Lessons from the study of history (1 of a series)

This evening I want to write some thoughts about “what history teaches us.” It is a very important and even an enjoyable topic, but not for the reasons that so many moderns seem to believe these days. As usual I’ve selected a huge topic, but will, thankfully, use a specific example to round out the points I wish to make. To set the tone, let me say that one of the most irritating and incorrect shibboleths used today is the saying “Those who do not understand (or know) their history are doomed to repeat it.” Hardly a day goes by that some talk show commentator doesn’t feel oh so wise when he or she says this. Here are the problems with the belief that underlies that statement.

First of all, humans on a day to day boring basis need to either learn from past mistakes or repeat them. That is a proper context, the problem of learning, as my brother would say to his children “the easy way or the hard way.” If someone text messages and causes an accident, one would hope that the person learns not to text message while driving again, and to pull off into a parking area of one must. This is an example of “those who do not understand not to text message while driving because you might cause an accident are doomed to risk possibly causing another accident at some point in their driving life.” However, one could not immediately write an epic history or philosophical book that discusses “Humans learned that texting while driving is dangerous and thus, oh you people of the future, do not ever put any distracting activity in your automobiles of the future again.” How can one anticipate a country’s stance toward a human activity and foible, and use of a technology, twenty or one hundred years in advance? You can’t because you cannot anticipate the circumstances. For example, maybe a car is invented where you can sit there and text all you want like a fiend while driving and never cause an accident! I’m just making up a slightly silly analogy, but it’s a solidly accurate analogy and very useful.

So trying to shove history down people’s throats so that they “learn to never make THAT mistake again” is just plain stupid. History is important so that one can learn 1) what actually happened 2) what people actually thought, did and believed at the time 3) the circumstances and 4) as a contribution to modern day wisdom and ability to problem solve. The first three reasons are all part of what the TV character Inspector Joe Friday used to say, “Just the facts, ma’am.” History is about learning facts, and facts do include what people alive at the time thought and felt, in other words, their perceptions. When you understand the facts of history, including the perceptions of the contemporary participants, you can synthesize all the facts into an addition to your individual and societal wisdom. Being wise has many advantages. The first is that one tends to be more optimistic and be strong of heart because you understand what has happened before, and how people got through it, and how you can retain hope, even in dire circumstances, today. The second advantage of wisdom is that you are not mislead by false theories of what is actually happening today, and as both the Bible and secular literature warn that in times of trouble rumors and false prophets are rampant. When one has a solid grounding in factual history and adds that to one’s lode of wisdom, one can discern truth from falsehood or exaggeration much more clearly. The third advantage of wisdom is that you understand a wider range of possibilities of solutions to present day problems. You think of things that you and your contemporaries who are ignorant of history might never have thought about. The fourth advantage of wisdom is that you consciously or unconsciously emulate the wise leaders who have gone before you. Remember, the great virtuous figures in history became “wise” the same way as everyone else: through education and experience, including making mistakes.

Military instructors all understand what I’ve just described, and that is why key historical figures and their battles are studied in military academies. They study them so that they add 1) facts and 2) wisdom to their collective and individual skills. They do not study military history because they think that someday they may have to defend the Alamo again, and this time they “won’t get it wrong.” History and the ordinary people who comprise history is a moving target; people, life and society change. Circumstances change and society changes. For example, the Holocaust is the premier justification for the saying that I am criticizing, “Those who don’t learn from their past are doomed to repeat it.” Huh? No disrespect, but the Holocaust happened in a time before fax machines, cell phones, computers and satellite imagery. That is just one example of how precisely “the same thing” can never happen again, just from the sheer change in technology, if not in the improvement in people’s hearts. Yet we can photograph the Sudan and Darfur, and the conflict in the Congo, over and over again, and the suffering continues, just to give two examples. The idea that history needs to be studied to “prevent” the “same mistake” from “repeating” is New Age stinking thinking. History needs to be studied so that people have a common basis for the facts, so that they understand human nature and response to circumstances more clearly, and thus they can add to their wisdom that they then apply as judicious to current situations and problems that they face.

