Why we study Western Civ

Public Interest, Wntr, 2005 by Steven Ozment

A FEW years ago, I gave a talk to an audience in a small German town based on a book I had written about a prominent but dysfunctional family that had lived there 450 years earlier. When asked how I came upon and researched this story, I described a three-year period in which I spent fully as many waking hours reading and pondering the remains of my sixteenth-century subjects as I did in dealing with my daily life in present-day America. The next morning the headline over my photograph in the local newspaper read: "This is a Man From the Sixteenth Century." Although not such for the local journalist, certainly for a historian there could not have been a greater compliment!

History is every civilization's clinical record of human nature and behavior, for which reason it has always been cautionary and problem-solving for subsequent generations. We study the past not to avoid repeating it but to learn how previous generations survived the same mistakes we make. Historians worthy of the name have an ability to live imaginatively in the past as fully as they do in the present. In doing so they are chameleon-like, but not for the purpose of camouflage and deceit. Only by such abstraction can they become knowing insiders in worlds that no longer exist. In this regard, historians are people with dual or multiple citizenship, only their second and third countries are past civilizations and distant ages.

Who needs history?

The historian's natural enemy is people who know, and want only to know, their own immediate culture, which they accept as a supreme measure of humankind. It is the civic duty of historians to remind their fellow citizens that they are neither the first nor necessarily the most interesting people to have walked the earth, and that nations that lead their lives as if they were have often suffered terrible consequences.

Today, the distant past is a neglected vital resource. History fills comparatively fewer shelves in local bookstores and libraries, and the history that is most prominent there is about familiar subjects within our contemporary culture. Of the 16 books on the mid June 2004, New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, only two were history, both well-worn American (Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton and Cokie Roberts' Founding Mothers), while Dan Gordon's record-breaking misty fiction, The Da Vinci Code, led all categories of adult reading by wide margins. History majors in American colleges and universities overwhelmingly show a similar sensibility. Over the last three years only 20 percent of history majors at Harvard University enrolled in a field-specific tutorial in premodern history (ancient, medieval, or early modern history). For the other 80 percent, the world began in the more comfortable nineteenth century.

A major reason for such provinciality is the pervasive belief that the past is a benighted world of superstition and prejudice, or, less threatening, a world of fantasy and romance, in either case no proper guide for an emancipated modern age. "Bunk" was Henry Ford's famous word for it. Today, history is another word for dead and gone--"toast," as it is said--and any who think it a Rosetta Stone for their civilization risk irrelevance and scorn.

In casting about recently for the right venues for a book tour, my publicist was repeatedly told that "current events," not history, is what audiences want: talking heads and familiar faces, not the ponderous minds of strangers. "Current events" means today's business (national politics, foreign affairs, and popular culture), issues connected with the recent presidential election, an exit from Iraq, and Hollywood's latest. Having become society's most trusted guides, the present and the future, the one ephemeral, the other imaginary, effectively block a long perspective on our times from the distant past.

This, of course, is not a new problem for Americans. Woodrow Wilson, who was a professor and president at Princeton University before becoming the twenty-eighth president of the United States, blamed the historical illiteracy of his contemporaries on "a certain great degeneracy" born of misplaced trust in science:

   We believe in the present and in the future more than in the past,
   and deem the newest theory of society the likeliest. This is the
   disservice scientific study has done us; it has given us agnosticism
   in the realm of philosophy and scientific anarchism in the field of
   all politics. It has made the legislator confident that he can create
   and the philosopher sure that God cannot. Past experience is
   discredited and the laws of matter are supposed to apply to spirit
   and the makeup of society.

There have been times, however, when people believed "today" to be the last day to date in the history of human civilization, a profound legacy of baggage and proven ways. Our age is not one of them. "Today" has rather become the first day of the rest of one's life: an untrammeled fresh start, endlessly experimental, and with little need to look back. The longest shelves in local bookstores and libraries are filled with fiction, self-help, and current events (mostly the lives and politics of American leaders)--immediate, self-referential information serving personal amusement and struggle.