We Need to Talk About History

The American Library in Paris

History is fiction. Historians novelise real events in the firework displays of dialogue and the building blocks of narrative. Like the legends of Christmas, we wrap our historic events in gaudy tinsel. Our narratives are the stuffing we use to fatten up the goose of realism, so we can celebrate and feast on its turning points in a timeline that is as manufactured as it is unrealiable.

So why, then, is history so important and why does it feature so heavily in my writing? Two words. Human experience. Ignoring history is like paying to go to the theatre and turning your back to the stage. Yes, assuredly history is a staged play, but unless you watch it, you won't understand the drama unfolding before you. And that drama is about you.

There is also something in human nature that will eventually make you take a look back. In the hormonal battle ground of the young, everything is about tomorrow. But as your twenties tick by, and you get to your thirties and beyond, everything becomes about yesterday. This quirk has helped to create a lot of problems in our societies - we deal with historical problems too late, or we look back on history with a rose tinted lens.

It is hard to remove the nostalgic blinkers from the study of history, but it's necessary. Think of it as a medical examination: History should be examined post-mortem, as a murdered corpse should be for forensic evidence of the facts, coldly and objectively as possible. But it's difficult to do a post-mortem on the body of a loved one. Likewise, human subjectivity interferes with social and scientific research, especially when we investigate our own past as a species.

But this subjectivity is human experience, and we can't easily discount it. Even if its dangers to rational thinking are legion, our experience creates a reality that doesn't exist, or at least only exists because we do. For example, cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman hypothesizes we evolved to experience a collective delusion - not objective reality. And history is a major part of this delusion, as narrator and as an archive. It reinforces and sustains the delusion. Not only what we talk about, but what we supress, too. The audience only sees what is put on the stage, and when it comes to history, the play is the thing.

One hundred years ago, Tulsa, in Oklahoma, was one of the most prosperous predominantly black areas in all of America, but it was also where one of the biggest race massacres in American history took place. The white American population couldn't process that fact that "subnormal" blacks had the skill to be financially successful, and so, they not only devastated the area beyond recognition, they slaughtered an estimated 300 black people for breaking a racist stereotype. Do we talk about this? No, it's not part of our delusional reality which surrounds black people. This scene, like many others, have been cut from the play.

Tulsa Massacre: News reports were largely squelched, despite the fact that hundreds of people were killed and thousands left homeless.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, when in 1960s and 70s Britain, hundreds of black children were labelled as "educationally subnormal", and wrongly sent to schools for pupils who were deemed to have low intelligence. It's simply a post-credit scene. Or the news that the Social Mobility Commission says top Whitehall civil servants are even posher today than in the 1960s is another; a familiar demographic which symbolises less than 7% of the population wielding power over the majority today as it did yesterday. Power and wealth are the true victors of history: As Robert Watts, compiler of the annual index of the UK's wealthiest residents, says, the fact many of the super-rich have grown so much wealthier during a pandemic, when thousands have buried loved ones and millions worry for their livelihoods, makes it a very unsettling boom.

This isn't just regional: More than five million people became millionaires across the world in 2020 despite economic damage from the Covid-19 pandemic. While many poor people became poorer, the number of millionaires increased by 5.2 million to 56.1 million globally, Credit Suisse research found. Even if reality isn't some sort of shared mass delusion, it is easy to argue that, from this perspective at least, the society that allows this to happen is one of our own making. The stitchwork is plainly human: It's a long, interconnected tapestry that puts things into the context of a bigger (albeit counterfeit) picture.

And when some people have tried to use history to suggest it is inherently inhumane to structure our societies in this way, more entertaining pens have simply written a better produced play. But wealth distribution is not the only tree we have felled to build an impentetrable fortress for our delusion. Climate change is another, but this scene is much harder to leave on the cutting room floor - because it's where our subjective and objective realities collide in more ways than one.

