History is Imperfect
I have either been making history (a few times, as shown in the autobiography that opens this blog), writing history (master’s and doctoral theses, published articles), teaching history (35 years, college and university levels) or learning about history for most of my life. The most important thing that the study of history has taught me from day one is how incredibly imperfect everything that happens truly is. There is just nothing in this world that ever works out the way that people think that it ought to have worked out.
To start with, history is imperfect because everyone who communicates historical information necessarily follows some particular interpretation of events, whether in oral form, written form or any other form (such as film or photos). No human being is capable of transmitting any kind of narrative whatsoever without introducing some kind of personal bias. And it really does not matter what the subject is: universal history, cultural history, national, regional or local history, the history of many people, a few people or just one person.
This applies even to those few professional historians who try very hard to avoid any sort of prejudice and who voluntarily submit their work to the judgment of their (extremely critical) peers. It applies even more ardently to those other egotistical professionals who are convinced that theirs is the only possible interpretation that makes any sense. Not to mention the millions of journalists and other amateur historians of all kinds whose output varies in its degree of honesty from one individual to another.
But the more important point is the fact that the imperfection of history completely demolishes and discredits every attempt that proselytizers are always making to convert everyone to the one true belief, whether religious or otherwise. These people, innocently unaware of their own hypocrisy, think that everyone who does not support their obviously correct point of view is being biased and ideological, but not them. This peculiar attitude shows up not only in the often incoherent ramblings of fundamentalist sects, whether religious or political, but also in the official discourse of powerful politicians and investors representing currently dominant ideologies.
Today’s leading ideology is based on faith in democracy, as if the popular majority was truly in power, instead of the infinitesimally small plutocracy that really runs the only theoretically democratic part of the world. These false democrats pretend to be ruling an international community of several dozen supposedly enlightened nation states, practicing free enterprise, free trade and all the other attributes of officially sanctioned neoliberalism and libertarianism. But they are just as supremely unaware of any possible contradiction between reality and their own peculiar ideological amalgam as any extremist professing the absolute and literal truth of whatever absurd, totalitarian concoctions that they may have themselves invented.
Since everyone necessarily possesses a particular ideology, whether marginal or hegemonic, no honest historian can ever completely support any particular side in any particular debate, over anything at all. Moreover, since history is the study of everything that took place in the past and the past is everything that is not happening right now, or in the unforeseeable future, then no honest person can ever accept at face value any particular point of view about any possible phenomenon that has ever existed. It makes no difference whatever whether or not the historical discourse being analyzed is very recent or really ancient; all human discourse is necessarily biased. The truly intelligent and aware people among us are those who admit that no matter when or where they occur, “the facts” are always ideological constructions and no perfect description of reality is ever possible.
The domain in which this shows up in the most obvious way is in the study of geopolitics. For example, probably the geopolitical topic most often referenced since the Second World War is the never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine. It is also one of the most emotional issues that has ever been debated. Every single entity involved in that conflict, such as the state of Israel itself, the different political factions within Israel, all the Palestinian factions and movements that have sprung up over the years, the other Arab countries, the other Muslim countries, the USA, the Christian Zionists, and every other country, political and religious organization in the world, has its own particular take on that conflict. Unfortunately, all of those “takes” are necessarily erroneous, although some of them may certainly be closer to reality than others. As a result, there is no way that any honest observer could thoroughly support one side or the other in that conflict, or any other conflict, without committing some kind of egregious error. Any either/or approach (“you are either for us or against us”) is necessarily ridiculous.
Most observers invariably get all caught up in the specific predicates of any such conflict. No one ever likes to admit that every possible point of view on anything is necessarily erroneous, in one way or another. There are dozens of reasons why some people support Israel and dozens of reasons why other people support Palestine, but none of them take into account the true interests of all the real people directly involved. In an ideal world, both peoples would be able to live together and prosper peacefully in a harmonious, honest, binational state, but no sane person could possibly believe that such a perfect solution could ever really come into being. None of the sides really wants that to happen, ever.
Human societies never work in any utopian way, and every side in every conflict is always corrupted by circumstances and never proceeds in an ideal fashion. During the Cold War, for example, the officially democratic countries fought against the totalitarian communist menace by allying themselves with over a hundred ultra right-wing military dictatorships spread out all over the world. Which meant that though the self-proclaimed democracies did often function in a somewhat more democratic way inside their own countries than the authoritarian countries did, they were not really promoting democracy as a principle. Since every single ideological conflict in the world is now and always has been corrupted by such dubious alliances, one wonders whether or not any of the leaders of human institutions ever truly believe in their own propaganda. Most of the time, ideological principles are used in the same cynical way as commercial advertising, to sell products and ideas, and after the sale is accomplished are not considered to have any intrinsic value whatsoever.
