12/29/2004
Who writes history?
A very interesting article written by a history professor from UC-Levine, about the proliferation of Google as the ultimate truth-checker. It shouldn’t be, obviously; Google is no more infallible than any other resource, and it shouldn’t be treated as such.
But what caught my eye was something else entirely:
There’s a reason history should be written by historians and not by Internet software or talk-show hosts: Who else today has the time and patience to sift through the past to unearth the events and ideas that are fundamental to reasoned public debate on the most crucial issues facing our society? The ancient Greeks long ago realized that history is crucial to democracy; especially in wartime, we Googleize it at our peril.
This speaks, I think, to another unique problem in our society - the urge to make everything polite and objective to the point where there is nothing but dry dates and facts, where there is nothing to indicate the passions and rationales behind a conflict. The dates and the facts are really the least important part of understanding history; knowing when and knowing what is useless if you don’t learn why.
A substitute teacher I once had back in junior high said that the reason we learn history is to prevent ourselves from making the same mistakes, over and over again. By Googleizing, by sanitizing, by reducing history to the absolute and bland truths, we lose this purpose. And who knows what else will be lost after that?
Filed under: Miscellany
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