, the question means something entirely different, which I say not flippantly but again to illustrate how important dialogue and community are to deciding what something means. For another thing, in keeping with context-dependency, we might wish to ask, “Why even ask?” Again, this is not flippant or dismissive but practical: when does it matter so that we distinctly need to identify the colour red? Where a group of people might face the question over what is red versus what is orange or purple, we might expect some kind of discussion to ensue. And, whether one asks as part of such a group or as a hermit, alone, I submit this one person’s decision about what is “red” ultimately comes down to one person to determine: “Red is this,” or “This is red,” or even, “Gosh, I still can’t really decide.” Even a coerced decision we can still attribute to the one who forces the issue – one person has decided on behalf of another, however benignly or violently: might makes right, or red, as it were.

Coercion introduces a political consideration about whose authority or power has influence, similar to needing referees on account of those players who decide to run. The point, for now, is simply that a decision over what something means to a person is ultimately made by a person, leaving others to deal with that decision on their own terms in whatever way. But other people are part of the meaning-making process, even passively, or else I wouldn’t need language to begin with since the rest of you wouldn’t trouble me by existing. Not to worry, by the way, I appreciate you reading this far. From what I understand (and I am convinced I must learn more, being no avid student of either postmodernism or Derrida), his observation of différance either discounts or else offers no account for the arbitrary decision-making that people might make when they decide they’ve had enough. People tend to land somewhere in a community, and it’s the rare person who lives and plays wholly and uncompromisingly by their own rules. However, the fact that he felt différance was worth the effort to publicise and explain to the rest of us does reflect an arbitrary decision on the part of Derrida and says something – sort of ‘out loud’ – about him.

So this is where I have more fundamental trouble understanding Derrida and différance – the very notion of “different,” as in, in what world could there not be an arbiter? Even a life alone would face endless decisions: what to eat, where to go, when to sleep, and so forth. From such musing – speaking of rabbit holes – I was led to reading about another philosopher named Jacques, this one Rancière, and what he calls the axiom of equality. In pure nutshell form, I take this to mean that no (socio-political) inequality exists until it has been claimed to exist – and note that it’s claimed in a boat-rocking kind of way, what the kids these days are calling “disruptive.” The upshot is that equality, itself, can only ever be theoretical because someone somewhere inevitably is and always will be marginalised by the arbitrary decisions of cultural hegemony. Still learning.

Back to the Walking Football analogy: if the rabbit hole of defining a word in the context of those that surround it, then having to define, even further, all those words, and on and on, and experience is inexhaustible, and what’s the point, and lift a glass to nihilism… if that kind of limitless indefinite deconstructive search-and-compare lies at the heart of what is different, then maybe Derrida just found it difficult to reach agreement with other people. It stands to reason that, if he played Walking Football, Derrida might be the worst cheater on the floor, continually running when he should be walking, then denying it just the same as he tried to gain advantage. Maybe, fed up being called a cheater, he would take his ball and go home to play by himself, where no one could say he was wrong. Being alone, after all… who would be there, whether as an obedient player or as a sneaky one, to challenge him?

In fact, maybe that’s why he chose to return to play the next day – for all the arguing, he enjoyed the game, or the attention, or the camaraderie, or the exercise, or whatever, more than being accused of cheating. I wonder if, perhaps, in the great game of philosophy football, he would have been the only rival to strike real fear in Diogenes – I mean awe & respect kind of fear, and I mean if they had lived at the same time. It’s hard to know about Diogenes since nothing he wrote down ever survived, and these days, I doubt more than a few can recall any of whatever he said, besides that lamp-carrying honesty thing. (We should all have such good spirit when it comes to our first principles.) Anyway, I think Diogenes played for Wimbledon.

Well, I am being unkind to Derrida. Evidently, he was a kinder person by nature than I have let on, as well as an advocate for all voices, all people. And the professional care, the uncompromising expertise he took to convey his ideas, to trouble himself with delving down the rabbit hole so arbitrarily – to go down at all but, moreover, to go so far when he might, just the same, have decided to halt. Delve as far as you like, but accept responsibility for your decision, every time. In that respect, how does Derrida differ from any other person facing decisions? Did he have still other motivations? No player who kicks a football is deliberately playing to lose, not unless they have been coerced by someone else to do so. On the other hand, for all I know, maybe what Derrida called red I would call blue. Be careful not to pass the ball to the wrong team! (By the way, in sport, dynasties are remembered precisely because they eventually come to an end.)

Was Derrida no less accountable and open to scrutiny than you, or me, or anybody else? To suggest that a word only makes sense based on how it differs from those around it is no less arbitrary than its reciprocal suggestion: a word only makes sense based on how it describes only what it describes. Half-full / half-empty, a six and two 3s… Two sides of the same coin are still the same coin. Alternatively, who put him up to all this? Meanwhile, on his own, surely Derrida had it within himself, as people do when they reach a point, simply to say, “Here is enough. I decide to stop here. For me, [the item in question] means this.” If that doesn’t ring true and sound like him, well, I’d say that can be just as telling of his character; I heard it suggested, once, how we can be helped in knowing something by what it is not. So, fine – for Derrida to stake the claim called différance, I’m willing to concede him that moment. We all land somewhere, and we’re all hardly alike, even when we’re alike.

