The founding fathers of the United States were among the rare people who have existed on this earth who knew at the time when they were making history that they were making history. Armed with the accumulated knowledge of thousands of years of Western theology, political philosophy, and historical insight, and trusting that they were on the side of the angels, they waged war and engaged in self-conscious efforts to frame the historical understanding of their historically significant deeds. Even the ordinary people of small towns in the colonies that became the United States possessed people of some learning who were able to identify the rights at stake in their conflict with a British empire that believed that they had the power to decide all things for the colonies without any input or consent from the colonies themselves. This is not to say that the founding fathers of the United States (nor the founding mothers, brothers, sisters, and others) were perfect people, but they knew that what they were recording would become history. And they were right. Even in their failings, such as their failure to do more in eliminating the curse of slavery among them, they recorded their understanding that slavery itself was unjust, a sign of moral sensitivity that demonstrates that even when they were wrong, they were human beings still, and possessed of insight not always appreciated by their harshest critics [1].

In many ways, the democratization of social media and the ability of ordinary people to post photos and videos and their own reflections online to an appreciative audience. In general, I think it should be considered to be a good thing for people to gain experience in dealing with the dilemmas of being both consumers and producers of content, but it is clear when we look at how people engage with social media that they are not always learning the right lessons about how to become creators of the rough drafts of history. Indeed, it may be considered among the chief failings of history that people tend to think of the subject first and foremost as a collection of names and dates that most people find boring and irrelevant, when history is really an attitude about the importance of recording the past for reflection as well as the benefit of others in the future. History is not merely something that we study, and certainly not the bare facts that people memorize, but it is something that we make–not only by our actions but also by our writings and reflections on our existence.

Let us discuss how this works, or does not work, in practice. During my first year at the University of Southern California, I took a class on military history that introduced me to the diaries of a Napoleonic soldier who had, as a young man, fought (and survived!) Napoleon’s invasion of Russia as a conscript from the Napoleonic puppet state the Confederation of the Rhine. Later in his life, he emigrated from Germany to some forsaken part of Kansas and his diary was later found and published, an important primary source about one of the great military invasions of history. To be sure, the author of this diary was never in his life a remotely famous man, but his experiences were noteworthy and his place in history as a historian is secure, thanks to his foresight in writing as honestly as he could an account of what he had experienced as a young man in mortal danger from the elements, from disease and starvation, as well as from combat. This man, and other men and women (and children, even) who take it upon themselves to write honest accounts of what they experience from their own perspective provide we historians with the raw materials from which we can draw insights and histories. The better the data and records we have, the better our histories can be.

Not everyone does this job so well. This morning, I was browsing Facebook (a surprisingly irregular activity for me), and it struck me that one of my Facebook friends, someone I had not seen for quite a while, had gone back to her maiden name, which usually implies some sort of rupture in the state of inglorious hymen. As is usual in this sort of situation, the person had faithfully scrubbed her account of almost all the information that would lead someone to think that she had once been married. She had (obviously) unfriended her ex, and removed all of the photos of the two of them when they were walking together in life. This is by no means an uncommon occurrence, but is rather one that I have seen many times, where people believe that the end of a relationship with someone means the obliteration of its trace in the historical record of our lives, as if such failures do not deserve to be acknowledged, admitted, and faced honestly. To be sure, in ages like our own, relationships and marriages often fail, but they happened. What we did with someone else, the promises we made in the dark, the fights, the lies, the false promises made under false pretenses, the vows we swore but could not keep, all of those things did indeed happen in reality, however differently we may feel about them after the relationship or marriage is over.

It is strange just how people do not realize the historical significance of the different approaches we can take to the melancholy aspects of history, both our own and within the world as a whole. A genuine historian, one worthy of the name, views the importance of knowing as much as possible about the past, both good and bad, regardless of how it makes anyone look, because it is from accurate knowledge that we can gain insights and wisdom. The attempt to obliterate history because it is embarrassing to us simultaneously prevents us from learning from it. We can only learn if we remember the past, if we face it, and if we learn to deal with it. It is not that the truth is actually obliterated when we try to destroy it, but the damages remain and the evidence of the cover-up, and how that makes those who attempted to tamper with the record even worse, along with the difficulties one has in telling a true history in a place that is deeply unfriendly to the truth, means that the narrative itself becomes the subject of the fight rather than a shared means of exploring what one can do about the past, or what one can learn about it. After all, what’s done is done, and it cannot be undone, no matter how much we might think differently about the past afterwards.

What this suggests is that the attempts to airbrush the historical record by obliterating statues we do not like, or removing photos and videos that expressed joy and hope in relationships we do not want to remember, or seeking to deny the reality of what happened because it is no longer convenient to us or something that we wish to admit are all related to each other. At least some of the larger antihistorical trends that our society has spring from our antihistorical personal practice. If we cannot see the value of admitting our flaws and blemishes and showing how learning from failures and mistakes made us the people that we are today, and show growth and reflection, then we will not be able to see the value of this on a community level, an institutional level, or a societal or civilizational level. None of us, whether individually or in any sort of group, were born wise from the beginning. Our follies and our mistakes provided us with learning opportunities, from which we hopefully grew in important ways. A belief in progress that requires erasing and misrepresenting the past is no progress at all, but rather a regress to ages of tyranny, deception, and oppression. To do better than that, we must love the truth enough to preserve it even in the face of having to admit the things that we thought, felt, and did in ages of ignorance and folly.

[1] It should be noted that among those who condemn the founding fathers most harshly for their failure in eliminating slavery there are many people who claim to be anti-racist while simultaneously claiming that one cannot be racist against whites, which demonstrates that they are less enlightened and less moral than the founding fathers that they condemn, seeing as the founding fathers did recognize the enslavement and degradation of blacks as unjust, while simultaneously and justly pointing out that the degradation of colonialism, which denied full humanity to settler colonists like themselves, was also unjust. White people, as much as anyone else, can be the targets of injustice, and those who cannot see that are not just people themselves.