I deliberately don’t post about politics because I don’t like confrontation but remaining completely silent makes me part of the problem. I don’t have allegiance to a particular political party, although there is currently one that I would never vote for. This is not a political post but it certainly touches on current affairs. When I was interviewed for college, part of the interview process was to write an essay on ‘why study history?’. I don’t really remember what I wrote; it was the 1970s, I know I mentioned the Irish troubles. We need to understand history because we need to learn from it. It is no coincidence that George Santayana’s quote, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfil it’, is on my home page. History is getting increasingly squeezed from the school curriculum. It is seen as being more relevant in today’s world to study computing, business studies, robotics and other subjects that were unimaginable in my school days. Don’t get me wrong, that knowledge is important but so is having a world in which to utilise that knowledge.
The human race seems to be rapidly losing the critical thinking skills that come with studying history properly. We need to be able to seek out proper evidence, we need to understand the role of propaganda and the power and danger of the megalomaniac. We need to be able to sift the truth from the distortions of the truth and downright lies that abound. There has always been propaganda and misinformation but in today’s digital world, that spreads so much faster and so much further than ever before. People believe what they read in the biased popular press and on social media. They fail to realise that some news output is not balanced and impartial but is presenting a partisan and misleading view that suits a particular political purpose. Whereas, in a pre-digital age, people were only likely to pass this rhetoric on by word of mouth, now mis-information can be passed on to thousands at the click of a button.
There are unthinking family historians following the shaky green leaves and believing impossible relationships, which they graft on to their family trees. These family trees get copied and replicated and before long, the weight of ‘evidence’ is in favour of something nonsensical. This is non-evidence; where is the source of that information? In the great scheme of things, if someone gets their family tree wrong, that does not have serious consequences. Believing other kinds of mis-information is potentially much more serious and downright dangerous. Daily, I hear or read friends and acquaintances spout or write ‘facts’ that two minutes checking would prove to be false, even if their common sense has failed to ring warning bells. The keyboard warriors don’t bother to fact check, ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people believe this, so it must be so. At a time when information has never been more accessible, we are nonetheless drowning in a sea of ignorance.
The world is currently a terrifying place. I hate watching or reading the news because I, like many, am fearful, not just for myself but for my family, my friends and a world that seems to be rapidly slipping from our hands. We seem to be rapidly evolving into a society where humans are no longer humane. What has happened to that sane world, where the majority of people are kind, are caring, are empathetic. I am not a psychologist, although I did study psychology as part of my undergraduate degree. I have however spent more than fifty years studying the people of the past, trying to understand their behaviour, their motivations and why they made the life decisions that they did. One thing that studying history has taught me is that there have always been periods of crisis or near crisis. There have always been threats to democracy and to the status quo. There have always been individuals who have risen up to take advantage of people’s fears and who have the personality to gather followers around them, largely by latching on to one or two issues that chime with certain sections of that community in fear.
By studying history, I have observed how humans behave when they are under threat. That might be a threat of conflict from an ‘enemy’ (real or perceived), a threat of poverty at a time of dwindling resources, a threat of epidemic, of famine or of natural disaster. Humans find it difficult to cope with threats and the stress that it causes, particularly if it is unremitting, ongoing stress. Studies of those who, for example, have suffered from long term domestic abuse, or who have spent prolonged periods in a combat zone, have discovered how detrimental that stress can be both physically and mentally. As a species, we cope best with stress if we can identify the cause and lay the blame for that stress with an outsider. If the threat is perceived to come from someone not like us, it is easier to cope with than a threat from within. Who the people ‘not like us’ are has varied over the centuries. We blame the people not like us even if all logic suggests it cannot be so. In 1348, in England, Jews were blamed for the plague. It was obvious that these people not like us were poisoning the water. Except of course the Jews had been expelled from this country in 1290. We are still guilty of applying such warped ‘logic’ in order to blame people not like us for the things that we fear today.
This is not a political post because I am not brave enough. I have friends and acquaintances who do not think as I do and I am not robust enough to engage in acrimonious debate. I am selfishly wanting peace and quiet in a world where there is no peace and quiet. I am cheered by the knowledge that there are those who do sift the evidence and seek the truth and many of you reading this will be amongst them but we tend to be the quiet ones. I watch people being drawn in by bombast and rhetoric and ‘information’ that has no foundation. I see people following leaders because one aspect of what that leader spouts feeds into their fears. They do not look beyond the loud headlines and the single issues to wonder about the polices that might underline those particular political stances. They do not think of the practicalities involved, of how what is being spouted might be achieved, if indeed there is a coherent, workable plan. They do not consider how what results from these viewpoints might impact on other aspects of all our daily lives.
Many of my followers are family historians or authors who carefully research their books. Some of you are here because I occasionally post about travel, about gardening, or special needs. Whoever you are and whyever you are here, please, please for the sake of us all, try to persuade those around you to look beyond the bombast and the catch all headlines, to look beyond the appeal to their underlying fears and analyse what is being said. To look beyond the propaganda to seek the facts. Think about what some of these policies will mean, both for us and for the people not like us. If we are the strong, we need to stand up for the weak, for those who have no voice. Let us work towards returning to a world where empathy and compassion, for each other and for people not like us, are no longer derided but are seen as core human values to be sought after and lauded. If that makes me woke, or whatever the current derisory term is, then I am very proud to be so.
Normal service, with posts in a lighter vein, will resume shortly, as long as there’s a world that will continue to allow me to do so. I’ve included a picture to lighten your day.
The History Interpreter - Janet Few 