It has become increasingly fashionable in right-wing circles to argue that New Labour has always been hostile to, because ignorant of and anyway not interested in, history. I wish to argue that it is always vital to know your history, but it can be equally vital, sometimes, to agree with your enemies to forget it.
When Sir Kenneth Dover, one of the UK’s most distinguished classicists, reflected on the activity of history, he argued that there are two sorts of discipline — ‘scientific’ and ‘historical’. Science deals with universals, gathering and testing data with a view to generating repeatable experiments which prove the case in hand. History, the discipline covering what we might call ‘the humanities’, deals with what humans have done, said, thought, felt and created over thousands of years — in other words, the unpredictable, unique and individual. Repeatable experiment is not an option. The historian’s job is to produce hypotheses about humans on the strength of our experience and understanding of them — in the case of classics, when they are long dead and can be known only through surviving literature and artefacts: the most reliable hypotheses we can, so that we are not the victims of charlatans or liars peddling versions of the past for their own purposes.
That is well put, and the implication is that, if people can use the past to peddle lies, they can also use it to reveal truths. Is it reasonable, then, to ask whether the truths about the past (to distinguish it from our own personal experience) can be in any sense of practical use? To put it bluntly, are there lessons of history, or simply — a very different thing — lessons of historians?
The ancients certainly took the view that the past was usefully instructive. Thucydides, for example, concentrated on the political and military history of the Peloponnesian war (431-404 bc), and interspersed it with speeches in which the protagonists, from their differing points of view, analysed events and their causes. As the Italian classicist Roberto Nicolai argues, this was a pragmatic mix of the political and the rhetorical — what happened, why it happened, and how in each instance the case was (and therefore could again be) argued. Thucydides’ purpose was to provide a useful means by which (as he says) any similar future events could be dealt with.
Romans took all this to heart but the result was something different: history for them was a source of practical ethical models, exempla good and bad, to imitate or avoid. Such a way of using the past was encouraged by their higher education system. This trained students, most of them destined for top political and legal careers, in how to argue and win cases. One technique was to give them a problem from ancient myth or history and tell them to put themselves in the position of one of the characters involved. How could Ariadne have kept Theseus? Should the Spartans have defended Thermopylae? Should Hannibal have tried to take Rome? Was it right for the Romans to destroy Carthage? This encouraged the probing of the past to produce arguments justifying the advantages and disadvantages, the strengths and weaknesses, the rights and wrongs of any situation — just like Roman history.
Interestingly, today’s schools know all about this: it is the often reviled ‘empathy’ style of history. Here children are encouraged to think themselves into and act out the role of historical figures, usually government-approved exempla of good and evil — Hitler, slave-traders, the rich, the poor; a good exercise, in my view, as long as children are given enough hard knowledge to do more than spout party lines.
This practice has now spilled over into public life — the government empathising so strongly with those who feel they have suffered at the hands of its predecessors that it feels duty-bound to apologise to them. Forget that, if you are not responsible for that past, it is the height of irresponsibility to apologise for it, let alone claim credit for so doing. But as long as it is someone else who has done wrong, it costs nothing and plays well in an emotionally retarded, Oprah Winfrey sort of way. Even Gordon can do that.
But what if wrongs for which you are historically responsible are involved? Here we come to the nub. In 404 bc Athens, finally defeated by Sparta in the Peloponnesian war, was forced to replace its radical democracy with control by the pro-Spartan ‘Thirty Tyrants’. The democrats planned revenge, and in the summer of 403 were bloodily reinstated. But what now? The wounds were still raw, and the city was split down the middle. A settlement was required, and when it was drawn up, it made a crucial demand: that ‘no one was to remember the past misdeeds of anyone’ (except where the Thirty and some others were concerned). The slate was wiped clean. The essayist Xenophon comments: ‘To this day both parties live together as fellow-citizens, and the people abide by the oaths which they have sworn.’
This was not destroying the past, as if it had never happened: ancient historians recorded it for all to read. But the question practical Greeks faced was: given the recent past, what do we do now? To attempt a settlement based on the balance of past rights and wrongs was simply to refight old battles. No settlement in those terms was possible. The only way in which the people could prevent themselves being hamstrung for the future because of mistakes they had personally been responsible for in the past was for all sides to agree to forget that past and put it behind them — where, after all, it belonged.
Which leads to Israel and Palestine. If ever there was an example of two peoples being enslaved by their history, this is it. And it is a history which is lovingly nurtured and updated, grievance by grievance, day by day, year by year. Talk about hamstringing yourself for all time to come by a situation which, for those being born now, is not actually of their making, but (you can be sure) soon enough will be.
One day, the two sides will find politicians who will look at where they are now, acknowledge the disaster that is their oh-so-precious history, invite each other to forget it completely, and start again. Because if they do not, there will never be any resolution, and the world will grow tired of them, and they will have no one to blame but themselves as they grind each other, for the last time, into the bloody dust — in the name of their history. Peoples for whom their past is more important than their future deserve all they get.
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