We are, each and every one of us, individual. But together we comprise something just as dynamic on a larger scale – one might construe us societally, or perhaps historically, anthropologically, or on and on, in whatever way through whichever lens. For me, différance appears an attempt to speak for all about all, prescriptively. A grand stab at philosophy, no question, and that’s the beauty of the equality of philosophy, with thanks to Rancière: we all have a part to play and a right to respond. For the time being, as I have understood Derrida and his thinking, and I willingly stand to be instructed further, différance strikes me as ironic, being an advocacy for the dynamic development of people and language and culture that self-assuredly asserts its own accuracy. That is not an uncommon indictment of postmodernists. What’s more, it is ohh, so human.

What On Earth Were They Thinking?

How often have you heard somebody question people who lived “back then,” in the swirling historical mist, who somehow just didn’t have the knowledge, the nuance, or the capability that we so proudly wield today?

“Things back then were just a lot more simple.”

“They just weren’t as developed back then as we are today.”

“Society back then was a lot less informed than we are today.”

It’s difficult to even confront such statements out of their context, but where I’ve had all three of these spoken to me in (separate) conversations, I challenged each impression as an insinuation that we’re somehow smarter than all the peoples of history, more skilled, more sophisticated, more aware, more woke (as they say, these days), that we’re, in the main, altogether better than our elders merely for having lived later than they did. These days, apparently, “we’re more evolved” – ha! 🙂  more evolved, that’s always a good one, as if back then everyone was Australopithecus while here we are jetting across the oceans, toting our iPhones, and drinking fine wines.

Well, sure, maybe things have changed since back then, whenever “then” was. But, more typically I’ve found, contemporary judgments levelled upon history are borne of an unintended arrogance, a symptom of 20:20 hindsight and the self-righteous assurance that, today, we’ve finally seen the error – actually, make that the errors – of their ways.

Surely, these days, few – or any – would believe that we’re ignorant or unaccomplished or incapable, not the way someone might say of us while looking back from our future. At any given point on the historical timeline, I wonder whether a person at that point would feel as good about their era, looking back, as any person on some other point of the timeline would feel, also looking back, about theirs. Is it a common tendency, this judgment of contemporary superiority?

These days, we might well feel superior to people who had no indoor plumbing or viral inoculations or Internet access, just as someone earlier would have appreciated, say, some technological tool, like a hydraulic lift to raise heavy objects, or a set of pulleys, or a first-class lever. It really is arbitrary for a person, looking back at history, to feel better about contemporary life because contemporary life infuses all that person’s experience while history’s something that must be learned, at a minimum, second-hand.

I’ll guess that learning ‘history’ means learning whatever has lasted and been passed on because what has lasted and been passed on has been deemed to have merit: we’re taught the history that has been deemed worth remembering. The kinds of things I’ve found to have been deemed worth remembering, i.e. the kinds of things I learned in History class, are the general mood of the times, the disputes and fights that occurred (violent or academic), a select handful of the figures involved, and an inventory of whichever non-living innovations and technologies simultaneously arose alongside all that. If, later, we demerit and no longer pass on the history that lasted up until then, and instead pass on some different history, then that’s entirely indicative of us, now, versus anyone who came before us, and it reflects changed but not necessarily smarter or better priorities and values.

For me, we shouldn’t be saying we’re any smarter or better, only different. So much literature has lasted, so much art. Commerce has lasted, institutions have lasted, so much has lasted. Civilization has lasted. Cleverness, ingenuity, shrewdness, wit, insight, intellect, cunning, wisdom, kindness, compassion, deceit, pretense, honesty, so many many human traits – and they all transcend generations and eras. People vary, but human nature perdures. I’ll trust the experts, far more immersed in specific historical study than me, to identify slow or subtle changes in our traits – hell, I’ll even grant we may have culturally evolved – and I can only imagine how many ways the world is different now as compared to to back then before now. But what does it mean to be better? Better than other people? Really? And who decides, and what’s the measure?

We can measure efficiency, for instance, so to say technology has advanced and is better than before is, I think, fair. Even then, an individual will have a subjective opinion – yours, mine, anybody’s – making culture not proactive and definitive but rather reactive and variable, a reflection, the result of comprised opinions that amplify what is shared and stifle what is not. As we’re taught merited history, you’re almost forced to concur, at least until we reconsider what has merit. That’s a sticking point because everyone will have an opinion on what is culturally better and what is culturally worse. What we call ‘morality’ inevitably differs, and suddenly we have ‘ethical’ debate, which is to say disagreement or even discord over which perspective is ‘right’. But to blithely say a people or culture is better, I think, is too subjective to rationalize and a questionable path to tread that maybe says a little more about the one who said it.

