In his imaginative and innovative book covering 600 years of the English past, The Outcasts of Time, historian Ian Mortimer observes “The man who has no knowledge of the past has no wisdom”. He’s right. The lack of historical understanding and plain ignorance of so many people is a problem. Why? Because history - or should this be historical myths? - are being used in politics and the media to win support, drive policy and engineer huge and irreversible change.
In reading the philosophy or methodology of history - works such as Popper’s Poverty of Historicism or Berlin’s Historical Inevitability - it’s easy to get caught up in post-modern theory and end up thinking it’s all a waste of time. E H Carr believed the destruction of historical objectivity dangerous. “If the historian necessarily looks at his period through the eyes of his own time”, he asked, “will he not fall into a purely pragmatic view of the facts? If objective truth is unattainable, why should a historian not make up a narrative and claim it is true?”
This was prescient. What prevents ‘alternative facts’ on the internet, selective evidence, or even conspiracy theories, being pushed as genuine knowledge? In his fine essay ‘What isn’t history’ Mortimer writes, “The realisation that history cannot be defined by a shared understanding of ‘objectivity’ or ‘truth’ or by reference to a set of professional criteria, is both important and empowering. It’s still possible to prove arguments wrong. Alternative interpretations are always possible”.
Post-modernism and its scepticism about historical selection can be overdone. History is a dialogue between past and present. Mortimer is quite clear. “Fair choices, integrity, knowledge and awareness of the limitations are the key attributes” of any historian. Justin Champion would have agreed, “Trust is at the core of all historical practice”. We should pay attention to historical certainties but go beyond them to find meaning in the past that we can use for the present and future.
Why, then, are myths so corrosive? Every country has them, but it’s enough to focus on British examples. There are lots. History is politically powerful, especially when it serves an ideological purpose. A familiar nationalist approach is to make historically based claims on Britain’s place in the world, invoking former achievements as a model for today. An assurance of comforting familiarity. Historian Robert Saunders brilliantly nails it. “As so often history becomes the mask worn by ideology, when it wants to be taken for experience.”
A flashing red light warns against the hi-jacking of collectively shared experiences of the conflicts defining our history. Saunders is clear “We” is the most dangerous word. “We won the war, we survived the Blitz... It allows us to pin other people’s medals to our chests; to demand gratitude for other people’s sacrifices; and to boast of victories bought with other people’s blood. It creates a false equivalence between past and present, in a way that can dull our sensitivity to change”.
He defines the core spin of 'Global Britain', that the country could enjoy the same power today as at its colonial peak. The story is not of an empire that has gone, but of a small island punching above its weight - swashbuckling, buccaneering and pluckily winning against the odds. The myth of smallness defining Global Britain teaches dangerous lessons for the future. Any failure can readily be blamed on doomsters and traitors who refuse to believe with enough fervour. It’s central to the UK populist method. Oversimplify complex issues with a catchy slogan, and find ‘the other’ to blame - in this case the EU.
It’s a seductive though completely false message, of course. But many people don’t mind being lied to if it’s what they want to hear. And it appealed to quite a crowd. ‘Take back control’ (though we always had it) was a great slogan. The arguments for Remain were more difficult and nuanced for many people, especially those with little education or those prone to nationalist propaganda. And ‘Project Fear’ was a killer line allowing the ill-informed to shut down any arguments involving numbers, facts, protocols and other details. It could all be airily dismissed like Trump’s ‘fake news’. A huge torrent of lies followed.
British exceptionalism is the essence of Brexit. We’re better than everyone - with ignorance, arrogance and prejudice, boasting of our greatness. It’s a huge embarrassment. But it’s what the credulous, angry and disappointed want to be told. It seems to make them feel better, if only briefly, especially those looking for a cause to latch on to. Liars in politics and the media backed by untraceable funds have harnessed this and generated a self-disabling trauma. As a result the UK is the first major country to turn its back on a rules-based multilateral order.
“I was there” is another line to be wary of. The numbers who can remember the 1940-41 Blitz are really very few. Even fewer are those who heard Churchill’s wartime speeches. But that doesn’t stop a large slug of the population saying, and maybe believing, they were there. The power of collective folk memory (especially that of 1940) when absorbed through family, school and popular culture, is immense. Reporting of trouble spots often includes vox pops from tourists in a holiday resort or airport claiming their proximity endows them with special knowledge of a complex political and military conflict in the same country.
And then there’s ancestry. We’re mostly descended from Edward III of course. But many family trees, not just of the owners of stately homes and castles, can bend the narrative if unwanted facts emerge. Years ago amateur sleuthing on the early Portuguese Madeira colonists revealed a Scot whose name survives on the island. He’d left home around 1415, and ended up siring at least six children, and a Madeiran dynasty. Yet family history claimed he ‘joined the service of Ferdinand and Isabella’, the Reyes Catolicos of 1492 Spanish Reconquista fame, 75 years later. Wrong people, wrong time and wrong country. Otherwise great.
But such self-conscious burnishing of family credentials is a mainly small scale part of myth making. It doesn’t involve big lies to bolster policy like Britain’s hard exit from the EU. As the Brexit myths fade virtually nobody these days pretends there will be any benefits. Most wish the country had never gone down this path. But we’re stuck with it. It’s Britain’s version of the Emperor’s New Clothes and the rest of the world laughs at or pities us. The decision to leave the EU was based on so many absurd notions of what was available and at what cost that it detached British politics from economic and political reality. The UK may well struggle to maintain its union. Widely seen as untrustworthy, the country now has a dangerous collision with the real world.
I’m not a historian. My career was in international communications research and analysis, where there was common understanding at the political and corporate level of the importance of agreed detailed rules for a truly global industry to thrive. Most of the key players and their decisions were guided by experts in the technical, legal, strategic and commercial aspects of wireline, satellite and mobile telecoms. Or at least by intelligent and well educated people with experience in the field. Nationalism in any guise was extremely rare and I never heard anyone bleat about sovereignty.
But I’ve long been interested in history. I try to respect and value history, and indeed most historians. Some brilliant ones are mentioned here. Given the documentary evidence of the more recent past there should be few errors of fact, but maybe more scope for interpretation. Historians in general have been criticised for not calling out the obvious lies and perversions peddled by today’s politicians, media and the public. In fact many of them do just that, though some might ask if this is really their job or their responsibility.
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