So now I will give my specific example. This afternoon I drove to the book store “Barnes and Nobles” and was gratified to find that they had (at a discounted price) a copy of one of my favorite books that I have sorely missed, because my original copy is in storage many miles away. The book is “The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.” Regular readers know that my favorite secular history figure is George Washington, and of course it goes without saying that Abraham Lincoln has always been close to my heart. Like George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant was also first a general and then a United States President. Grant led the Army of the North, the Union Army, against the Army of the South, the Confederacy, during the American Civil War, known as the War against Slavery. Unlike George Washington, who lived in the USA as it was one hundred years before Grant’s time, Grant did not come from a landed and well to do background and instead, even after being President, was in desperate poverty. He wrote his memoirs as he was very ill and toward the end, dying, so that his family would have some income, particularly after he was gone, and he died one week after completion of them. Thus this book has come to be known as a masterpiece of American literature because it truly has no grandiose agenda, no fudging of facts or perceptions in order to look more grand or clever. Grant has left all of us a treasure of “what it was like” and “just the facts, ma’am” of a pivotal time in the history of the United States. If you want to be instantly transported into that crucial time in US and indeed global history, and be inside the mind of a truly great man (of the “ordinary man who steps up to the challenge” ilk, as was Washington), all you need to do is open this book. I tend not to read these types of books cover to cover and then put them away. I tend to turn to them regularly and just read a section. For example, I have (in storage) first editions of Washington’s letters to Congress during the War of Revolution and I would enjoy just reading one letter every once in a while to be transported in terms of perspective and the facts to the time of the Revolution, to the mind of George Washington. No student of history needs to be told of the poverty and hard conditions of the Patriot Army that Washington commanded, and how he had to beg for every scrap of arms, food and clothing from the Continental Congress. It is facts and perspective like that which anyone can read at will, reading the words of the Father of our Country as he desperately needs gunpowder as New York City is about to fall. That is history. That is why people need to learn and love history, and why students should not be impoverished of learning genuine, not agenda ridden, history in their classrooms.

By the way, I want to make another point. I am not “drawn” to certain historical figures for any of the usual flaky reasons that New Age “thinkers” (such as it is) posit about themselves and others. I don’t find historical figures interesting because 1) I think they’ve reincarnated (no one is reincarnated, as you ought to all confess to right now) 2) I have a “lesson” or “unfulfilled karma” that I’m just blindly reaching out toward 3) I’m “taking sides or making a statement” about who I am interested in or not. For example, yes, Lincoln and Grant are the Union figures. But I have and always will have a great personal and professional affection for General Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy. For a long time I enjoyed reading about the Tudors of England but that sure as hell did not mean that I was applauding or “reminiscing” about Catholic killing Protestant upstarts. As I’ve reported before, I have an even handed interest and affection toward all people of all nations and cultures, one that has been sorely tried and abused, however. Unfortunately that type of New Age stinking thinking has permeated our children’s schools where historical figures are ignored, diminished or skewed because of deliberate, and in some cases unconscious, imposition of New Age “values” and “dirty eyeglasses” (looking at the negative instead of the opposite, which is wearing “rose colored glasses”), as it were, on the ordinary people and facts of history. Honestly, I don’t know how this country or the world will survive if faith and reasoning based on facts does not return to the classroom and to day to day decision making.

So for my example, here is what I turned to read in Grant’s book this evening. I wondered, “What was it like the first time that he met President Abraham Lincoln?” I looked in the table of contents and found the event, which was when Grant was promoted to lieutenant general. Here is that excerpt from Grant’s memoirs.

From Chapter Fifteen, section “First Interview with President Lincoln.” The event described here took place in 1864.

The bill restoring the grade of lieutenant-general of the army had passed through Congress and became a law on the 26 of February. My nomination had been sent to the senate on the 1st of March and confirmed the next day (the 2nd). I was ordered to Washington on the 3d to receive my commission, and started the day following that. The commission was handed to me on the 9th. It was delivered to me at the Executive Mansion by President Lincoln in the presence of his Cabinet, my eldest son, those of my staff who were with me and a few other visitors.

The President in presenting my commission read from a paper-stating, however, as a preliminary, and prior to the delivery of it, that he had drawn that up on paper, knowing my disinclination to speak in public, and handed me a copy in advance so that I might prepare a few lines in reply. The President said:

“General Grant, the nation’s appreciation of what you have done, and its reliance upon you for what remains to be done in the existing great struggle, are now presented, with this commission constituting you lieutenant-general in the Army of the United States. With this high honor, devolves upon you, also, a corresponding responsibility. As the country herein trusts you, so, under God, it will sustain you. I scarcely need to add, that, with what I here speak for the nation, goes my own hearty personal concurrence.”

