Ariddia
02-02-2008, 19:10
Yes, yes, I know I said I wasn't going to post any more... I still try to make myself believe that. But this is something rather interesting, and I wanted to see what you all think of it.
This comes from a lecture by Australian historian Inga Clendinnen in 1999.
Benedict Anderson asked what holds nations together. Think about it. What set of experiences signifies 'Australia' to you? What do you directly know of it? You know your family, your friends, the people at the school, your workmates if you still have a job, the lady in the corner shop if there is still a corner shop, the people at the fruit stall, a cloud of relations, your football team, some people on radio and television. You will have travelled over bits of it, some bits often if your social or economic work takes you there. But it is still a very patchy mental map. There will be suburbs even in your home city as unvisited as Marco Polo's China.
So where is 'Australia'? As Anderson makes clear in his Imagined Communities -- it's in your mind. Nations are imaginary communities, and none the less real for that. And nations, especially democratic nations, especially democratic ethnically and religiously diverse nations like our own, cannot hold together unless they share a common vision as to how the world works, what constitutes the good life, what behaviour is worthy of respect, what behaviour is shameful. Present input clearly matters -- the journalists of the ABC and SBS influence my image of Australia and the world every day -- but our understanding of our nation is also profoundly shaped by our view of its past, of its history -- however vague that view might be.
That the study of history can encourage civic virtue is not a fashionable view in 1999. This has been the bloodiest century in human history, which makes it a bad time for the notion that good will and mutual respect can come out of reflection on the past. Most people would say that Yugoslavia has been destroyed by its history: by unassuaged passions and unforgiven wrongs. Michael Ignatieff has written a fine book arguing that it is not the past dictating to the present which has devastated Yugoslavia, but present politicians ruthlessly manipulating the past: that it is bad history, not true history, which has reduced the place to ruins. He may be right. I think he is right. [...]
Other people would say I am too ambitious in wanting true stories to make up the history of a nation rather than one simple and therefore necessarily false one: a story about how fine and great we are, how fine and great we have always been. They would say that people need simple stories which will make them proud of their country; that too many stories, especially if they are as lumpy as true stories tend to be, will only confuse them.
We have a prime example of the dangers of a simple story powerfully and repeatedly told close to hand in the United States of America, where American History is on the syllabus at most years in primary and secondary school, where the American flag is worshipped daily, and where 'America' officially can do no wrong. Teach grown men and women a nursery version of their history and you will make babies of them when it comes to grasping the actual workings of their own society, and of their nation in the wider world. The hypocrisy of much American foreign policy is only possible because so many of its people believe that the USA simply could not engage in dishonourable actions. They believe in their nursery version. So, even more alarmingly, do many people within the United States government.
One example only: in the course of snatching their one-time friend, later arch-enemy, President Noriega from Panama, in an operation they code-named 'Just Cause', the invading US troops and air force killed somewhere between 3,000 and 7000 people, nearly all of them civilians going about their ordinary business -- not drug dealing, not engaging in subversive political activity, just shopping, working, going to school. And all to lay hands on a single villain. Those thousands of dead Panamanians simply do not exist in American consciousness, much less burden their conscience. They have been comprehensively 'disappeared'. The internal problems of the United States polity -- angry black men and women in the cities, armed white men in the hills -- have a lot to do with that insistent but spurious national story.
By contrast, there are, increasingly, at the end of this terrible century, examples of divided nations who are making the choice for good history. Let me offer you two. First, South Africa. Under the old regime racial division and gross inequality were sustained by state violence, and caused incalculable social misery. That régime was ended by negotiation, so there could not be a criminal tribunal, a Truth and Justice Commission. Instead, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up. [...]
My second and still problematic example is Ireland, where over the last few years we have watched not so much the forging of a new history, but a halting, difficult movement away from bad history. We have watched a people extricating themselves from the tyranny of legends, from corrupted histories which have been used to promote murderous division. [...]
However -- there is a 'we' and a 'they' in this country, a divide between Aborigines and the rest of us. Wherever they live, they are the product of their distinctive history, as we are of ours. Their experience of their unique past crucially matters to their present situation, and to their view of their possible future. Our ignorance of their history, or our denial of it, is a threat to us all, because it is the major impediment in the way of general agreement as to what constitutes justice and decency, which are core issues in any democracy.
