Christopher R. Rush
Though I grew up in a home ensconced in the past, with hardly ever a thought about the present (except for the eager anticipation of getting to the video game rental store for the latest Mario or Final Fantasy game), my sense of history was primarily from an aesthetic perspective. I mentioned in the initial definition some of the historians I read – skimmed, read, let us not quibble at the close of a semester – Tuchman, Ambrose, others. I did not mention then I read them from an aesthetic point of view, likely because I did not realize it until this course. My definition four months ago for a “good” history was “some sort of combination of ‘true’ and ‘engaging,’” likely as I reflect with more emphasis on the “engaging,” since I rarely read multiple authors on a topic or event or person to compare, contrast, refute, and such. The histories and the historians I enjoyed, aesthetically, were “good historians.”
Lukacs instigated an awareness of that approach. His definition of history as “the remembered past”[1] has lingered in the middle of my mind all term, especially his earlier line: “the very purpose of historical knowledge is not so much accuracy as a certain kind of understanding: historical knowledge is the knowledge of human beings about other human beings, and this is different from the knowledge which human beings possess of their environment.”[2] I thought historians wrote so we could remember what people used to know or do; Lukacs’s “remembered past,” with his emphasis on people knowing people, not just actions, showed me that my aesthetic approach was limited, yet I did not need to read history more like a historian but more like a person (not a literary critic in training).
After we read Lukacs, Adler’s remark, “The historians are aware of the difficulty of combining truth telling with storytelling,”[3] resonated even more – perhaps because I have been reading Catton recently, and I read Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels as a younger guy when I went through my Gettysburg movie phase, watching it every other week or so for a time, enjoying the narrative-driven historians more than the factual historians. Is Shaara a bad historian because he tells stories? No one doubts Catton, surely (he does have endnotes, after all – perhaps that is what saves him).
As a classical educator, I have read Thucydides and Herodotus before, but this encounter with them, with echoes of Lukacs and Adler dancing in my head, struck a bit differently. Thucydides: “my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.”[4] Here is Thucydides, admitting without compunction, he has told stories about what the participants said based on his understanding of the needs of the moment, what they likely or should have said, and he is a great historian – not “fast and loose,” but a bit “peppy and sub-taut,” perhaps. Herodotus: “My judgment as to the extent of Egypt is confirmed by an oracle delivered at the shrine of Ammon, of which I had no knowledge at all until after I had formed my opinion.”[5] An oracle said it, so Herodotus is working it into his history.
Tacitus relates a story (historical anecdote?) about Sejanus and concludes, “Neither of these statements would I positively affirm; still it would not have been right for me to conceal what was related by those who lived up to the time of my youth.[6] This brings us back to Lukacs’s “remembered past” – here are stories passed down to Tacitus, he cannot confirm it, but the people he knew in his youth knew these stories, and their knowledge is part of history, so he includes them as part of Roman history.
Kirk never said, “Beam me up, Scotty”; Rick never said, “Play it again, Sam,” but people think they did. Those misremembered phrases have been more influential in pop culture, a real aspect of modern Western human history, than the actual lines of those video stories. Surely that has some connection to “history, the remembered past.” We did not read 1984 for this course, though it would certainly be an interesting pairing with Lukacs: Lukacs is not concerned so much with “controlling” the past as Orwell was, as a tool for controlling the present, but Lukacs does want us to know the past (as accurately as possible, I took it, though there is the rub) to live in the present better, concerned as he is with our humanity and our connection to our common past and inexorable march to our collective future (not in a Marxian sense, of course). The mis-remembered past may be “false,” but that falsehood is not necessarily a moral evil. I do not know why I have two fir trees in my home with lights and baubles on them to celebrate the birth of the Lord Christ, but my peers would find it odd if I did not have at least one, though none of us know why we do such a thing. We are operating on a misremembered past, but we seem to be doing all right with this tradition, at least.
My understanding of history is still in motion; Lukacs was by far my favorite reading of the term, and I wrote my paper on historical gaming mainly as a way to honor and satisfy him, even more than preparation for my forthcoming gaming elective. It is his (and Adler’s) counterbalance between history and literature, facts and the “remembered past” that will stick with me the most from this course
I am also preparing to teach the ’60s Pop Culture course again with my librarian father, likely for the last time. I have been encouraging students to sign up for it mainly for his personal reflections, his “remembered past” growing up in the ’60s in New Jersey within ballistic missile range of Cuba. The last times we taught it we focused mainly on American Pop Culture, with a dose of British Invasion, USSR Cold War, and Vietnam aspects. I want to add more international components, more jazz, and more remembered past for myself and my students. This course, and Lukacs especially, has encouraged me to emphasize as well a line I used previously in the course that everyone’s “the ’60s” was different: the ’60s were different for those in San Francisco, in New York, in London, in Saigon, and certainly for those in Birmingham, Alabama. We created the course years ago mainly for the aesthetical experience: okay, it was an excuse to listen to the Beach Boys and the Beatles, but it has since become for me an opportunity to grow in this sense of “the remembered past.” I have a few colleagues who do not approve of this course, mainly because they do not want to remember those years, but with all due respect to them, I do not think that will help our students know why the United States is what it is very much, nor where we stand collectively and individually in light of those years. We shall see how it goes. My approach going in, thanks to this course, is much different this time around, from an appreciation of the arts of the day, to an understanding of the people, the ideas, the history. Perhaps I will see this decade not from a literary/aesthetic perspective this time but from a historian’s point of view.
Bibliography
Adler, Mortimer. Syntopicon. Vol. 1. Edited by Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goetz. Second Edition. Vol. 1. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990.
Herodotus. The History of Herodotus. Translated by Richard Crawley. Edited by Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goeta. Second Edition. Vol. 5. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990.
Lukacs, John. Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994.
Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War. Translated by George Rawlinson. Edited by Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goeta. Second Edition. Vol. 5. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990.
Tacitus. The Annals and The Histories. Translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb. Edited by Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goeta. Second Edition. Vol. 14. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990.
[1] John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), 9.
[2] Ibid., 7.
[3] Mortimer J. Adler, “History” in Syntopicon Vol. 1, in Great Books of the Western World, 2nd ed., eds. Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goetz (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 1:549.
[4] Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley, in Great Books of the Western World, 2nd ed., eds. Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goetz (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 5:354.
[5] Herodotus, The History of Herodotus, trans. George Rawlinson, in Great Books of the Western World, 2nd ed., eds. Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goetz (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 5:52.
[6] Tacitus, The Annals and The Histories, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, in Great Books of the Western World, 2nd ed., eds. Mortimer J. Adler and Philip W. Goetz (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1990), 14:48.
Redeeming Pandora 