When my wife and I returned to Canada from a three-year adventure in Colombia, we anticipated educating our children without the drama experienced in Colombia. This silly notion was dispelled with the first meeting at our children’s school. I don’t remember much of what the speaker said but his response to a question from another parent has never left me.
“Mr. Superintendent, I note that our children are no longer required to learn grammar and spelling or even practice arithmetic facts. Why is this?”
“Why would we insist on spelling and grammar and math facts when kids have spell checkers and calculators?” he responded.
“Because otherwise they will be poorly schooled idiots!” I was tempted to yell out.
With a sinking feeling I could see that my wife and I were facing 15 years of warfare with the Calgary public school system. And I was soon to learn that the teaching of history was in even worse shape than that of grammar and arithmetic.
The strength of my conviction of the importance of history is directly related to the length of time that I was ignorant of that history. The great tide of my ignorance began to ebb with my curiosity about the Bosnian War (1992 - 1995). It occurred to me that if I was going to join the chorus calling for the capture of the evil Slobodan Milosevic, I should find out what he did that justified imprisonment. Other than learning that he did nothing to justify imprisonment, the experience taught me that:
· history is complicated and fascinating,
· mastering one aspect of history reveals ten more that you didn’t know existed,
· current events need twenty years of “soak time” to become explainable history,
· if your understanding of history (and the current events that make history) comes from the media then almost everything you think you know about current events and history is wrong.
In the absence of an understanding of history the western press feeds us formulaic, puerile, and monolithic explanations of complex events. They need to make money and explaining current problems by addressing complex history does not make money, so we get what we get. In describing the Ukrainian Holodomor and other Soviet events, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in “The Gulag Archipelago”, states that there is danger in an uninformed population relying on the veracity of the press. Especially when the lies of that press are rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize. The phenomenon of fake news is universal and has been with us for a long time.
Ted Byfield argued from C.S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man) that when John Dewey changed history and geography to “social studies”, public school became a factory for men with no chests. In Byfield’s argument, taken from “Why History Matters”, the purging of history ultimately leads to the end of the civilization that stops studying it. A return to history, according to Byfield, is the antidote to Western decay.
The esteemed Edmund Burke famously stated that “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” We all nod our heads sagely in the face of such wisdom even as we are surprised to learn that Ukraine was not a constituted country until 1994. Mark Twain had a more humorous take on Mr. Burke’s dictum, “History doesn’t repeat itself – at best it sometimes rhymes.” Again, we nod our heads at such sagacity. I prefer the more modern rendition of Simon Wiesenthal, “The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So, information is a defence. Through this we can build, we must build, a defence against repetition.” I think he is right, and, for this reason, we should all learn a bit of history.
This begs the question of why a clever guy like John Dewey would want to destroy history in the classrooms of the nation given that Mr. Wiesenthal thinks that a widespread knowledge of history is a bulwark against crime. What ideology or fountain of cash caused Mr. Dewey to take the pedagogical position that he did? I don’t have an answer for this other than to say that perhaps he was caught up in the progressive spirit that gave us Herbert Marcuse and others of the neo-Marxist, Frankfurt School. According to them, history (and everything else) is open to critical evaluation, and they gleefully deconstructed the foundations of our worldview and society. And fair enough. There are undoubtedly elements to the Western worldview that need some sunlight shone on them. But in criticizing and deconstructing everything in a nihilistic orgy of false virtue rather than identifying and buttressing the cultural virtues, the proponents of critical theory feverishly saw off the philosophical branch upon which they sit. Such intellectual suicide appears more like the narcissism of the ignorant than the perspicacity of the astute.
A friend recently told me that he had joined the local chapter of the Sir Winston Churchill Society and donated to the installation of a public statue of that great man. I won’t reveal where that statue is to be erected because, in the ignorance of today’s overheated rhetoric, it might be immediately pulled down. Using the uninformed logic of today’s club-carrying hivemind, Churchill, “…whoever he was, must have been racist and misogynistic if not also a fascist communist with homophobic tendencies. Off with his statue!”
If Sir John A. MacDonald can be removed from the Victoria City Hall by timid defenders of Canadian democracy, then what hope will Sir Winston have? “Removing a statue is not erasing history”, they said. A good debate can be had about the accuracy of that assertion. Maybe after that debate, instead of removing or canceling him, we would decide to replace a pensive Sir John A. with one of him in stocks so that passersby can throw tomatoes at him in absentia. Let’s be clear. Removal is erasure from which nothing can be learned.
A few days ago, my grandchildren and I came across a pair of baby magpies and, stopping to remark on their cuteness, we were instantly bombarded by the overwrought parents who misinterpreted our positive interest in their babies as a malediction of their continued existence. It occurred to me that this was a metaphor for the social state of Canada. It often seems that the screaming Nazguls of the popular culture are continually divebombing that culture from unexpected directions. “Destroy the thugs of the world! Who are the thugs? Destroy them all! Get an mRNA shot to live! Wait! Better to get five shots to live! If you like truckers, then you are a misogynist or worse. Stop using fossil fuels or the world will burn to a crisp. We need more fossil fuels so that fossil fuels won’t cost so much! If we need more money, we can just print it. Our economy is in the tank because we printed too much money. The government needs to oppressively control our speech to make speech freer. What in the world is happening in Ukraine? Why do I have to line up at 3 am to get a passport?” The weirdness keeps coming at us and just when you think you have one thing figured out, two more things swoop in to drive you crazy. The world has become disorienting.
But O what luck! Disorientation is resolved through understanding history. For example, history is the story of thugs so identifying them is not really that hard to do when we understand the templates that they follow. Significant technology changes are hardly unusual, but they used to take so long that we called them “Ages”. Like the Stone Age or the Bronze Age or the Iron Age. The passage from one Age to another has similar dislocations and opportunities. Printing money to bribe current citizens by letting future generations get economically slaughtered is an old scam. The bankruptcy of France that contributed to the loss of Louis XVI’s head gestated for seventy years following the money printing of John Law. What is happening in Ukraine? We need twenty more years to answer that one but understanding a bit of Ukrainian history will expose who is lying most egregiously today.
History is not just for pinheads. We can better understand today through the lens of yesterday but only if we have access to the lens. Knowing some history doesn’t solve all problems but it reduces the probability of being hoodwinked by our culture’s ever-present charlatans. Maybe we won’t give up our rights so readily if we understand from history what inevitably happens to those who surrender their rights. Perhaps we won’t keep believing the lie that money is free and will finally stop governments from robbing the future to bribe the present. I hope we are quicker to follow that money before accepting that “we are all in this together”. Also, a bit more definition around “flattening the curve” and “two weeks” is well advised. It would be nice if we demanded that the science be demonstrated before we bow down before it.
Maybe I am arguing that history will render us cynical. But a dose of historical cynicism is the antidote to the fatuities of governments, despots, and our elite “betters”. By becoming an historically informed audience, we will be less likely to be serial victims of our oppressors. I am sick of being the perennial Charlie Brown to our government’s Lucy. If we all know some history, it will increase the chances that she will finally hold the blasted football. It is time to stop the attack on our cultural foundations by those who would be our gods without the nicety of asking our permission. It is enough already. We start this reversal by teaching our children and grandchildren – and ourselves - some history.