messy history – Blue Cereal Education

{This Post is Recycled – Reworked from a Previous Version and Reposted In It’s Updated Glory}

As if the cutting-edge special effects and thespian excellence weren’t enough, Devo ushered in the 1980’s with rather high expectations of their listening audience. It wasn’t enough for us to merely whip it – we were expected to whip it good. On the title track of the same album, they scolded us for demanding “freedom of choice,” while in the same breath accusing us of not even wanting it – not really.

We were still getting over disco and they hit us with this philosophical barrage? No wonder they couldn’t get no satisfaction.

But they had a point. Freedom is a terrifying thing. There’s great comfort in structure – even confinement. I’ve seen this dramatically demonstrated in recent years as I’ve watched students navigate my decision to give them greater leeway in what they research, how they demonstrate it, and how they wish to be assessed. Some have flourished with the sudden reduction in boundaries, but many find themselves… hindered by too much freedom – especially if it comes with too little scaffolding, given too suddenly.

And that’s the academic version – the relatively easy one to fathom, and to fix. Trickier are historical, social-political happenings. You know – the “real world” stuff.

One of the things about growing up around Tulsa is that you become rather familiar with people of faith and the variety of ways in which they interpret and express that faith. There are some complexities to being People of a Book, not least of which are sorting out which values and practices captured in one’s holy text are eternal, or literal, and which are temporal, or illustrative – important, but shaped by the time and place in which they were written.

Some are fairly easy. The “don’t kill each other over stupid stuff” tends to transcend time and place, and specific cultures or faiths, as does “don’t steal,” “don’t lie (at least not for selfish reasons)” and “don’t boink your neighbor’s wife on any sort of regular basis.” At the opposite end of the scale we find the other kind of “easy” – things few contemporary believers feel compelled to apply in a literal, ongoing way: “don’t eat shrimp,” “don’t wear mixed fabrics,” “keep the women quiet” (seriously – did that EVER work?), or “have fun with snakes and poison – you’ll be fine.”

It’s not always so clear, however. Some stuff is tricky. Obeying your parents certainly has practical, cultural, and maybe spiritual value even today, but to what extent and in what circumstances? It’s easy to become dogmatic about something like hair length or tattoos (it wasn’t that long ago these were deal-breakers) while warnings against too much planning, or saving, are set aside quickly – often without even bothering to come up with good reasons. The modern Christian simply is NOT going to forsake ALL ELSE to follow Him – we’ll come up with the theology afterwards, if we must, but dude – seriously?

We deal with this all the time in history as well. Yes, slavery was evil, but to what extent was each and every slave owner twisted and maniacal? (Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup both seem to suggest that the institution of slavery created evil men as much as evil men created the institution.) Religious persecution was brutal by today’s standards – the same Puritans who so famously came to the New World to escape the yokes of others quickly imposed their own harsh punishments on those in their communities who failed to fall in line. (Poker through the tongue, anyone?) But surely community standards as a general concept are not inherently… awful?

How do we balance a modern appraisal of not only the accomplishments and failures of our progenitors, but of their motivations and culpability as well? Whatever we come up with will be imperfect at best, and probably nowhere near THAT good.

Added to the complications of time and place is the fact that most cultural norms and the laws enforcing them have trade-offs we don’t like to acknowledge. The roles of women, for example, even a century ago, were rather constrained by today’s standards. There were assumptions and attitudes in play which we find offensive today, perhaps rightly so. I’d never suggest we should roll back the progress made (note the yellow rose on my lapel), but neither should we run from the realities of other cultures (including our own in decades past) which gave context to some of the practices and mindsets we today condemn.

And reality can be a hell of a mitigating circumstance.

By way of example, it may not be inherently evil and oppressive in all times and places for women and men to have had more rigidly defined roles than we’d like to see in modern America. There’s a certain security and stability that comes from carefully defined social structures, and – depending on one’s surroundings – practical benefits as well.

Were those Victorian dances you see in the movies, with fancy moves and complex expectations, limiting? Absolutely. But consider in contrast the awkward terror of stepping out on the dance floor of any modern club and being expected to shake your sober booty with, um… “freedom.” Suddenly some good ol’ western line dancing – where everyone does the same basic thing in the same basic way – makes more sense than you’d have ever accepted watching from your seat.

A Pride & Prejudice society certainly comes with its own difficulties, but those cultural and legal structures evolved to protect participants as much as to crush their individual hopes and dreams. It may seem burdensome to seek an introduction by an appropriate mutual acquaintance or follow some basic formalities before openly wooing the opposite sex, but the process is far easier to understand than figuring out whether or not complimenting a co-worker’s shoes is more likely to lead to a first date or a sexual harassment complaint.

It’s a balance – freedom vs. security. Just like the war on terror, but with notes saying “Do you like me? Circle Y/N” instead of drone strikes. The structure that limits also supports. To support, it must limit. That’s the tricky thing.

Also, I think I just compared all of social and legal history to a good bra.

As times change, or as understanding expands, freedom tends to become more and more of a priority. More choice – more freedom – means less structure. More often than not, at least in recent history, moving that direction means reaching a bit closer to our own ideals. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing.

I AM suggesting that not all historical or contemporary social or moral issues are entirely obvious, unalienable, or easily solved by a little indignation. I’m suggesting not every clash reduces to a morality tale of liberty triumphing over entrenched ethical fascism, or god-fearing decency once again restraining vice. Perhaps we should ride more moderately-sized moral horses as we exclaim over social issues – some of which center around clear violations of all we hold sacred, but others which speak to evolutionary changes more complex than ‘good’ people conquering ‘bad.’

