My new appreciation for history
I was a pretty good student in high school. I was diligent, resourceful, and inquisitive, always working hard to understand the concepts and ask for help when I didn’t. I always got A’s. And in most cases, I went above and beyond teachers’ expectations, finding my own creative projects to pursue outside of school, and often finding teachers who would help me with them, whether it was writing poetry, animating clay, creating software, or criticizing fiction. I simply loved school.
Except for history. History was terrible. Every history teacher I had framed history as the process of memorizing the past, showing that I could recall it, and perhaps occasionally analyzing why I thought something in history had happened. What could be more irrelevant to my life? How could it be that what happened in 14th century Rome would have any relevance to what was happening in grunge, video games, or my muted psyche? The closest I got to enjoying history was reading James Michener historical fiction like Centennial and Alaska. While these were entertaining, most of what I learned was that the America of today was not like the America of yesterday, and while there was a link between the two, it was mostly through a series of scrappy white men who had kids and then died.
Over the past few years, however, I’ve warmed to history—not because I find it more interesting than I did before, but because I’ve found it more relevant. For example, when I first learned about redlining, it slowly became clear to me that things that have happened long ago aren’t actually gone. They’re here, sometimes in the explicit form of actively enforced laws, and sometimes in the implicit forms of the effects of those laws that have rippled through slowly changing infrastructure like intergenerational wealth and institutional knowledge. And then, of course, are ideas that formed long ago, such as racist beliefs about the diversity of humanity. These ideas, and the decisions they led to, aren’t just decisions of the past, but, as Ta-Nehisi Coats described them, the compounding moral debts of the present.
As this pandemic has grown in the past few months, one might imagine that history would revert back to irrelevance, with the daily news pulling our attention to the present and the future. But for me, mostly what it has done is stripped away the veneer of progress, revealing the deep echos of the past in present day. I’m surrounded by:
- The past capitalist decisions to lay down abundant broadband fiber in U.S. urban centers, but not rural communities. Those choices about infrastructure were made long ago, and have direct consequences today on our ability to stay connected and informed.
- The ancient idea that different is dangerous, manifesting as racist fear-mongering about contagious Asian faces. The persistence of this idea across history, propagated by parenting, culture, and who knows, maybe even human nature, ravages still.
- The centuries-long American value of placing nearly all of the responsibility on individuals rather than the collective. Such devotion to individualism is not inherent; it is a cultural value, baked into our national narrative, our safety net, our cultures.
History isn’t irrelevant. It is the architecture and provenance of the present day. Without it, we cannot understand today or how to change tomorrow.
Buried in this thicket are three mechanisms of relevance:
- Decisions of the past shape the infrastructure of today. To understand or change our infrastructure, we have to understand those decisions.
- Memories of the past shape the behavior of today. To understand or change our behavior, we have to understand our memories.
- Knowledge from the past shapes the beliefs of today. To understand or change our beliefs, we have to understand the origins of our knowledge.
This becomes obvious at a micro scale. For example, I used to have a cat who would crawl up on my lap in a special chair in the corner of my old house. One day, a broom fell on her while we were sitting. She stopped coming to that chair and stopped sitting on my lap. If I want her to start again, the only way was to remember that the chair in that corner was associated with that trauma. And the only way to fix it was to replace that trauma with something positive. A few weeks of treats near that special corner faded her memories, and restored our cuddling sessions.
It gets fuzzier at the macro scale. For example, why do 30% of U.S. households still not have broadband? Many companies have tried to fix this, laying down more cable, expanding to more cities, or using last mile technologies like wireless or satellites. But they’ve failed because they don’t understand the past. Much of that 30% has broadband available in their area, but 1) doesn’t want it because they’ve never had it and don’t know what they’d do with it, or 2) can’t afford it because of a long history of service bundling by that increases prices. These aren’t problems of now, they are problems of individual’s past experiences with technology and of markets’ old ideas about how to sell content.
The same analysis applies to structural forms of racism. Why can’t many young black American men thrive in America? Why can’t they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and be successful rugged individualists? The decisions, memories, and knowledge of the past tug them down. The longstanding erosion of school budgets in their schools deter great teachers from lifting them up. The generational poverty of their parents limit their economic opportunities. Our systematic, data-driven policing of black neighborhoods send a persistent signal that they are suspected thugs. None of these forces are the doing of young Black men in American. They are the forces of the past, warping the present.
I like to create. I like to make change. But my new appreciation for history is reminding me that creating and making change require a crucial sensitivity to the origins of our status quo. All endeavors of change, including those in my home discipline of computing and information science, will ignore history at their peril.