Although we are deluded into thinking all the natural wonders of the planet's resources were created solely for our enjoyment, objective reality gate crashes our Christmas party to tell us that the planets, the stars, the satellites were here before any human mind was, and will be here after the last human mind thinks its last thought. We will try to selectively mimic this objective reality for our survival as a species, and so when the evidence builds up to finally persuade us we really have done damage to the environment, we may tweak our delusions just enough to keep us going.

When we can no longer ignore how we're threatening lifestyles we rarely think of outside our own, and how their destruction may indeed threaten our own survival in the future, we begin to rethink the delusion. When the orangutan population is reducing at an alarming rate, and trees over 1,000 years old - which are a major asset to our planet - are being cut down (I call it murdered) for palm oil plantation, what else can we do? Or how about the chemical-laden cargo ship that sank off the coast of Sri Lanka, which a spill from will devastate marine life? What did the orangutans, the trees, or marine life do to us to warrant their murders?

The only way to answer this, however, is to talk about it. So, when we see what white people or wealthy people - or any type of people who feel entitled and sense that entitlement slipping - are prepared to do when they think their lifestyle is under threat, we need to talk about it. The butchery of Tulsa really should be called a genocide; but no one really talks about the Tulsa race massacre, or indeed any of the massacres on what is now US soil, which was perpertrated by white people. The mass extermination or encampment of indigenous or minority populations somehow isn't genocide when carried out by the white population in the US. And because we don't talk about it, it can still happen in America today.

The American Genocides: Fullerton/Cambridge/History

We constantly talk about the rights (or lack thereof) of women in developing countries, but we don't talk about North America and how women's rights - more particularly the right to their own bodies - is being erroded in the land of the free. So much so, high school teen Paxton Smith felt she had to speak up about it in her high school graduation speech. What is the issue? Why abortion of course, and men in high office dictating to women via new legislation what they can and cannot do when they find themselves pregnant - even in cases of rape and incest.

Highschooler Smith felt she couldn't stay silent, and she was right. She may not get some far-right extremist try to shoot her in the head as happened with Pakistani teen Malala Yousafzai, but the probability has become a high possibility. Not only because white extremism has grown, but because it flourishes in a country where gun laws and the racist roots of the Second Amendment to bear arms was really a constituational licence to kill the ever growing black population in the US. And no one talks about it.

We need to talk about these issues in healthy ways, but we need to talk. This is where history comes into its own: History forces us to talk, not only about what we feel happened yesterday, but about what is going on today, why it is happening and what could happen in the near future. So we will understand, and not be shocked, when we see US cops mocking a dying man's plea that he can't breathe (one more in a horrific collection of videos) when this time the victim is white - or the violent reaction of the military in Myanmar to those opposing its coup, using the same indsicriminate butchery on its own people as it did on its Muslim minority not so long ago.

In this way, history is there to make us aware of what has gone on before, so we can make sense of the road ahead through discussion. Even if we have dramatised history into millions of staged fairy tales based on actual events to keep up the delusional reality of human experience, you can't get a good grasp of events unfolding today if you're ignorant of the ones that unfolded yesterday. The danger is that we've turned our human events into a one-way discussion; we've dramatised that roadmap into a play "based on true events", which are no longer true, or an event.

Every nation has such an illustrious roadmap. They teach it in schools. In times past, we've treated that map as a religious icon; immutable, closed off to inspection or criticism, something that must be followed without question. Other eras has seen countries question their roadmap, and revise the route they came from to the one they would take. Currently, we are in the former, where we equate the past with greatness, and are not encouraged to question it - because it's the nature of our beast. For our human handiwork also tells us that while human experience matters, some humans' experiences matters more than others.

This is when history becomes troublesome: To be mindful of the past doesn't mean to be constantly looking back to a glorified version of our own. The best analogy, I guess, is the cliched one of a car journey: History is a map you use to check you're on the right road, nostalgia means you keep looking back in your rear mirror instead of in front of you. And nostalgia doesn't just interfere with an interpretation of the facts or make testimony too unreliable. Overt nostalgia, to me, is a sign that we are fucking up the future. If we are so disillusioned by the present time that we constantly revert back to some halcyon time (that never really was) then all we are doing is buring our heads in the proverbial sand of a reality that never existed - not even in a delusional one!

