22/07/2020 Nicholas Higgins

History is Dead

‘Who controls the past’, ran the party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present control the past’, George Orwell, 1984

If the 2016 Brexit referendum told us anything, it is that Britain does not know what or who it is. Here is a country at war with itself. A country divided along lines of age, education, wealth and opportunity; a country seen quite differently by the old and the young; a prickly union in which provincial England had a very different sense of identity from Metropolitan England. Asked on 23rd June 2016, what kind of collective identity it wanted to assert, the UK replied with one loud, clear, unanimous voice: ‘We don’t know!’

Perhaps it is because Britain has been uprooted, alienated and sundered from its national history? Since the 1960s the lore of our tribe, the stories of our ancestors, the memories which our parents held in common, have ceased to be. 50 or 60 years ago, we might have all known the stories of Thomas Becket, King Canute or Queen Boadicea. Now these things are as meaningless to millions as the forgotten myths of Greece. 

History holds an ever diminishing place in public education, now optional from the age 14. Speaking as a history graduate myself, ‘grand narratives’, ‘great men’ or ‘great events’ of our history are sidestepped in favour of the ‘skills’ that history imparts. Little wonder then, that 90% of us cannot name a 19th century British prime minister. Participants in this poll struggled to name the British general at Waterloo, the monarch at the time of the Armada, Brunel’s profession and the location of the Boer war. 

If we haven’t forgotten most of it, the history we do remember is the worst of it. In the popular imagination the British Empire has become synonymous with oppression, racial prejudice and economic plundering. Such loathing has become intensely fashionable in recent years. The liberal intelligentsia of our day have taken it upon themselves not to shore up and protect the culture in which they had grown up, but rather to deny it, assail it and tear it down. None other than George Orwell agreed:

‘England is perhaps the only country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution from horse racing to Suet puddings.’

The difference today is that seemingly every woke millennial has come to agree. ‘Patriotism’ and ‘Englishness’ have become dirty, even comical, words, and those that use them are denigrated as right wing loonies or cultural facists. True, large chunks of the British past are ugly, shameful and despotic. Few want to turn the clock back. Decolonisation, the undermining of the class system, the greater opportunities open to women, the improved treatment of racial and sexual minorities - these are all good and laudable developments. 

But the cynicism we have for our history has gone beyond ‘healthy’, and become all consuming and corrosive. We are constantly reminded of our shameful involvement in the slave trade, but conveniently forget that Britain led the way in the abolition of slavery. We love to lambast Churchill for his dubious racial prejudices, but quietly ignore that he was the one man who rallied the nation against Nazism (and pioneered the Welfare State). We love to point out the famines in India, yet stand oblivious to legacy we left in their judiciary, legal, bureaucratic and educational systems. 

If we are to really pursue a ‘warts and all’ history, we must acknowledge both the bad and the good. All of it - not an unquestioning belief that it was positive, but not an unflinching pessimism either. History is never black and white. 

But more is at stake here than a denuded national pride. By only seeing the worst in our history, we are walking the dangerous path of rejecting it outright. Indeed, if our past really was so ignorant and repressive, why bother with it? Looking to the past is retrograde, a dusty archive of doubtful value. Man must look forward to the ‘Brave New World’. Forget the past. Celebrate the new. Embrace the unceasing tide of modernity and ‘get with the times’. As Henry Ford proclaimed in 1916,

‘History is more or less bunk. It is tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinkers dam is the history we make today.’

As an anti-semite and close friend of Hitler, we might’ve taken Ford’s proclamation with a hint of scepticism. Britain it seems has swallowed it whole.

How puzzling when history is the very foundation for who we are? Human’s are innately historical beings, we are what we are today because of everything that happened yesterday, and the day before, ad infinitum. If the future has yet to happen and the present is only a fleeting ‘moment’, the past is the only leverage we have to understand ourselves. The same surely stands true for entire societies. Without shared histories entire nations lose the very basis of their identities. They become ruder-less ships, left only to drift with the tide. 

Thus has been the fate of Britain. In the past British identity could be attributed to a highly specific, not to mention philosophically and historically deep foundations (note, Christianity). Now the belief in the inherent and inevitable tide of ‘progress’ has unmoored us from the traditions, beliefs and practices of our history. What has filled the void?  P. G. Wodehouse was not far off the mark when he said it was ‘lager, football and bodily functions’. Thrown into the mix is the tripartite of virtue signalling buzzwords, ‘multiculturalism’, ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’. These are not bad things in themselves, but they are a flimsy foundation indeed for a collective identity. If identity is by its nature unique and individual, how can such broad, overly general and shallow ideologies suffice?

Brexit told us they do not. Brits are in the grip of an existential malaise, a cultural crisis. With the loss of all unifying stories about our past, we’ve lost sight of who we are and what we’re capable of. We are like the Alzheimer’s patient, who having lost his memory, no longer knows who he is. Little wonder we’ve invited millions of immigrants to our shores. They bring with them distinct, historically grounded culture’s of which they are rightly proud. Perhaps this a way of filling the void that is our own loss of identity? 

We must, as Heidegger put it, ‘win back our roots in history…to take a creative view of tradition’. This does not mean slavishly following every tradition, that nothing can be questioned or changed. Rather it means acknowledging the importance of the past. It means recognising that we are the inheritors of a particular tradition and that we need to engage with it. Only then will we understand ourselves, and  only then will this country make peace with itself.