History Lesson

I got another lesson in un-history yesterday. That is, I learned - again - that something I'd been taught in school to believe as fact was a complete (and recent) fiction. However, that this fiction has become fact in our culture marks it as myth, or sacred story. Our attachment to the hard line between history as true and myth as false shadows the real truth - that stories have power, regardless of how many facts they contain, for the people that repeat them.

George Santayana, a Spanish essayist and philosopher, wrote, "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."(1906) This phrase has spawned many paraphrased versions, such as:

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.
Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.

Consider for a moment the source of this quote - particularly in light of the phrase, "as among savages." Who is telling this story? How does he define "progress"? What combination of rank, culture, economics, race, age, epoch, etc. informed his writing?

History is very different from "the past." History is a written account of events by those who are still around to write them, i.e., history is written by conquerors. The spin doctors who seem so transparent today create history by repeating their account again and again. The account that sticks, that lasts through centuries, is the one that best serves those in power. If you are not a member of the power elite, or their followers, your account - regardless of how factual it is - gets lost in the mob mentality of sound bites and spin. Even Shakespeare, a man of rather mythic proportions today, participated in political spin when he cast Richard the III as a monster to validate Henry IV's usurption of the throne via murder.

Many power minority groups have been accused of "revisionist" history; indeed, such a claim may well be made about the previous example. And they say it as if it's a bad thing. Well, as far as history being an account of and by the winners of power struggles, I guess it could be. Re-visioning, taking another look at, the past more often than not shows that history is fabricated for very specific, likely political, ends. It is an edifice built to show off how superior the winners are, how they couldn't help but wrest power, land, money, culture, etc. away from "savages," malcontents, and monsters. If more facts got out, if others got to repeat their accounts, it would likely be bad for those "winners."

So, if you seek to stop repeating history, re-member the past. Put back together the events, people, and times that were ripped apart to feed propaganda and power elites. And the best place to start is with re-membering, very honestly and authentically, your own past by getting around and behind the history you've written about it in your own mind and life. "As within, so with out" - as you re-vision and re-member your past, and share this process with those close to you, the more free we can all be from history.

**The new re-visionist story I learned was that no one in Europe believed the world was flat when Columbus set sail. Everyone had known for centuries the world was round. The story about Columbus defying sages who thought the world was flat was written by Washington Irving in the 19th Century. Again, consider the source...