It makes no difference either whichever geopolitical conflict is being analyzed. In today’s Middle East (North Africa and Western Asia), besides Israel and Palestine, there are dozens of similar conflicts and all the other regions in the world have or have had hundreds of other examples to offer. Wherever and whenever political, economic, social or cultural groupings of people gather themselves into any sort of collective entity, each definable group will always try to degrade or to defeat the aspirations and the activities of any rival group. The separating process that succeeds in splitting human beings into rival groups leads each gang of insiders to invent its own particular systems of identification that deliberately make it impossible to find common ground with any of the outsider groups.
Throughout the centuries, in every different region, all sorts of human groupings have competed with each other for the right to exist and once they achieved that right they inevitably sought domination over all the others. Using only recent examples, whether this process takes place at a global level for world domination (the USA, Russia, China, etc.), regional domination (Germany in Europe, Brazil in Latin America, India in South Asia, etc.) or local domination (the UK versus Scotland, Canada versus Quebec, the Hutus versus the Tutsis in Rwanda or Burundi), makes no difference. Every geopolitical or cultural entity is only interested in its own advancement, whenever it becomes stronger, or its own survival, whenever it becomes weaker. In every case, might makes right: the winning side gets to write the official history of every conflict, unless or until the losing side somehow manages to make a comeback and become the new winning side.
Changing the parameters of the conflict makes no difference either. It does not matter in which particular period of history any conflict has taken place, nor in which domain of human intercourse. Tribal rivalries, religious divisions, conflict between the social classes, are all just as complicated and corrupted by opportunism as any of the geopolitical clashes. Today’s regional wars, like those in the past, are always characterized by all sorts of shifting alliances, making it impossible for anyone, including fundamentalist sects, to legitimately claim any kind of purity whatsoever. History makes every conflict dirty and disgusting, with the result that some of the world’s most fanatic purifiers, such as today’s Islamic State movement, often turn out to be nothing but counter-gangs, or agents provocateurs, under the occult control of external forces. For that reason, no one involved in any conflict can ever be truly certain about what he or she is truly fighting for, or against.
This is why it is so ridiculous for true believers to proclaim that their particular ideology is somehow more sacred than all the rival beliefs. Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Confucianist or any other kind of religious fundamentalists always treat their own founding texts as literal truth of universal significance, descending onto the earth from some ethereal source. But historical analysis of all those texts always determines that none of them were ever revealed all at once by any (non-existent) higher entity and were in fact always the product of centuries of change and dispute between competing religious and geopolitical forces within their respective regions.
Every supposedly sacred text has in reality been altered hundreds of times to reflect the historical evolution of each host society. In exactly the same complicated way that any theoretically non religious, merely political ideologies, have also evolved over time. Anyone who has ever read anything about the evolution of conservative, liberal, nationalist or socialist ideas knows something about the extremely convoluted process by which ideological orthodoxies come into being. The development of the Marxist ideology is an excellent example of such a process, with its constant divisions between competing varieties of democratic and totalitarian socialists. In the end, the currently accepted versions of the Bible or the Koran are in fact no more sacred than the collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Stalin, or even the compiled quotations from Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book”.
But none of this leveling off of competing religions and ideologies into so many separate forms of human discourse means that people are obliged to give in to moral indifference, or ambiguity. Just because no single interpretation of history has any kind of monopoly on the truth, just because every set of ideas is always corrupted and compromised by being mixed up with all the other sets of ideas, does not mean that people should just reject all possible interpretations of reality in a relativist way. Principles guiding thought and action should still be put forward and argued even though no one can honestly expect any of them to necessarily prevail in the real world.
As anyone reading my blog already knows, I also have my own set of such principles, that I share in some cases with millions of other people. For example, I favor complete social equality between men and women, rather than any forms of male chauvinism, whether blatantly proclaimed or hypocritically disguised. Unfortunately, though some parts of the world managed to go quite a distance toward feminist emancipation in relatively recent times, we now live in a period of almost universal regression. More and more men are moving back to an antediluvian attitude toward women, if they ever abandoned it in the first place.
This has become obvious not only in extreme examples like most parts of India but also among native peoples in Canada as well as within the National Football League in the USA. In most such instances, cultural relativism is being used to camouflage such atavism, including the many cases in which women themselves identify with their aggressors (the Stockholm syndrome), such as in deliberately wearing either far too much or far too little clothing in public. In every case where women are being mistreated, it does not do any good to denounce sexism only on the part of dominant countries, or cultural majorities, or social classes, or even, in the case of the Stockholm syndrome, only among men. Equal opportunity denunciation also requires that sexist attitudes be attacked wherever they appear, in every country, every cultural community and every social class. Religious fundamentalism, cultural isolationism and social degradation are not acceptable excuses for rotten behavior of the sexist variety, any more than psychotic levels of egoism in all the world’s toxic personalities are acceptable excuses either.
