We Have Been Taught…

This July 4th seems as good a day as any other to reflect upon the nature of history—whose it is and who’s depicted in it? Who tells the story and why?

This is from the introduction to anthropologist Eric Wolf’s book, titled Europe and the People Without History:

“We have been taught, inside the classroom and outside of it, that there exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and civilization independent of and in opposition to other societies and civilizations. Many of us even grew up believing that this West has a genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Wolf wrote that in 1982! It’s an absolutely brilliant book and it captures exactly what’s wrong with how we look at history, as if it can be bottled into little isolated people and wars and empires, with each of them a tidy sequence of pleasant little cause-and-effect linkages with no surprises at all. A nice assurance that some people have history and others don’t.

That sequence of begats is a mantra in praise of the political triumph of the west over everyone else. If we don’t get to see how complicated humans are and always have been, then it’s easy to suggest that the winners in recent history somehow deserved to win. Also that only one version of the human story is possible.

You’d think we’d be over this simplistically linear and incomplete view of the past. Not so. In two countries I can lay claim to, the US and India, we find politicians who don’t want students in secondary schools to get a whiff of that complexity. Instead they like the “begat” version, whichever particular set of begats they may choose to push. History, alas, doesn't play out that way. Lying about it won’t help future generations.