To this I replied: “Mr. President, I accept the commission, with gratitude for the high honor conferred. With the aid of the noble armies that have fought in so many fields for our common country, it will be my earnest endeavor not to disappoint your expectations. I feel the full weight of the responsibilities now devolving on me; and I know that if they are met, it will be due to those armies, and above all, to the favor of that Providence which leads both nations and men.”

On the 10th I visited the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac at Brandy Station; then returned to Washington, and pushed west at once to make my arrangements for turning over the commands there and giving general directions for the preparations to be made for the spring campaign.

Is this not a marvelous treasure, just this half of a page from Grant’s Memoirs? Stripped of what moderns would put in it of agenda and blabbing about the unimportant, it reveals many truths, both facts and perspectives. I’m sure most of you noticed what I am about to point out, but I know some of my readers are not from the USA and so I’d like to make plain some of the things I find gratifying in this excerpt.

The first is the promptness of Congress in acting in a non-partisan way to in ONE DAY approve Grant’s commission. In modern times, would not big mouth and big ego senators and representatives insist on blabbing away their opinion of both Grant and the conduct of the war? That is not to say they did not do that in the course of their normal business. But here in the middle of the Civil War, they kept separate the necessary swift actions, such as Grant’s commission, from being combined with thirst for both attention and perhaps necessary argument about the war. So Grant has preserved totally unintentionally a time that would be wonderful to see in that one respect again, when an action is conceived and completed in a matter of days.

The second is that Grant explains that even though President Lincoln and he had never met, Lincoln knew that Grant did not glorify in public speaking. This is not to say that Grant was a poor orator, but that he was a modest military man who preferred not to make speeches! Lincoln knew this about Grant in advance and in thoughtfulness of Grant’s feelings, wrote down his comments and gave Grant a copy so that Grant could compose in his mind while listening to the President what he would say in reply. That is a courtesy and more importantly a supportive thoughtfulness that is a role model that Lincoln is providing and that Grant has preserved for us to recall and to ponder. Notice too that on this occasion Lincoln invokes God; there is no escaping the heartfelt faith that all of our country’s leaders had and expressed as threads throughout all of their discourse and actions. But, of course, we know that in omitting from our schools study of the Founding Fathers and the great leaders as expressed in their own words that there is a deliberate resultant censoring of the name of God and expression of the presence and role of their faith in historical events from our students’ eyes and ears.

The third point that really stands out is the focus by both of them on the commission as a burden of responsibility, not as a glory, a “promotion” or an ego fulfilling award. This was not a change in title; this was the combining of responsibility for the Army and the placing it in the hands of General Grant. Both Lincoln and Grant focused their remarks on the gravity of that responsibility, and the confidence of the people of the nation in Grant. These were not empty words of false modesty, but preservation of the words that two men each carrying a great burden expressed at such a momentous time. Remember, they were not saying these words for “TV” or for “the public,” but they were saying what they genuinely felt according to the gravity of the situation.

The fourth point is that Grant turns all credit immediately on the troops. He calls the armies that are assembled to fight for the Union “noble” and he means it. That is in stark contrast to some today who do not speak up more clearly and sincerely in giving the armed services personnel their credit and respect. By contrast it’s just about the first words out of Grant’s mouth based on his heartfelt feelings (remember, this was a private event and no poseur self consciousness existed back then, for even newspapers had small circulation and delay in reporting events). People said what they meant and when they gave credit they meant it.

The fifth point is that Grant in turn gives all credit and glory to God, using a term that was common traditionally, which is Providence. Grant credits the troops and concludes with saying that if the Union is successful it is because of God’s will because God’s will leads both individuals and nations. Again, remember this is Grant’s ad hoc words of acceptance of the commission and once again we are treated to reading that people said what they honestly and strongly believed. Faith in God was in our nation as common, shared, strong and ever present as the air that we breathe.

I suspect that people enjoy reading all they can about what President Abraham Lincoln was really like. Paging through just now I found another meeting between the men and more “gold” for both facts and enjoyment. Maybe I’ll make a series of these excerpts for those of you who can’t get a hold of the book and would like to read some of the more interesting things that I find to share.