Another principle that I particularly favor is secularism, based on the complete separation of church and state. In today’s complicated societies, allowing any one religion to get closer to state power than any of the others is thoroughly disgusting. This principle is also quite useful for women’s liberation, since women are invariably the main targets of the kind of religious exaggeration now known as social conservatism. But freedom of religion is almost useless if it is not accompanied by freedom from religion, for everyone who so chooses. Unfortunately, once again it seemed for a time that many more enlightened countries were gradually replacing belief in mythical mystifications with a more scientific approach, but recently the trend has turned in the opposite direction. People are now combining religion with individualism by cherry-picking whatever mystical concepts they choose to adopt, making a total mockery of every established corpus of belief. Even many scientific communities, originally founded on a firm rejection of belief in any concept that cannot be verified by observation or experience, are now letting religious concepts in through the back door, thereby severely undermining their own credibility.
Another one of my chosen principles is the refusal to accept enormous differences in social equality. Once again, there was a tendency not so long ago among many enlightened countries to gradually reduce the gap between the social classes, whereas nowadays this has been replaced by the neoliberal tendency to greatly increase that gap. This is another extremely dangerous trend that has even been denounced by some establishment thinkers as threatening any future expansion of the world economy. To be sure, promoting social equality too much, to the extent, for example, of giving the same mark to every student during a semester is ridiculous, but the 30 million to one gap between daily incomes in today’s world borders on the insane. Nothing good can ever come from the adoption of the so-called Haitian model, in which billions of ultra-poor people are forced to sacrifice their lives to please a small handful of ultra-rich people. Extremely high levels of corruption are the inevitable result, as in India where it seems that an incredible 97% of the total population (1.4 billion people) is forced to scrounge for a living outside the formal economy!
A related principle that I have tackled in my master’s and doctoral theses, as well as in my published articles and my political activity, was distilled from a long-term study of the troubled relations between economic nationalism and economic liberalism. Those studies led me to firmly reject the ideological premise of libertarianism, to the effect that individual control of everything, most particularly the economy, is somehow necessarily superior to collective control. This premise is based on the egotistical mania of toxic personalities, who use an appeal for individual freedom as a cover for their own elitist domination of the supposedly inferior underlings who, according to them, were born only to serve their superior interests. They claim that the enormous corruption of all public bodies over the centuries has been caused by their collective nature, deliberately obscuring the fact that all public corruption has a private origin, whether in the United States of America, the People’s Republic of China or any other place. In reality, corruption is not at all confined to either individual or collective causes, and is much more universal than any of the world’s religions or political ideologies.
A further, very basic, principle is the need to uphold the integrity of the natural environment. People all over the world are now tolerating extremely high levels of pollution much too willingly, particularly in newly industrialized countries like China but also in richer countries like Canada, in which the conservative government has steadfastly refused for the past eight years to observe any environmental standards whatsoever. According to the Canadian government, the 47 people who died last year in the village of Lac Mégantic when a petroleum train blew up were killed only by the negligence of individual workers and not at all by the total absence of federal regulation of the devil-may-care railway and petroleum industries. The world’s largest polluters systematically refuse to accept any blame whatever for climate change or any of the other consequences of their consistently reactionary behavior. Like the tobacco companies, they throw all the blame back on individual choices and refuse to acknowledge any collective responsibility for anything at all.
As I pointed out earlier, however, upholding progressive principles like these ones does not imply leaving behind a sense of reality. Just because people like me feel that these ideas are far superior to their opposite numbers does not mean that we ought to think that they will eventually triumph. In the absence of any plausible reason to believe in the inevitability of progress, it is entirely possible, and is even becoming probable, that superior ideas could eventually die out altogether. Millions of people all over the world may agree that these principles are the best ones known to mankind, but hundreds of millions of other people do not agree at all. Religious fundamentalists, political extremists and ultra-individualists all have their own principles that are in total contradiction with the ones that people like me support. Where we see good, they see evil and where we see evil, they see good.
Deliberate ignorance on a mass scale, as in the Nigerian Islamist “Boko Haram” movement (“Western education is sinful”), combined with enormous sums of money, being channeled through such entities as the political action committees in the USA or the petroleum dollars of the Gulf states, may soon succeed in wiping out the world’s most progressive ideas completely. If current trends continue, the future of humanity could very well be an atavistic reversal of past development (the scientific revolution, the age of enlightenment) and a universal return to truly primitive ways of thinking. Unfortunately, all the social and material wealth of human societies is exclusively based on more modern modes of thought, with the result that a return to primitivism would undoubtedly eliminate most of the world’s population in the process.
History is imperfect. The final proof of that is the absence of any teleological imperative leading toward human progress. Everything is entirely dependent on ideological choices taken by imperfect people, individually and collectively, whose unfortunate decisions are often determined by egotistical fantasies of omnipotence and immortality.
