Usually I avoid waxing philosophical and stuff, and I leave all of that to my brother at his blog, but I've had a couple thoughts about history rattling around in my head for a couple of weeks, so I decided to toss it onto e-paper with some e-ink. Kenny might also be able to inform me that this post is, in fact, not philosophy. Feel free to do so, Brother!
I was thinking a couple of weeks ago, and I came up with the startling realization that history and religion are not too different. My inspiration for these thoughts comes from this video here where Hank talks about beliefs and religion. (A response from Hank's brother, John, is here, and I found it well worth watching.) Hank's video made me think about the difference between faith and knowledge. A good definition for faith for us today is "firm belief in something for which there is no proof." As for knowledge, I'll be talking about "information and skills acquired through experience or education."
I would think that most would agree that religion is generally based on faith. Those who believe in God generally have their reasons to do so as do those who don't believe in God. In the Bible (Hebrews 11:6, for those who care), it says "And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him." To me, this sounds like God understands that sometimes humans won't "know" but will instead "believe."
What does this have to do with history? I think that history may be more like religion in regards to being faith-filled. It seems to me that much of our historical knowledge is hardly knowledge. Certainly, there is probably not too much false about birth records, death records, and other official records. But all of us who dutifully went through K-12 education are grateful that our history books were not simply filled with records. There was an awful lot of humanity in those books which must have come from more than official recorded documents! (Correct me if I'm wrong. I majored in math, not history, but from what I've looked up online, and it looks to me like many primary and secondary resources are used to shape our understanding of history.) What we receive from peoples' writings is hardly an impartial, complete view of what has happened in our past. People tend to leave out details and exaggerate. We write through a filter of our own understandings and beliefs. Even as we read the newspapers today, we don't believe what's coming out of them. Yet perhaps in 500 years, people will be flipping through yellowed papers from today to decide what is and is not true about the people of 2011.
Thus, my knowledge of history becomes faith. I'm not trying to challenge the ideas of the existence of The Boston Tea Party, the Civil War or Auschwitz. However, I am acknowledging that my knowledge (Nay! Beliefs!) might not be spot on.
I have thought of a few interesting applications of this new view of a faith-filled history. First of all, it explains part of why we romanticize. Whether it be die-hard conservatives giving their all to return us to the splendor of the revolution (ignoring the existence of slavery), hopeless romantics who dream of the wonderful world of Jane Austen (despite the fact that during this time marriage was a business matter for the "haves" and do you really want to be a "have-not" during the early 1800s?), and people like me who perhaps dream of the days of Laura Ingalls Wilder when people had less and grew food (although they were riddled by illnesses curable today, and not all people lived in a small log cabin like the Wilders). We take our "knowledge" and turn it into support for our firm beliefs that those days were "the good old days." And perhaps it leaves us yearning for a nonexistent past instead of dealing with the reality of the future.
Another interesting application is of course the fact that we may gather only facts that we wish to believe from the past to form our historical repertoire. No wonder there is such a fuss about who gets to write the textbooks for out K-12 schools! It is so easy to take texts out of context or establish beliefs about history without any reliable source or reasoning. It is also very easy to brush aside the ugly stuff about people or an era so that we can use those people or that era to support our ideas. Politics these days, anybody? I highly doubt that we'll make real ground on a some issues (like the optimal size of government) for awhile because we all just have different historical faiths.
Of course, faith in history can go to the extremes just like in religion. How about the Birthers' beliefs that Obama was not born in the U.S.? How about the idea that President George W. Bush was in on the plan to attack our country on 9/11? Or how about Palin's recent recounting of Paul Revere's ride that strongly seems to indicate that the ride was, in fact, a lot about the second amendment (despite its nonexistence at the time)? (I'm sorry to bring Sarah Palin into my blog. I think she gets enough attention as it is, but her fantastic faith in our history struck me, and I couldn't imagine not fitting it into this post.)
Perhaps all of this was always obvious to you, but it really clicked with me in the past couple of weeks how history adds to the mess of humanity. Mind you, I think that history is important and worthwhile. (The mess of religion hasn't seemed to stop me from partaking, no?) However, I can understand better why we fight so much politically. History seems to be a lot of faith. It seems that it is very easy to not get along when faith is involved.
Friday, A Decade Later
2 years ago
6 comments:
One branch of philosophy, called epistemology, deals with knowledge, what we can know, how we know things, and the like. So, this post does indeed seem philosophical. I talked a bit about epistemology in my comment on this blog post http://elfarmywrites.blogspot.com/2011/06/focusing-on-wrong-details.html which was also inspired by Hank's vlog, how coincidental!
Anyway, one of my favorite things to say to atheists is that we have about the same evidence that the 1920's occurred as we do for God's existence, so we are all just taking things on faith.
Ooops, forgot Blogger doesn't hyperlink URL's, you can go to the blog post I mention above using this link.
I think Hank did say something about epistemology, now that you mentioned it. Yay Philosophy!
Thanks for the link. It was also interesting for me to see what another person got out of Hank's video. Plus, then I got to learn about epistemology in your comment. Win-win.
Hey Karen, Kenny directed me to your post as well, and...I love it. There's all of those historical urban legends and the romanticization of Columbus and such, and I've had so many contradicting things taught to me at different times in my schooling that it's kind of difficult to really "know."
However, as for Kenny's favorite thing to say to atheists...I would argue that the existence of God is based in metaphysics, while the events of the 1920s are grounded in types of things we know without a doubt to be physically possible. No one (or at least very few) would argue that one of my family's two pianos wasn't made in 1919, because we can look up the piano equivalent of an ISBN online and see that it is registered as having been made then and a piano company was in business and so on. We know piano companies can and do exist. God is more of an issue of either you believe or you don't, and there's about the same amount of evidence both ways.
So when trying to distinguish fact from fiction in history, I go by what I think is more likely. I'm inclined to believe Columbus was partially responsible for the deaths of a lot of Native Americans, because the rest of history agrees that a lot of European colonists did such things.
You bring up the idea of "evidence" which I think I managed to avoid in my post. :) It's another really great part of history (and religion), and I personally think that it certainly should be considered! Perhaps we'd do better as a society if we demanded some amount of reasonable evidence to support claims, but that is a different topic...
Of course, evidence can be subjective just as it is in a court trial. Given the same evidence, different jurors may reach a different conclusion.
I hope that most people go by what they think is most likely in the way that you described! However, by working with mountains of mathematics students, I have learned that there are a ton of ways that humans are wired with logic, and it is with this logic that a person will decide what is "likely" and "reasonable". Yet another reason to not be surprised that we can't all just agree and get along. ;)
Thanks for the comment!
I can look the world up online and find out that it was created by God, yet you expect me to trust your piano?
In my opinion the difference between the 1920's and God is that the 1920's don't really have any serious competing theories. I mean, even I, who acknowledge how ridiculously tenuous our information about the 1920's is, am willing to accept that they happened without really questioning it. Admittedly, I question whether we should be sure of it, but I don't really have an alternative I'd like to propose.
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