by PAUL COLLITS – WHAT will future historians know and think about the 2020s? Will there even be historians in the future?
I once asked Professor Ian Plimer why he persisted in engaging in rational debate over climate change, when his opponents never use reason, evidence or logic, nor can they, by definition, ever be persuaded to change their entrenched?
- There’s a two-pronged strategy in play, and it is deliberate and evil.
- The first is to bury the top-down generated evils of the present.
- The second is to render any potential dissidents incapable of creating an alternate story.
His answer was that he was simply recording the facts in a paper trail for future historians to sift through, in order to understand what occurred in our time.
To understand that there were, in fact, voices of sanity and science in our day. And, perhaps, to understand why the good guys lost.
IN VAIN
Prof Plimer’s noble efforts might still be in vain, however. Is there any real hope that the written record of his work and that of others in his profession doing proper climate science will be preserved for future historians?
Well, there is a concerted effort to make sure the Plimer version of climate doesn’t leak to the next generation.
George Orwell famously said, in that novel that gets quoted a lot these days: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
Who, we wonder, will control the present in the future (if you know what I mean)?
Creating one’s own version of history isn’t new. Someone once asked Winston Churchill if he thought history would be kind to him.
He said in reply – of course. I intend to write it!
Norman F Kantor, a medievalist historian, has written a book called Inventing the Middle Ages. It is about how medieval historians in the 20th century “invented” a picture that became embedded in both scholarly and common understandings of that time.
Whig history is another example of, in this case, the “winners” writing history.
Wikipedia says: “Whig history (or Whig historiography) is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a ‘glorious present’.”
What utter rubbish it is, too.
Progressives and Marxists have their own BS versions of the story of “inevitable progress”.
NUMBING
But many argue that our day presents very peculiar problems and unprecedented challenges, in the matter of accurately understanding and recording our times. It is that bad.
The Substack writer Catherine Shannon, recently quoted at length and with considerable approval by Hungary-based writer Rod Dreher, has written an article called Everyone is Numbing Out.
It describes our current cultural state as follows: “It’s easy to identify the presence of something, but it’s much harder to identify the absence of something.
“If your boyfriend brings you flowers, that’s awfully nice. If he never brings you flowers, it might take you a while to notice.
“Maybe you do eventually notice, but you decide to cope. You tell yourself you don’t care about getting flowers.
“Maybe you take it a step further: ‘Actually, flowers are really basic and lame. Only basic girls like flowers. I’m a cool girl and cool girls don’t care about getting flowers.’
“If this goes on for long enough – even if you are genuinely presented with flowers at some point—you will see them as a kind of joke.
“It sounds so trivial, I know, but if you dull your ‘receptors for flowers’ for years on end, you will eventually fail to see the beauty of the gesture.”
We have forgotten the value of “getting flowers”, and much else besides. The abandonment of the study of history and of the development in the next generation of the critical skill set needed to study is an example of the flower problem.
British historian Nigel Biggar, who is visiting Australia on a speaking tour this month, has authored a book called Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning.
He has also pondered the importance of studying history, and has lamented the current absence of real historical study at every level of education.
It is a compelling presentation.
There is a toxic mix of developments in play, that, taken together – as we should, since they are all occurring at the same time – help to explain the laments of both Shannon and Biggar.
There is, all around us:
- Information bombardment;
- Educating out, over three generations, of critical skills;
- Narrative construction based on little more than ideology plus emotionalism;
- An attack on “meaning” and the search for it;
- No one is paying attention;
- Fewer and fewer now know how to determine to what matters attention should be paid;
- Chaotic life, at speed;
- The internet;
- Memory-holing across the board;
- Silencing alternate voices;
- Multiple existential threats to our survival, whether from Chinese economic imperialism, reverse-colonisation, Islamic fundamentalism, neo-Marxism on the streets, new world order thinking and actions, woke ideology and global corporatism – all working, if not in tandem, then with cross-revolutionary alliances of convenience, to undermine sanity;
- Consumerism.
Such is our time, and it explains the existential crisis we face. It is often interpreted in terms of “the West” and its survival.
There is a two-pronged strategy in play, and it is deliberate and evil.
The first strategy is to bury the top-down generated evils of the present.
The second is to render any potential dissidents incapable of creating an alternate story.
This, in turn, has two elements. First, silence the current, mature push-back class, such that it is. And second, render the coming generation utterly incapable of fightback.
Deny them the tools and weapons. De-fang them, ensuring they don’t know what they don’t know.
In Shannon’s terms, induce “numbing out” and a denial of meaning. Smother them with bogan entertainment and cut off their intellectual supply lines. It is classic military strategy.
As Nigel Biggar points out, the eternal temptation of what Shannon calls the numbed-out generation is to fall for the easy narrative. That is the fate of our generation.
But is it worse than that.
The existence of the numbed-out generation means that we are not enabling a generation of future thinkers to understand our utter, evil madness at every level, and to record it and correct it.
EVIL
It is the evil of Orwell’s 1984, come true in our day. But it is even worse than Orwell imagined.
We have allowed the erection of a system in which there can be no way back. Yes, Orwell knew about memory-holing. He invented the term.
But he didn’t know just how efficiently and effectively we would be able to disable future historians.
God help the historians of the future. Yes, they will have their own biases and narratives, as we know from the above.
But they will simply have nothing to go on, in analysing our times. It will all be memory-holed, yes, but worse, the potential historians will be obliterated from the game.
The current rulers mean for humanity not to be able to find a way back to sanity and humanism. One suspects, even knows, that this is what the ruling class wants. And they are very good at it.
As we know. PC
Sir,
We cannot merely surrender to this appalling madness. Surely this is an aberration that history will record as a dark period which mankind fought against and ultimately defeated.
Clinging to hope!
Those who try to cancel (rewrite history ) have no brains and are just as happy without them . Everything they hate and attack about our past history has made their lives possible and have benefited from it all as well . I guess the word Irony is lost on them along with their lack of brains ?