The identity of history

dead British soldiers at the battle of Fromelles, 1916

of history:

* history is one big glunk,
* history is not the summation of all events (not all events will be recorded), 

* history is not "in" time, time is not a bucket,
* time is a mode of being of reality, time is the becoming of reality,
* from the future we cannot cherry-pick globally while ignoring local regions,

of necessity:

* whatever happens necessarily happens (otherwise SOMETHING ELSE would happen),
* what happens supervenes on the agents contributing the diverse processes including the agents themselves,

problems with presentism:

* presentism is the distortion that the present is normatively better than the past,
* the past cannot be retrofitted into a principle of satisfaction: it is what it is,
* the past can only be understood as IT IS not as it should've been (principle of necessity)
* to understand the past one has to go to the past, rather than bring the past to the present,

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Let's apply what we've learned about the philosophy and neurophysiology of memories in chapter 4 to the idea of history.  

* History is an archive of human events in the world. All events of the past are fair game. A historian is an archivist of all these events.  

* History is not an exact science for two reasons: first, historians dig the past from the present (like a  social memory, whether in the form of texts of archaeological sites. The facts need to be reconstructed). This is where interpretation comes in. second, history is an interpretive science because as the historian describes the facts, he also prescribes (for example: which facts should be selected and what we learn from the past).

* Interpretation is all we have in history and it's OK (as long as we end up with a reliable interpretation), how? getting as close as possible to the truth.

Let's add three points:

1- The past is the memory retention of history,
2- We cannot cherry pick globally ignoring local contexts,
3- Whatever happened, necessarily happened,

Explanation of these points:

1- History is all we have to understand the past. Now, the whole past is a big glunk.

History can be divided into chunks of time that we call epochs. However, be mindful that making a cut in history remains local decision of a global occurrence. Whatever we bring back from the past has to be brought back discreetly. And local decisions always sacrifice global causation (which brings us to 2- and cherry-picking).

History supervenes on society, which supervenes on the agents contributing the diverse processes engulfing the agents themselves.

2- Marx's historical materialism proposes that history is dialectical in that each "moment" is always superseded in the next moment and so on. Supervening all the different "moments" is HISTORY, the glunk, which is as blind to previous and future moments as society is blind to individual agents -or groups trying to bring up change or lack of thereof (this feature of blindness is very important for Marx's historical materialism and Darwin's evolutionary biology).

The machine of history is always in automatic mode. THAT'S A LAW.

For example: we know, now, that slavery is shameful. But there was a moment when slavery was the lay of the land. Take the Rome of the 1st Century AD. At this time, slavery happens (following Marx's hypothesis) not because of specific agents' choices, but because of historic modes and relations of production within societies causing agents to act in certain ways.

Following Marx, one could argue that what ends slavery in America was not this or that particular action of agents, but rather, the North's industrial power plus the civil war, which was a result of fundamental economic changes taking place in America.

here are some moral questions to history (they distort more than they help), history's EVENTUALISM IS NOT MORAL.

1- If the French had a revolution in 1789, how come they had an emperor in 1804, just a few years later? we're asking history what went wrong.

2- Jefferson had slaves, but he was also an enlightened man for his epoch. How do we reconcile the two? Click here and look for 3 different contemporaneous assessments. Here we compare the past with the present to learn a lesson.

3- Are we better off now than before say 200 years ago? The answer seems affirmative (and yet, many people think we're worse off). Here the question compares historic periods.

PRESENTISM and ITS PROBLEMS

Presentism is the idea that we have the duty to correct the moral failings of the past:

1- Presentists ignore that the past is already full. It cannot be retrofitted. 
2- Let's apply proposition 3 above to the present. The present happens necessarily. This has important consequences.
3- Each "moment" is self-contained by its own complexity. Individuals at the bottom can only do so much.

We forget to include ourselves inside the complexity above ourselves!  

Presentism takes for granted that being in the present automatically grants the present epoch a particular privilege over the past. Clearly a mistake, since each cut in the process of history is necessarily caused by the previous one. In other words, the past is full of itself. This unbounded zeal to correct the past has had horrible consequences to the historic sites and memories from the past.

Take a look at this list of genocides committed throughout history.

Are they fair? Of course not. But the question and answer are out of order. It already happened! And it happened as a result of specific conditions IN THE PAST.

Genghis Khan's armies killed about 5% of the combined population of the world! Yet, it's not black and white,  (there are endogenous and exogenous reasons, dependent upon ethnic, economic, social, technological contexts). As you move up the complexity you better understand the seeming absurdity of it all, not to mention the causes for the Mongol's Empire expansion, without which you would not have, as ripple effects) the histories of Muslim and Russian expansion, plus the Renaissance in Europe.

Following their logic, Presentists would see the Mongol invaders as "monsters," "rapists" or "terrorists," etc. To understand the epoch, you have to travel to the past; don't completely give up your epoch, you just suspend it to gain insight into the Mongols' particular context. A good exercise is to become a Mongol soldier ready to fight, and then a native Alans, horrified at the prospect of Khan's army approaching your territory).

to understand the past we must travel to the past rather than bring the past to the present,
the present is always presenting. the past IS NOT.

doing history means "traveling" to the past to apprehend REALITY (reality is neither past nor present). accepting REALITY's own terms.
only then we're ready to bring that lesson to the present. 

let's take a look at some nasty consequences of presentism:

the pyramid of Menkaure, (destroyed by Saladin's son, 12th Century AD),  
Bash Tapia Castle (destroyed by ISIS, 2014),
the destruction of Warsaw (the Nazis 1940s)
Entartete Kunst (presented by the Nazis, 1937)
the Buddhas of Bamiyan (destroyed by the Taliban, 2001)
the Mosque of Babur, (destroyed by Hindus, 1990s)
the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, (destroyed by Stalin in 1931)
Larung Gar, Tibet (demolition by China in 2016)

presentists miss a didactic lesson: better to keep the records of our past, instead of repressing and or destroying and hiding it. for the sake of the future, so it may not happen again.