When the future forgets the past

Consider what it takes for an idea to get from a mind in Ancient Greece to yours.

Someone generally had to write it down. Most ideas are already out of the game because most never left the heads of the people who thought them. To write it down, the person had to be literate, which means educated, which in most cultures (including ancient Greece) means relatively well-off and male. Many great ideas and inspiring art died in slave ships and coal mines in the heads of the people who conceived them, who as often as not were of a gender, race, or class disfavored in their historical moment.

Even if an idea was written down, it then had to be disseminated. Ideas left in a desk drawer couldn't reach you. The written and disseminated document then had to survive, one way or another, for more than 2,000 years.

To reach the present day, it must be the case that no person or thing destroyed the document, and with it the idea—not just in its own time, but in every year, every decade, every century that followed.

Most documents were written on things that are vulnerable to fire, water, or time. So every couple of centuries you have to go through the laborious task of recopying the document. And people naturally tend to preserve and recopy ideas that they like.

This has changed less than you might think in the digital age: People tend to save and share ideas that they like.

Knowledge disappears easily.

Stick a pin in that one.

The beloved and the reviled

Even popular ideas can have a hard time navigating the dodgy process of history. Didymus of Alexandria, among the greatest of ancient scholars, earned the nickname “Bronze Butt” for sitting long enough to write more than 3,000 books — of which zero have survived. Stobaeus, a literary historian in the 5th century, compiled 1,430 quotations from the greatest authors of the ancient world. His compilation survived, but 1,100 of the quotations—more than three in four—are from works now lost. The revolutionary ideas of Democritus, one of the greatest thinkers of all time, survive only in glowing references by other writers.

But the greatest impediment to the survival of an idea is being reviled, even briefly. Ideas that fall out of favor at any point in their history, especially where the powerful are concerned, are unlikely to survive. The chain of transmission is broken, and they vanish.

Most of the lost works quoted by Stobaeus were destroyed by the Christian church during its systematic destruction of the legacy of the classical world. "The burning of books and burial of scholars," the actual name and literal description of an event in the Qin dynasty of 213 BCE, was intended to suppress Confucian ideas in favor of Legalism. Tang emperor Wuzong did the same to Buddhism 1,000 years later in an attempt to spread Taoism.

The Albigensian Crusade and the Spanish Inquisition eradicated competing ideologies, as did the French Revolution.

Authoritarian regimes in modern times have continued to place a high priority on controlling the narrative. History is stretched and bent to make the regime appear to be the crowning outcome of a glorious historical mandate. Imperial Japan’s militarist government destroyed local texts, artifacts, and historical records in Korea and China to suppress local identities and support its expansionist and nationalist agenda. The Nazis orchestrated mass book burnings, targeting works that were considered "un-German" to enforce their narrative. Stalin often altered or erased photographs and records to eliminate those who had fallen out of favor. Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution destroyed historical and religious texts to align China’s history and culture with communist ideology and rewrote history to glorify communist leaders and erase past failures. Franco, the Taliban, the Khmer Rouge—rewriting history is standard authoritarian practice.

Knowledge disappears easily. If no one cares enough to push back against the power that erases it, it's gone.

So how secure is our current knowledge of history? How likely is it to survive the coming decade or so?

The 1776 Commission

On November 2, 2020, the day before the 2020 general election, then-President Trump announced the creation of "The 1776 Commission," an advisory group to give American students a "patriotic education" by combatting what he called the "twisted web of lies" in US schools that teaches students about systemic racism.

Eleven weeks later, on January 18, 2021—12 days after the storming of the US Capitol and two days before the end of Trump's (first) term—the committee published The 1776 Report. Historians declared that it was "filled with errors and partisan politics" and "outright lies." Jacobin magazine called it "staggeringly awful, trotting out every moldy reactionary trope about the history of the United States."

According to the report, the Founding Fathers all hated slavery; the civil rights movement contradicted our founding principles; modern liberals are punishing white Americans for the sins of their ancestors; and university professors pursue “deliberately destructive scholarship” that “shatters the civic bonds that unite all Americans.”

People tend to save and share ideas that they like. And a lot of realities about American history make a lot of people uncomfortable.

American history, says the report, must be told in a way that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling.” But what shall we do if our nation's history included the telling of any events that are accurate but not ennobling? I struggle to think of any, but if such a thing were to somehow happen, which principle would prevail?

(Real) history suggests that as long as a given authoritarian draws breath, the ennobling falsehood will trump the truth.

President Biden terminated the 1776 Commission on his first day in office.

The 2024 GOP Party platform promised to bring it back:

Once the authoritarians and their regimes are gone, some of the states they governed have shown an impressive ability to confront their demons and correct the record. And none more so than Germany.

How and why a nation owns its whole history

Everywhere you go in Germany, especially in the major cities, there is acknowledgement and education regarding the Third Reich. In Berlin, a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Educational centers and memorials at Auschwitz, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen. Brass plaques (Stolpersteine or "stumbling blocks") in the pavement outside the last known residences of Holocaust victims, with their names and fates.

Holocaust education, mandatory in German schools, emphasizing the history of the Third Reich. Billions of euros paid in reparations to Holocaust survivors. German leaders explicitly acknowledging guilt, including Chancellor Willy Brandt's famous 1970 "Kniefall" (kneeling) at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial. Literature, film, museums, exhibitions, performances and art and anti-hate campaigns.

By honestly confronting a chapter of its history that was anything but "ennobling," Germany was paradoxically ennobled—returned to the community of nations and propelled rapidly to a position of leadership among the Western democracies that could not have been imagined just 75 years ago.

American history has never been especially unvarnished, but it is about to get the whitewashing that conservatives have hoped for, longed for, demanded. They have been explicit about the fact and nature of the revisions to come, what is to be taught, and what is to be set aside.

Our grandchildren will learn about pilgrim's pride, a war against a mean king, the War of Northern Aggression, westward expansion, and how we saved Europe twice, went to the moon, and beat back the communist menace.

Slavery is a regrettable footnote ended by the enduring love of Christ Jesus. The forced relocation and decimation of Native Americans disappears in the rolling thunder of manifest destiny. There will be no chance to learn from the massacres at My Lai, Tulsa, Atlanta, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, or certainly The Pulse. The gassing of protesters for a photo op yields to the gaslighting of America—you sure you didn't just see that on The Wire or something?

And the peaceful protest at the Capitol that led to the shooting of a patriot who was singing a hymn, remember that? Then Biden's shameful attempt to imprison his political rival? All of that stays in.

It's far-fetched, I know. A paranoid fantasy, of course. Evidence of these events is everywhere. The internet runs to the horizon. No one can just press a button and make it as if an event never happened. Of course they can't.

Next time: a resistance technique for when they do.