And sometimes, without the hindrance of nostalgia, what is in front of you can teach you a little of what has been left behind. For istance, if you think we live in an open-minded, sex-positive society now, just wait until you hear about working class men in Yorkshire, who during the 1950s were having sex with each other at work down the mines - with the approval of their wives. If their actions at work didn't disrupt the family (which meant as long as they didn't leave their wives or leave their children hungry) this could be accommodated within normal heterosexuality in the north in the mid-20th Century. But this probably had more to do with lack of birth control, and the realities of poverty, rather than being open-minded.

Or do you think violence is declining or on the increase in society today? While some statistics say we have become less violent, more recent events suggest global wars may have have lessened, but our aggressive appetite for individual violence has increased - and its initiates are getting younger and younger. In the UK, teen stabbings are on the rise, with some teens promoting themselves to firearms to build "street rep". Fifteen-year-old boys being blasted in the face by a double-barrelled shotgun as they walk to school is fast becoming an urban reality, not fairy tale. But human society isn't more or less violent than in the past, we've always been violent. Yet, we treat violence as though it were a supremacist cult reserved for the initiated, sort of like the Dionysian Mysteries, a secret religion that no one except its members know the workings to, rather than something inherent in all of us.

Or, as in the case of the pandemic itself, the day today can show us what we have failed to leave behind. The science told us that withholding vaccines from poorer nations would be "playing with fire" - as it would only be a matter of time before a new and even deadlier strain emerged - but wealthy nations ignored this advice and stockpiled jabs as though they were stockpiling nuclear weapons. And because our delusional reality is yet to teach us that to think beyond our borders is necessary for our survival, we need the objective reality of a virus to stop us from stubbornly driving ourselves into its brick wall.

Scientists have been chipping away at this wall for a long time, and they have found themselves front and centre in the "battle" with the coronavirus - but their battle isn't with the virus. Across the world they have come under attack throughout the pandemic from right-wing extremists. And the threat to Prof Marc Van Ranst is more serious than most. Belgium's leading virologist has had to live in a safehouse with his wife and 12-year-old son, guarded by security agents, against a far-right rogue soldier who has a vendetta for virologists and Covid lockdowns.

But scientists are all too human, too. Dr Robert Redfield, who led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Trump administration, told Vanity Fair that he received death threats from fellow scientists when he backed the Wuhan lab leak theory last spring. Add to that, the fact the countries need to bribe their populations to get a COVID jab, and you realise that, after all the deaths, and all the stories of personal heartache shared over the media, we still need incentives to act responsibly.

While humanity refuses to change its outlook, any advancement can be used to take us back centuries. New evidence of AI being used by police in China to recognise the emotions of detainees in order to help determine guilt or innocence, and its avowal to become the world's AI superpower by 2030 leading to a new arms race with America, means that both countries are pouring billions into cutting-edge military tech, including autonomous weapons. It's a prospect that should scare us all, because all humanity will be doing is to swap an American fairy tale for a Chinese one in the future.

It's a well-known reality in folklore literature that not all Chinese fairy tales have happy endings. This could be one of those times, and one of those tales: China is using its coronavirus relief efforts in countries like India to strengthen its influence there while it fights to expand its borders. It can be no coincidence that India has failed miserably to prevent a deadly second wave or that China bouyed by international apathy, still continues its inhumane animal practices that continue to be a port for new potential pandemics - even if this coronavirus turns out not to be one of them.

So, we need to talk. We need to talk about the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing. We need to talk about why China is crushing Hong Kong dissent and what this means for the future. Their future and ours. We need to talk about genocides. All genocides. We need to talk about violence. Our violence. It's not love, or peace, or God that will save the day. It's dialogue. And we need to talk about history, real and imagined, before we become history.

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