Worst Professor Ever

As much as I love history,  I can’t deny that my desire to apply it makes my world view a little…skewed, by normal standards.

Whenever I see some talking head on TV announcing anything “new” — a new study shows this! a new idea shows that! — I always wonder, Did you check your history on that? Cuz I bet Plato or Montaigne probably made that (e.g.) psychological observation at some point. I gather that this isn’t the standard response, and that we’re just supposed to nod along and be impressed by the newness. History-checking isn’t included in the realm of fact-checking.

That’s especially true when it comes to claims of things being “completely unprecedented.” Unless it’s a genuine technological advancement, like some new way of splitting atoms, it’s probably not. The modern world likes to think that science is a new thing, a sign of how awesomely rational we’ve become. But no, people have been doing science for a very long time. Hell, the ancient Greeks were talking about atoms before anyone could actually see them.

Don’t even get me started on economics, a field that strikes me, the ancient history person, as being quite ridiculously young. That’s the really weird part, I suppose, the fact that my view of current events encompasses a couple of thousand years. And that this translates into an admittedly unusual skepticism about the present.

And I know that bringing up Aristotle is not something most people do offhandedly. But in my view it’s genuinely important to realize that his “biological” observations are still very much alive in modern sexism. (So is a lot of other historical stuff. I just have a particular dislike for Aristotle because a) he’s boring and b) he liked tragedy better than comedy.) Here again, many feminists have rolled their eyes when I bring this point up, because in their view I’m distracting from the matter at hand. From the now.

Last night I was chatting with another historian about “presentism” — and yeah, that’s an egghead-y kind of phrase, but the concept is good. It basically means a lack of  historical awareness, a sense that now is the only thing that matters, that it’s the only way to categorize things, and that it can only be analyzed in terms of the present because the past is too primitive to matter. Which is just silly. Maybe we should call it “newism” or “nowism.” I wonder if that would help? Probably not.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: combating “presentism” is one reason why history is a critical tool for media literacy. But there’s the rub: if you care about history, not as a trivial pursuit but as a useful field, how do you deal with the fact that the world at large is not encouraged to think about the past in its analysis of itself? And that doing so seems like an eccentric diversion, at best?

This is a question that intrigues me all the more as I move into the real world, where people are not sitting in front of me expecting me to fill their heads with historical trivia. I never liked doing that anyway. I much preferred having conversations that happened to involve history — which is, ideally, what could happen in non-classroom environments. If it didn’t seem so weird, I mean.