History (The Purpose of the Past, part 3)

Previously, I transcribed quotes from Gordon S. Wood’s book on the subject of ideas, and then on the subject of history in general. But I especially like what he writes about the benefits of learning/writing about history. From the introduction:

I don't believe that history teaches a lot of little lessons to guide us in the present and future. It is not, as the eighteenth century thought, "philosophy teaching by example." Yet by disparaging the capacity of history to teach lessons, I don't mean to suggest that studying the past can't teach us anything. If history has nothing to say to us, then it wouldn't make much sense to study or teach it or read about it at all. History is important to us, and knowledge of the past can have a profound effect on our consciousness, on our sense of ourselves. History is a supremely humanistic discipline: it may not teach us particular lessons, but it does tell us how we might live in the world. (p 6)

Done well, history can offer an appreciable usefulness:

Indeed, historical explanation is only possible because we today have different perspectives from those of the historical participants we are writing about. Most new historical investigations begin with an attempt to understand the historical circumstances that lie behind a present-day problem or situation. It is not surprising that our best recent work on the origins and nature of slavery coincided with the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Or that our recent rich investigations into the history of women grew out of the women's movement of the past three or four decades. This is as it should be: the problems and issues of the present should be the stimulus for our forays into the past. It is natural for us to want to discover the sources, the origins, of our present circumstances. (p 10)

Finally,

By showing that the best-laid plans of people usually go awry, the study of history tends to dampen youthful enthusiasm and to restrain the can-do, the conquer-the-future spirit that many people have. Historical knowledge takes people off a roller coaster of illusions and disillusions; it levels off emotions and gives people a perspective on what is possible and, more often, what is not possible.

An observation about being true

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the things that prevent us from being true… This could be a discussion of giant proportion, but I’m thinking of it very narrowly. I’m thinking of the mild anxiety I get in social situations that sometimes causes me to talk with less consideration than I wish I had. If truth reflects the goodness inside of ourselves, changing the manner in which we express ourselves, or performing insincerely are both ways that contravene the truth. Two minor examples from podcast-land come to mind: Mary Beard on Always Take Notes and Carlos Rafael on Catching the Codfather.

In the first, Mary Beard is talking about her academic career and how her writing changed…

I then wrote the seminar up for a kind of pretty prestigious, but also pretty traditional UK Classics magazine. And what I think was funny [when] I looked back at the article, [is that] it’s got all the arguments I want to make, but I could see that I was so intimidated by the Academy at that point; it’s all dressed up in academic language which makes me now want to throw something at it. […] What I did - I didn’t see it at the time, but I see it now - [is] […] I was pretending to be an elderly male academic. I was burying my own bright ideas in their language. And I eventually stopped doing that, but it took a long time.

In the second, Ian Coss, the podcast host, is contrasting two versions of Carlos Rafael, who speaks reasonably in interviews, but who is cut-throat on a secret recording. (47 minutes in here.) Coss concludes “I think both versions of Carlos are performances to some degree.”

It makes me think of Katherine Boo’s conclusion in Behind the Beautiful Forevers and the circumstances that can “sabotage [the] innate capacity for moral action.” Boo shows a situation in which corruption removes that innate capacity. But I’m intrigued by the degree to which we are responsible for building the strength of our innate capacity in even the smallest of ways.

Cooking

This week I made Caroline Chambers’ Beef and Sweet Potato Flautas, as I did last year. However, since I was making the meal for company, I doubled the filling, and they were less “flauta” and more “fagotto”.

Baking

A friend of ours is celebrating a milestone birthday and I seized the occasion to work on sugar cookie decorating skills. I followed Grace Gaylord’s instructions for making the cookies and the icing on her blog The Graceful Baker. She’s very generous with her tips and it was just the kind of guidance I needed as an amateur. All in all, a fun project!

Enjoying

I like reading Rob Stephenson’s newsletter “The Neighbourhoods”. Sure, it’s about places I’ll never see, but I enjoy his writing and usually come away having learned something. I didn’t know castor oil was used as a laxative. And until reading Mussolini and the Pope, I didn’t know castor oil was used to torture clergy. What a contrast to its rosy promotion now!
I liked Guy Winch’s advice on preventing yourself from lengthy rumination: first, recognizing a thought that is a rumination (it’s upsetting), and second “converting the ruminative thought into a problem that can be solved.” (Here, at 20 minutes.)
I like how the barcode on this container of meringue powder is illustrated as if made with icing!