(link (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/boyers/stories/s66348.htm))
This comes from a lecture by Australian historian Inga Clendinnen in 1999.
Benedict Anderson asked what holds nations together. Think about it. What set of experiences signifies 'Australia' to you? What do you directly know of it? You know your family, your friends, the people at the school, your workmates if you still have a job, the lady in the corner shop if there is still a corner shop, the people at the fruit stall, a cloud of relations, your football team, some people on radio and television. You will have travelled over bits of it, some bits often if your social or economic work takes you there. But it is still a very patchy mental map. There will be suburbs even in your home city as unvisited as Marco Polo's China.
So where is 'Australia'? As Anderson makes clear in his Imagined Communities -- it's in your mind. Nations are imaginary communities, and none the less real for that. And nations, especially democratic nations, especially democratic ethnically and religiously diverse nations like our own, cannot hold together unless they share a common vision as to how the world works, what constitutes the good life, what behaviour is worthy of respect, what behaviour is shameful. Present input clearly matters -- the journalists of the ABC and SBS influence my image of Australia and the world every day -- but our understanding of our nation is also profoundly shaped by our view of its past, of its history -- however vague that view might be.
That the study of history can encourage civic virtue is not a fashionable view in 1999. This has been the bloodiest century in human history, which makes it a bad time for the notion that good will and mutual respect can come out of reflection on the past. Most people would say that Yugoslavia has been destroyed by its history: by unassuaged passions and unforgiven wrongs. Michael Ignatieff has written a fine book arguing that it is not the past dictating to the present which has devastated Yugoslavia, but present politicians ruthlessly manipulating the past: that it is bad history, not true history, which has reduced the place to ruins. He may be right. I think he is right. [...]
Other people would say I am too ambitious in wanting true stories to make up the history of a nation rather than one simple and therefore necessarily false one: a story about how fine and great we are, how fine and great we have always been. They would say that people need simple stories which will make them proud of their country; that too many stories, especially if they are as lumpy as true stories tend to be, will only confuse them.
We have a prime example of the dangers of a simple story powerfully and repeatedly told close to hand in the United States of America, where American History is on the syllabus at most years in primary and secondary school, where the American flag is worshipped daily, and where 'America' officially can do no wrong. Teach grown men and women a nursery version of their history and you will make babies of them when it comes to grasping the actual workings of their own society, and of their nation in the wider world. The hypocrisy of much American foreign policy is only possible because so many of its people believe that the USA simply could not engage in dishonourable actions. They believe in their nursery version. So, even more alarmingly, do many people within the United States government.
One example only: in the course of snatching their one-time friend, later arch-enemy, President Noriega from Panama, in an operation they code-named 'Just Cause', the invading US troops and air force killed somewhere between 3,000 and 7000 people, nearly all of them civilians going about their ordinary business -- not drug dealing, not engaging in subversive political activity, just shopping, working, going to school. And all to lay hands on a single villain. Those thousands of dead Panamanians simply do not exist in American consciousness, much less burden their conscience. They have been comprehensively 'disappeared'. The internal problems of the United States polity -- angry black men and women in the cities, armed white men in the hills -- have a lot to do with that insistent but spurious national story.
By contrast, there are, increasingly, at the end of this terrible century, examples of divided nations who are making the choice for good history. Let me offer you two. First, South Africa. Under the old regime racial division and gross inequality were sustained by state violence, and caused incalculable social misery. That régime was ended by negotiation, so there could not be a criminal tribunal, a Truth and Justice Commission. Instead, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up. [...]
My second and still problematic example is Ireland, where over the last few years we have watched not so much the forging of a new history, but a halting, difficult movement away from bad history. We have watched a people extricating themselves from the tyranny of legends, from corrupted histories which have been used to promote murderous division. [...]
However -- there is a 'we' and a 'they' in this country, a divide between Aborigines and the rest of us. Wherever they live, they are the product of their distinctive history, as we are of ours. Their experience of their unique past crucially matters to their present situation, and to their view of their possible future. Our ignorance of their history, or our denial of it, is a threat to us all, because it is the major impediment in the way of general agreement as to what constitutes justice and decency, which are core issues in any democracy.
(link (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/boyers/stories/s66348.htm))