ON HISTORY

History is often regarded as a record of events and people who once lived and were famous, and about episodes that once transpired and jolted the course of events. Lord Chesterfield called it “a confused heap of facts.” This history, especially in the human context, is what is usually presented in textbooks. It is useful for memorizing names and dates0

History is a lot more than that. In so far as it embodies names and actions that were once part of a nation’s life, history is the collective memory of a people. It informs us about the movers and shakers of the past, for ultimately history is shaped by the thoughts and actions of individuals, written down and narrated by other individuals who rarely, if ever, were actually present when the events transpired.

History inspires the current generation by revealing the great achievements of the people xwho lived in other periods. National histories sometimes instill pride in one’s ancestors: a privilege that, in our own times, is beyond the reach of new immigrants to a country. History can also warn us of the blunders that others once committed without realizing the long range effects of their actions.

Most of all, history is the story of significant changes that have occurred in the world. These changes are fast or slow, good or bad, but they make one period ever so different from another.  In other words, the running thread in history is change. What needs to be borne in mind is that there have been many, many changes with the result that the world in which we live today is considerably different from the world in which people lived a hundred or a thousand years ago.

When changes are slow it results in a gradual, almost unperceived, transformation. This is somewhat like the grown-up adult, a middle-aged or old person who rarely consciously experiences the day by day changes that transformed the infant to the greying senior. When monumental changes occur too fast or too suddenly we have revolutions. In a matter of days or weeks the old order is completely gone, yielding place to a new.  When change does not happen or is arrested from happening there is stagnation. In such a case societies linger on in static anachronistic modes.

An important aspect  of history is that all too often the changes and factors that cause them  are completely unpredictable, brought about by forces over which we have little control and about whose occurrence few could have surmised. Notwithstanding books like 1984 and other fictions about the as yet unborn future, on any given day, in any nation on earth no one has or can have the slightest inkling of who will be leading the nation three decades hence, and what the status of international relations will be. Invariably instigators of major changes are persons who rise to prominence and power by one means or another. History is the most dramatic proof of the fact that there is no such thing as  determinism, strict or loose,  when it comes to human affairs.