"Those who cannot remember the past..." just make it up
The Role of "Convenient History"
Recent events got me thinking about this classic quote from George Santayana from 1905:
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
When I searched Google to get the citation right, I learned that Rene Magritte used the quote as the title for a piece in his series Great Ideas of Western Man.
Ideas repeat themselves unless steps are taken to address them. We studied Watergate to understand what allowed the Nixon White House to go after its enemies. We then took steps to create guardrails to protect against those. With the passage of time, those guardrails are weakened or simply ignored. And now we have stories about massive government modifications a potential Trump administration would put in place to obliterate them in service of a unitary executive (“Article II Powers”).
Santayana’s warning gave birth to podcasts like Rachel Maddow’s Deja News. She and her collaborator have explored the ways in which the Oath Keepers sedition trial reflects an earlier era of seditious conspiracy or the parallels between the busing of migrants to Northern Cities with actions taken in response to the Freedom Summers of the 1960s.
The current advocacy of Christian Nationalism and White Replacement Theory have remarkable parallels to anti-Catholic sentiment in the immigration fights of the early 20th century. Alabama’s refusal to conform to the recent Supreme Court decision declaring their redistricting unconstitutional has echoes of the nullification steps taken in the years leading up to the Civil War.
As Cylon #6 says in Battlestar Gallactica1, “All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.”
As much as this national forgetfulness causes us ongoing trouble, we’re seeing the beginnings of something much worse: Rewriting history to fit current political needs.
We’ve had subtle versions of this for a long time. Think of David Barton and his Wallbuilders group and the insistence that the Founding Fathers were somehow evangelical Christians, which has been rebuked by real historians who study the Founding. Think of the Lost Cause mythology that suggests that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery and that the Stars and Bars or Confederate monuments are about pride and not racism.
The newest versions of this Invented History are much more blatant. So we have Ron DeSantis defending claims from his Board of Education that many in slavery actually learned valuable skills that benefitted them in later life2. Critics have observed that many of those used as examples in the learning standards had grown up in free families. In today’s Washington Post, Gillian Brockell noted that many slaves were already skilled when stolen from Africa.
Then there’s the attempt by Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Education Ryan Walters to argue that the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was not about race but was the simply the actions of individual racists. Because his opposition to Critical Race Theory doesn’t allow him to argue that whites attacked blacks because of the color of their skin, he argues that it was because they were evil individuals doing bad things.
Not to be left out, RFK, Jr., argues that maybe the polio vaccine was a problem and that “we need to look at the science” or that SSRIs are behind school shootings or that water treatment is making young people trans.
A remarkable version of this imagined history that also involves Santayan’s quote has to do with the conservative argument that the military has become Woke. They suppose that attempts at diversity within the armed services somehow weakens military readiness. This, of course, ignores important facts. Namely, that an all volunteer army has depended upon a larger percentage of underrepresented segments of American society for decades and that understanding those different groups and seeing their leadership reflect the lower ranks significantly enhances morale, cohesion, and readiness.
Not so, they cry: “We can’t have our military involved in social experiments!” Such sentiments are accompanied by memes of a shirtless Putin or other foreign fighters (who look like something out of that horrible DeSantis video clip).
But we know that actually the military engaged in one of the great social experiments of the Twentieth Century when President Truman issued Executive Order 9981 ending segregation in the military. This action had a far greater effect than something like Brown v. Board of Education because it could make the change at the federal level and allowed many in the post-WWII period see that diversity was a public good.
In times past, we forgot the lessons of history and therefore had to deal with issues when they recurred. Today, people are pretending the past never happened because it’s inconvenient to address it. Or they are inventing history that didn’t happen (JFK, Jr. didn’t die!). Or they are creating ideas that allow them to demonize their opponents (teachers are groomers, the elites are drinking adrenochrome!).
I’m searching for an encouraging way to end this piece but I’m struggling. Our lack of a shared history or definition of current reality makes it remarkably difficult to know how to push back against these trends.
Good journalism would call out these excesses. Informed voters would punish history deniers at the polls. Social scientists would share what they’ve learned in their research and teaching with the public at large.
But Cylon #6 may have been right after all. It’s happened before and it will happen again. At least until we start learning from the past.
Which was taken from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
See, it wasn’t all bad!