Why study the ancient past? Why fund study of the ancient past?
POINT: It is a lot easier to compare new ideas if comparing to what already exists – political, philosophical ideas, etc. Having something that quite a few people are familiar with facilitates new discussions.
It raises the point that every discussion you have is framed based on previous ideas – including the history of science – the way we talk about and understands science originates in the Greek ideas of science. There is no way to understand how we as a society interact with science as a discipline without understanding the roots – lots of disciplines existing today in west have roots in classical world.
COUNTERPOINT: We’ve drifted into argument the that these studies are only worth it because they are relevant today – but just because not relevant today doesn’t make it not worth studying – perhaps someone wants to study the peasant conditions in 13th cent rural France –you can be interested in it for itself, you don’t need to prove it has relevance – I’m not even sure how productive a teleological understanding of reading history is …
A lot of stuff we read as classics was lost for a while, so it is not necessarily that intellectual tradition in the West followed a straight trajectory because we forgot things, we rediscovered things…
For example, it is easy when reasoning to trace a straight line but maybe was a coincidence two people thought that
POINT: There is an ethical call to the study past because you never know if it will be useful or not but if you don’t produce important knowledge because you dismissed an opportunity to study the past…well, there is a powerful ethical issue there. We have access to knowledge and it COULD be useful therefore it should be studied…
Studying the past reminds us that the world has not always been this way, therefore it can be different again – it can be a powerful counter to apathetic “presentivism.” And it can be an inspiration of different worlds, different futures to create…
COUNTERPOINT: But should we really fund these studies if we’re running out of funding for other things?
So what – we know past helps us understand present – it is nice to have understanding but does that translate into change in being or change in thinking? And it doesn’t need to translate into anything per se, but sometimes I wonder if really gives us that much…
COUNTERCOUNTERPOINT – Studying the ancient past is deeper than ascertaining where certain ideas originated—it is the whole basis of archeology – the whole process of understanding how certain processes have worked out in the past such as the origin of the state or how societies started to develop – this is relevant to how social differentiation can play out today…
DEVIL’s ADVOCATE: To play the devil’s advocate: it is all worth studying for its own sake – we have to embrace that at some point – generally it won’t positively affect a mass of people if you publish a given article on these things…
COUNTER DEVIL’S ADVOCATE: – but it keeps a certain sensibility alive to fund these things – if you stop giving it importance even if it’s not useful, then you lose that sensibility and you start being a business school….
So the practice of doing it important rather than actual result?
POINT: Just because it doesn’t materially benefit people, it can benefit them in some intangible way – communicating history to nonacademics is really important – an understanding of the past is important .
COUNTERPOINT: But it is more difficult with classics. Greek ideas are not the origin of modern Britain so it is more difficult to justify (versus studying 19th century British nationalism)
POINT: There is a problem of people wanting to control historical narrative to serve one purpose or another…When first learning history from your textbook, the writer picks a few important people and it can be a political decision. For example in Texas, some textbooks de-emphasized Jefferson because his work wasn’t in line with some conservative sentiments in that area!
There are “facts” of course, but there are various facts on each side – and if you choose to use one fact, and omit another, you are privileging one narrative. Not to mention all of the myths and fabrications that can make their way into historical narratives.
COUNTERPOINT: But history has to be a narrative – there is no way to tell history without choosing to tell it in a certain way – no way to be truly objective. Perhaps this is a difference between history and natural sciences – there is a literary element…
COUNTERCOUNTERPOINT: But for general population, that awareness (of it being a narrative) isn’t there – in academic readings of history, you know that you’re reading a problematic narrative, you’ve been taught to look at it that way, but much of the population is told “this is what happened,” not that this is one possible narrative of what happened…
Actually there is the same problem in science and sometimes it is even bigger – there is an experiment result and people take it as true. Everything is a narrative that you build to explain something, interpret something – perhaps this is a disconnect between academia and the public – where science studies and historical narratives are more framed as fact
POINT: There are 100s of ways to argue about or interpret something (like archeology) – but does all that doubt bog it down and make it less fun? If say well, we found this and we THINK it means this, but we’re not sure…
COUNTERPOINT: This argument can get really tricky though…Take climate change. If we view it as a narrative that’s constructed – which was the case with “climate gate” – and show that knowledge is not as perfectly certain as we thought – if we say, when presenting evidence, that science not as definitive as it appears – and if public knows about this – there is more room for doubt, for finding errors – in other words, it is hard to present science as narrative without undermining it…
POINT: Anecdote: friend studying science here says science is like being in a dark room and having to you’re your way through without bumping into anything. If you can get through the room, you think you were right about where the furniture is placed and what it is, but you can’t be sure.
COUNTERPOINT: It is really hard though because there is a need for certainty – well is this vaccine safe or not?? When people’s health is on the line, you need to be definitive, to have faith in it.
Transmitting the idea that “we don’t know what we’re doing” in science would scare people.
In the humanities you’re allowed to be more relative, to say that there are different theories /interpretations…we can be less objective.
COUNTERCOUNTERPOINT: But we can’t be objective (in science) either – physicists can pick to look at something as wave or particle and it affects what results you get – you’re in the experiment!
POINT: Even asking these questions is a part of a historic context – we’re in a new sphere of knowledge where we question the narrative, the context….
POINT: It is hard to reconcile unsettled view of history with commitment to fact and to ACTION. It is hard to reconcile that relativism with humanist action…
POINT: Perhaps the objective should be to teach the subjectivity of history?
But how can you teach that to a 12 year old?
Still, showing kids other ways of life and times is already an exposure to the idea that others don’t have to be Other and Separate…it helps develop empathy and even dismantle dangerous forms of nationalism to see other ways of life other kinds of societies across time and space – it can open people and prepare them to see things as subjective – to see that there are ways of life other than ours…
POINT: In the States, House Resolution 3077 – which passed the House committee and later, when repackaged, passed both House and Senate committees – stipulated that national security people should sit on the board of international studies such as Middle Eastern studies and history…this shows (frighteningly) the weight of different narratives in academia, that they could be seen (ridiculously) as a security risk!
Spain recently passed the Law of Historical Memory – regarding the Spanish civil war, it ordered the removal of any monuments vindicating the side that had lost – such as withdrawing names of streets for right wing side. If you have to do that, if have to make moral categories for who gets a name on a street, then wouldn’t you have to take away the names of most of them? The idea of injecting an ethical part to how we understand history is problematic….
