Humainologie creative dialogue Sept 22 on 9/11 and using history to find a way out and a way forward

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” - George Santayana

“We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to dominate us.” - Gore Vidal

“Once you have done your homework, you realize that we need new politics. We need a new economics, where everything is based on our rapidly declining and extremely limited carbon budget. But that is not enough. We need a whole new way of thinking. … We must stop competing with each other. We need to start cooperating and sharing the remaining resources of this planet in a fair way.” - Greta Thunberg

With the climate crisis ahead of us and our history of capitalist competition and warfare still with us, we are in a situation like people in the World Trade Center in the minutes after the attack. The situation is unfolding much more slowly, but it is also going to involve the entire planet and it is going to continue for a long time. Its urgency is harder to grasp, but its importance should be easier to understand. As Greta Thunberg has expressed it, “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire because it is.”

We must find a way out of the traps of our past dysfunctional behavior and a way forward through the challenges of our future. We must learn from our past and figure out where we want to go from here. One of the most important lessons of history was essentially what the Cheshire Cat told Alice: Which way we ought to go from here depends on where we want to get to.

Please bring to our creative dialogue one or more lessons you think we need to learn from history. It’s tomorrow, Wednesday September 22, starting at 6:30 PM Calgary time. Here is the Zoom link provided by Shinobu:

Topic: Humainologie creative dialogue Time: Sep 22, 2021 06:30 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada) Every week on Wed, until Oct 27, 2021, 8 occurrence(s) Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83728528644?pwd=VmxxbDRSdHoxbU1Jam5rYnlPbnB0UT09 Meeting ID: 837 2852 8644 Passcode: 12345

Here is the link to a program about the “20 years of chaos” that have followed the attacks of 9/11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcUMj4oy_0o and here is a very short video commentary with a very important message about the American response to the attacks of 9/11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyjqvyeyPU4

To help with our learning the lessons of history, I have appended herewith my synopsis of a book that Manuel Rozental had recommended, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, by Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

Let’s find a way out and a way forward together.

Arthur

Book: (Michel-Rolph Trouillot) Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)

Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel-Rolph_Trouillot was a Haitian historian whose focus was first on Haiti itself, and then on the history of the Caribbean. Three of the five chapters in this book examine “silencing” as it applies to important chapters of Caribbean history, including the silencing of the Haitian revolution (1791-1804).

Slaves of African ancestry had risen up and overthrown their white “masters.” Just months before the insurrection, a French colonist had “reassured his metropolitan wife of the peaceful state of life in the tropics. He wrote: …’We have nothing to fear on the part of the Negroes; they are tranquil and obedient.’” Even after the fact of the uprising, the stark reality of what had happened did not quite register in the European awareness. In that same chapter (Chapter 3, “An Unthinkable History”) the author points out our tendency to ignore those facts which do not fit with our preferred way of thinking: “When reality does not coincide with deeply held beliefs, human beings tend to phrase interpretations that force reality within the scope of these beliefs. They devise formulas to repress the unthinkable and to bring it back within the realm of accepted discourse.”

My synopsis will focus on the two chapters (Chapter 1, “The Power in the Story” and Chapter 5, “The Presence in the Past”) in which he develops his conceptual framework. This book has influenced the concept of “history” ever since it was published. The author emphasizes that interpretation of both the past and the present are constantly in flux. The notion of “the fixity of pastness” is a mistake that has led many historians, American historians in particular, to abandon the role of public intellectual.

I am very much aware of the importance of having intellectuals actively involved in giving form and meaning to our times. Noam Chomsky, for example, has had a profound influence on my own life and work. Trouillot emphasizes the unfortunate consequences when serious historians are absent from public discourse. “Since historical controversies often revolve on relevance – and therefore, at least in part, on the positioning of the observer – academic historians tend to keep as far away as possible from the historical controversies that most move the public of the day. In the United States, a few have intervened in the historical debates that made news in the early 1990s: the alleged role of Jews as slave owners, the Holocaust, the Alamo, the Smithsonian exhibits on the American West and on Hiroshima, or the Virginia park project [reference to a planned Walt Disney theme park on the history of slavery in America]. But many more qualified historians have kept public silence on these and similar issues. That silence even extends to debates about the national standards for history that academics seem to have abandoned to pundits and politicians.”

That particular form of “silencing the past” is only one of those referred to in this essential book. “Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).”

To illustrate the foregoing with my own examples taken from recent history: The discovery of mass graves at the sites of residential schools uncovered past actions in which there was intentional silencing at the source. In Catholic school systems elsewhere, as depicted in “Philomena,” a movie based on a true story, there had been actual destruction of archives, shrouded in a conspiracy of silence among those who knew about it. When mass graves are discovered, there is a retrieval of facts from the past, but what narrative will arise from this? Silence is again an option. And even if a useful narrative arises, will it be ignored by the public? Will that narrative translate into meaningful action, “the making of history in the final instance”?

Interpretation of both the past and the present are constantly in flux. The production of history involves both the act and the interpretation of the act, and this duality is fluid. Furthermore, each of us is involved in the process of creating the facts of history and in the process of interpreting those facts. “History is always produced in a specific historical context. Historical actors are also narrators, and vice versa.” We can assume that the histories that were written in 1930 about American slavery would differ from those written in 1990; and we can predict that all those past histories would differ from a history of American slavery that might be written thirty years from now.

Here it is important to introduce the concept of authenticity. Historical authenticity “resides not in the fidelity to an alleged past but in an honesty vis-à-vis the present as it re-presents the past.” As an example of a failure of authenticity, Trouillot again mentions the history of American slavery “theme park” that Walt Disney had planned (an idea that was widely criticized when it became known). “When we imagine Disney’s project and visualize a line of white tourists munching on chewing gum and fatty food, purchasing tickets for the ‘painful, disturbing, and agonizing’ experience promised by the television ads, we are not into The Past. And we should not ask these tourists to be true to that past: they were not responsible for slavery. …The trivialization of slavery – and of the suffering it caused inheres in [that kind of theme park].” Further to the theme of authenticity, the author refers to both the importance of research into the Holocaust and the abhorrence that this history inspires in many Germans today and writes: “But no amount of historical research about the Holocaust and no amount of guilt about Germany’s past can serve as a substitute for marching in the streets against German skinheads today. Fortunately, quite a few prominent German historians understand that much.”

“The map is not the territory” was the way Alfred Korzybski had expressed it. Interpretation of both the present and the past will always be ambiguous. And yet we must continue our efforts to understand, to interpret history even as we engage in the process of making history. If we get hung up on a need for some eternal and unchanging “truth,” we miss the choice of a dynamic intellectual approach to better outcomes. In the words of the author, “Positions need not be eternal in order to justify a legitimate defense. To miss this point is to bypass the historicity of the human condition. Any search for eternity condemns us to the impossible choice between fiction and positivist truth [referring to logical positivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism], between nihilism and fundamentalism, which are two sides of the same coin. As we move through the end of the millennium, it will be increasingly tempting to seek salvation by faith alone, now that most deeds seem to have failed.”

Here in Calgary, like human beings everywhere, we are making history day by day. This book can help us understand the process and how to do it most imaginatively and effectively.