It is an enlightening experience for historians to observe contemporary events unfold. The information, the facts, the opinions, the polemics, the agendas, the emotionally charged reactions come at them from all directions, crisscrossing, contradicting, cancelling out one another, forming incomprehensible shapes, blinding and deafening, messing up with reason and with theoretical schemata, stirring emotions and subverting (or confirming) preconceived ideas. Then reflection and critical processing and analysis (hopefully) take over and enable historians to see patterns and links in the cluster of happenings, and to gauge their connectedness to other clusters from the past and the present. Eventually, the events will become historical, they will settle down in the pages of a book; by that time, ithey will have probably been disconnected from the emotions and they will have lost their urgency.
Students, particularly younger ones, rarely make a connection of historical events with experiences in their own lives. A common approach to history, at least in my native Greece, is to exploit the past in order to serve agendas of the present, mainly by creating a cult of long gone heroes who achieved a greatness that should but cannot be repeated. Young (and not so young) students of history are also - I have noticed from personal experience, having taught History in the Greek secondary education - eager to pass facile judgment on this or that historical person's or group's deeds, as if it were simple or easy to make important decision, as if the actants of history could see things as simple and clear-cut as we can (sort of) see them with the benefit of hindsight. This tendency to look for heroes and villains in a framework of 'foundation myths' and narratives seeps into the way people form their political judgments, or what passes for political judgment in a world where nuances are overlooked and complications are ignored (with great contribution from the press, or what passes for press these days). At any rate, historical events look like distant, dreary tips of icebergs floating somewhere far from where we are, and we are taught nothing about what they mean and how to use that meaning. This is the case particularly in peaceful, affluent times.
Students, particularly younger ones, rarely make a connection of historical events with experiences in their own lives. A common approach to history, at least in my native Greece, is to exploit the past in order to serve agendas of the present, mainly by creating a cult of long gone heroes who achieved a greatness that should but cannot be repeated. Young (and not so young) students of history are also - I have noticed from personal experience, having taught History in the Greek secondary education - eager to pass facile judgment on this or that historical person's or group's deeds, as if it were simple or easy to make important decision, as if the actants of history could see things as simple and clear-cut as we can (sort of) see them with the benefit of hindsight. This tendency to look for heroes and villains in a framework of 'foundation myths' and narratives seeps into the way people form their political judgments, or what passes for political judgment in a world where nuances are overlooked and complications are ignored (with great contribution from the press, or what passes for press these days). At any rate, historical events look like distant, dreary tips of icebergs floating somewhere far from where we are, and we are taught nothing about what they mean and how to use that meaning. This is the case particularly in peaceful, affluent times.
And then hard and turbulent times hit us. Even the most blissfully ignorant must be aware we are now going through such times. Perhaps this is the first time in our history that two consecutive generations, raised in relative peace and prosperity, are confronted with a much harsher reality than the one they (we) were raised to expect as a matter of course. Day by day the world becomes more shaky, shifting towards a shape that would look more familiar to my grandparents and great-grandparents (some of them were refugees). Less stability, more economic hardhsip, more heart-heartedness and selfishness, but also a different awareness, an alertness which only hardship can raise.
Until recently, a majority of young (and not so young) people never had to think seriously about anything beyond their own narrow circle of people and interests; it was the times of idioteuein, of living life only on the private level. Interestingly, this Greek word also means 'to be stupid.' (It is where the English word 'idiot' comes from). But now young people - and older people whose brains have not yet set into a cement-like stolidness - begin to see for themselves how difficult it is to see ahead and to know what's best, how tangled and complicated this supposedly straightforward relationship of cause and effect is, how time is a dimension as important as all the other dimensions of the physical world - only we cannot ever grasp this one. In other words, they (we) begin to see how history works, and how we are all materials for history.
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I am writing this post one year after the Scottish referendum for independence, when the Scots let fear win over hope - temporarily. In the meantime, another referendum two months ago in my native Greece decided that hope should win over fear, only for hope to be turned into something for which I have no words; the only thing I can think of to describe the situation is Uncle Vanya's bitter and demented laughter, at the very end of Chekhov's play, in a performance I saw in Thessaloniki a very long time ago. It is strange how the sound and tone of that laughter were stored quietly in my memory all those years and have now re-emerged on the eve of yet another election in Greece. It is an unaccountable thing, memory.
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