I’m suggesting that it’s valuable to look back in history – whether decades or centuries – and evaluate the motivations and choices of those who came before. A little wrestling with their realities and assumptions can clarify rather than obscure. At the very least it can produce some much-needed uncertainty on our part. Some appreciation for the tension between security/stability and freedom/choice may prove… illuminating.

An appreciation for the gray can make us better historians and better teachers. It might even make us less annoying on Facebook.

RELATED POST: Cognitive Dissonance

RELATED POST: Condemnation Bias

Waaayyy back in 1996, the band Barenaked Ladies released their first moderately successful single in the U.S.:

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Broke into the old apartment – this is where we used to live
Broken glass, broke and hungry, broken hearts and broken bones – this is where we used to live
Why did you paint the walls? Why did you clean the floor?
Why did you plaster over the hole I punched in the door?
…
Why did they pave the lawn? Why did they change the locks?
Why did I have to break in? I only came here to talk – this is where we used to live
…
Broke into the old apartment – tore the phone out of the wall
Only memories, fading memories, blending into dull tableaux – I want them back…

History is a tricky thing. Personal or collective, it’s ridiculously difficult to reconstruct the past – even on those rare occasions when we have an abundance of materials with which to try.

It’s a paradoxical truth in teaching history that the only two things you can say with any certainty are that (1) people everywhere, throughout time, are all basically the same – no matter what their circumstances, and (2) we can’t possibly fathom or understand people in other times, places, and circumstances – our worlds are simply too different.

Plus, we never have ALL of the information and experiences needed. While we gain wonderful perspective from time and distance from whatever subject we choose to examine, we lose detail – seeing only through a glass darkly, or a rather pixelated type of historical Google Earth.

Even when documentation abounds, it turns out we can hardly trust those who WERE there, consciously recording. Our human perception and memory are apparently pretty much crap whenever anything important needs recalling.

On the other hand, how many ugly break-ups does THAT explain?

And so far we’ve been assuming that all involved WANT to accurately preserve or recapture the past. That may not always be the case:

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As he feeds them to the fire, one by one, he’s dimly aware – he may have learned a thing or two, but tuition wasn’t cheap. And he’s only got these foggy notions of what he paid…

Author Milan Kundera of Czechoslovakia began his 1979 novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, with a true story embedded into the narrative of Mirek, a fictional protagonist:

Chapter One: Lost Letters
In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was a great turning point in the history of Bohemia…
Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close to him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.
The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.
Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.
It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting…

As it turns out, the fictional ‘Mirek’ is distracted from his otherwise tiny, irrelevant revolutionary efforts by his own quest to secure the return of some embarrassing letters from a former girlfriend – someone he now finds a bit ugly and offensive.

You see the irony, of course.

More recently, textbook behemoth McGraw-Hill took some heat when an annoyed mother circulated a snapshot of this insert from their Texas-approved history textbooks:

It sounds like they got a great deal on a vacation package from those people who keep spam-calling me from Orlando while I’m trying to eat dinner.

There are far more subtle ways to rewrite history than burning letters or euphemizing slavery, as this piece so effectively demonstrates. It’s not just Texas, of course – history is rewritten every time there are no normal-sized women on TV or in every chapter summary focused on Generals and Presidents over factory-workers and midwives.

I own a dozen well-intentioned U.S. History texts from 1876 – 1961 which portray Christopher Columbus a dozen different ways and paint Indian Removal as everything from travesty to unfortunate necessity to “You’ve Just Won An All-Expense Paid Trip To Oklahoma!”

Those same books, however, avoid any controversy at all regarding the women’s movements of the early 19th century. That’s because there’s no mention of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, or even Susan B. Anthony in any of them. They simply didn’t make the cut.

Kinda makes you wonder which is more troubling – being misrepresented, or being erased. *shudder*

It is, in fact, largely unavoidable that we’re going to make draconian compromises any time we try to write or talk about history, assuming we wish our discussion to take up less time and space than the original events. All the more reason, then, we should be hyper-aware of what’s NOT being told, and what’s NOT being asked.

What’s happening just off-screen, as it were.

Even when we have the purest intentions, capturing the past – be it events long gone or the shifting shaping swirling of our own experiences – is an undertaking both elusive and unfair. Perhaps it’s a blessing to work from a scarcity of information; the impossibility of conveying the richness of the better-known may prove far more daunting.

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It’s as if a fin, reaching from the swamp, grabbed me by my arm – tried to pull me in. But my arm was strong, and the fin was an inaccurately reconstructed fake…

For those of you less metaphorically inclined, the past is always “an inaccurately reconstructed fake.” Even when it does pull us in, it’s an interpretive approximation at best.

It was right through those trees – I’m not insane! That’s where the fin tried to drag me in. Don’t look at me, look at where I’m pointing – close your eyes, see what I see!

That’s one of my favorite lines in all of known music. “Close your eyes, see what I see” – there’s the human experience in a nutshell. Please ‘get’ me – just a little! Fathom collectively with me, if only for an instant, said the shepherd boy to the lonely king.

Please?

If you can draw it in the air, or write it down, then you weren’t there. What’s gone is mute – someone changed the truth – they smoked the proof and there’s nothing left…

But there is. There are our stories, and fragments, and framings, and efforts to capture – however imperfectly – some critical bits. Faded memories blending in to dull tableaux, yes – but also photos revealing Clem’s fur hat on someone else’s head.

The past is maddeningly foggy, to be sure, but the lessons – and the flavors – too important to give up. So we grasp at the smoke and fill in the rest. Hoping.

Tag: messy history

Freedom of Choice

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