Consider this as well: we each know what we’ve learned, and as individuals, we’ve each learned what we value. But what we’re taught in Culture ‘X’ is what’s broadly valued and, thereby, prescribed for all ‘X’s. We’ve all heard the rather hackneyed epigram, that those who neglect history are doomed to repeat it. But maybe the ones screwing up just didn’t learn the right history to begin with.

I tend to abide by another hackneyed epigram, that they are wisest who know how little they know. And wouldn’t real historical wisdom and real historical understanding mean being able to see and think and understand as people earlier did? But short of firing up the Delorean for an extended visit some place some time, it seems to me that judgments about history are made with an aplomb that might be better aimed at acknowledging our finite limitations. We’re no angels. If anything, this error of judgment speaks volumes about us. Condescension is what it is, but in my opinion, it’s no virtue.

We should hardly be judging the past as any less able or intelligent or kind or tolerant or virtuous as us, especially not if we aim to live up to today’s woke cultural embrace of acceptance. Being different should never be something critiqued; it should be something understood. Conversely, in proportion to how much we know, passing judgment is assumptive, and we all know what Oscar Wilde had to say about assuming (at least, we know if we’ve studied that piece of history). At the very least, we ought to admit our own current assumptions, mistakes, errors, accidents, troubles, disputes, and wars before we pass any judgment on historical ones.

On that positive note, I will say that considering all this has prompted me to notice something maybe more constructive: so often, at least in my experience, what we seemed to study in History class were troublemaking cause-and-effect, bad decisions, and selfishly motivated behaviours. Far more rarely was History class ever the study of effective decision-making and constructive endeavour – maybe the odd time, but not usually.

Maybe my History teachers were, themselves, stifled as products of the system that educated them. What could they do but pass it along to me and my peers? Considering that, I might more readily understand how people, alive today, could conclude that all who came before were simply not as enlightened, not as sophisticated, or not as adept as we are now.

Yet that merely implicates contemporary ignorance… assumptions and mistakes still happen, errors still occur, accidents – preventable or not – haven’t stopped. Troubles and disputes and wars rage on. If the axiom of being doomed to repeat history were no longer valid, we wouldn’t still feel and accept its truthful description, and it would have long ago faded from meaning. All I can figure is that we’re still poor at learning from history – the collective “we,” I mean, not you in particular (in case all this was getting too personal). We need learned people in the right positions at the right times, if we hope to prevent the mistakes of history.

Not enough people, I guess, have bothered to study the branches of history with genuine interest. Or, no, maybe enough people have studied various branches of history, but they don’t remember lessons sharply enough to take them on board. Or, no no, maybe plenty of people remember history, but the circumstances they face are just different enough to tip the scale out-of-favour. Epigram time: history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Or maybe we’re just full of ourselves, thinking that we’ve got it all solved when, evidently, we don’t.

It also dawned on me, considering all this, that high school “History” class influences what many people think about broader “history.” My high school experience, and university too, was mostly a study of politics and geography, and toss in what would be considered very elementary anthropology – all this as compared to those other branches of historical study: archaeology and palaeontology come to mind as detailed, more scientific branches of history, but there are so many – literary history, philosophical history, religious, environmental, military, economic, technological, socio-cultural… on and on they go, so many categories of human endeavour. I’ve even come across a thoughtful paper contemplating history as a kind of science, although one that is normative and susceptible to generational caprice. One final epigram: history is what gets written by the winners, which some will rue, some will ridicule, and some will call “unfair,” but which I will simply acknowledge as what people evidently do.

And that’s really the point here: throughout what we call human history, where we’ve subdivided it so many ways – right down to the perspective of every single person who ever bothered to contribute, if you want to break it down that far – it’s people all the way back, so it’s all biased. So it’s neither complete nor even accurate until you’ve spent oodles of time and effort creating a more composite comprehension of the available historical records. And, dear lord, who has time for that.

History, in that respect, is barely conceivable in its entirety and hardly a thing to grasp so readily as to say, simply, “Back then…” History is people, and lives, and belief inscribed for all time. To know it is to know who lived it as well as who recorded it. Knowing others is empathy, and empathy is a skill trained and fuelled as much by curiosity and diligence as emotion or opinion. p.s. emotion and opinion come naturally and without effort. For me, valid history derives from informed empathy, not the other way around.

As far as recording history for future study… ultimately, it will again have been people recording and studying all of it, “it” being whatever we care to remember and record about what somebody was doing, and “doing” being all of what people were doing to the attract attention of those doing the recording. It’s all a bit cyclical, and completely biased, and someone will always be left out. So people might be forgiven when shaking their heads in judgment of the world “back then” because, without empathy, what else could they possibly know besides themselves?