Postcard

This week was 4/5 gray days… But I caught this bit of sun on Monday!

On Friday, there was freezing rain, and instead of being transparent, it looked gray and strange.

Happy Sunday!

Reading

I recently finished Mussolini and the Pope by David I. Kertzer and enjoyed the product of his historical research. I can only imagine how thrilling it must have been to access the Vatican’s archives for this story. This inside look at Pius XI’s pontificate and Mussolini’s political career grounds the tangential things that have floated past in the last little while… The political unrest in My Brilliant Friend, for example. This online peek at an exhibition of fascist posters. Or Tom Philipps’ comment on Hitler’s organization versus Mussolini’s: “This anniversary card of Hitler’s year-old chancellorship was hot off the press and Hitler makes his first appearance on a stamp. The control exercised over all the semiotics of power, masterminded by Goebbels, already marked Hitler out as in a different league of dictatorship from Mussolini who only made one philatelic appearance in Italy […].” (From Postcard Century, p 172).

But back to Kertzer’s book for a quotation… This one encapsulating the crux of the scandal from those years:

Neither Pacelli nor the pope's two emissaries - the official nuncio and the unofficial Jesuit - had ever uttered a word to challenge the government's decision to treat Jews as a danger to healthy Italian society. For anyone eager for a sign of the Vatican view of the new campaign of persecution, including parish priests and bishops seeking guidance on how to respond to it, the message was clear. The state was finally heeding the warnings that had been appearing in the Vatican daily newspaper and that had been regularly repeated in the Vatican-supervised La Civiltà cattolica and in much of the Italian Catholic press, from weekly diocesan bulletins to major daily newspapers. The recent opening of the Vatican Secret Archives has brought to light a report that makes clear that, as far as the Vatican was concerned, the August 16 [1938] agreement Tacchi Venturi negotiated with Mussolini, promising not to criticize the racial laws in exchange for favorable treatment of Catholic Action, remained in effect. (P 345)

Ideas and the elderly

Reading Gordon S. Wood’s The Purpose of the Past, I came across this passage on the subject of ideas:

These early twentieth-century historians [like Theodore Draper and Lewis Namier] knew that ideas existed, but they tended to dismiss them as propaganda, as manipulated rationalizations covering more deep-lying motives, which were usually economic. Ideas, they said, could not realistically be considered as motives for action, as causes of events.
Even if this realist or materialist position is true, however, ideas are still important for explaining human behaviour. Although ideas may not be motives for our actions, they are nevertheless the constant accompaniment of our actions. There is no human behaviour without ideas. Ideas give meaning to our actions, and there is almost nothing that we humans do that we do not attribute meaning to. We give meaning to even our simplest actions, a wink, for example, and these meanings - our ideas - are part and parcel of our actions. These meanings or ideas are the means by which we perceive, understand, judge, or manipulate our experiences and our lives. They make our behaviour not just comprehensible but possible. We have a human need to make our actions meaningful.
Although we have to give meaning to nearly everything we do, we are not free at any moment to give whatever meaning we wish to our behaviour. The meanings we give to our behaviour are necessarily public ones, and they are defined and delimited by the conventions and language of the culture at that time. It is in this sense that the culture creates behaviour. It does so by forcing us to describe our behaviour in its terms. The definitions and meanings that we seek to give to our behaviour cannot be random or unconstrained, which is why the concept of “propaganda” as freely manipulated meanings is flawed. Our actions thus tend to be circumscribed by the ways we can make them meaningful, and they are meaningful only publicly, only with respect to an inherited system of conventions and values. [Emphasis mine.]

This feels especially pertinent when I think of my 88-year-old mother-in-law. As I am reading through the newspaper archives of her young adulthood in the late 1950’s, I am struck by the social conventions that shaped her and that feel so alien today. If she comments about the number of immigrants she has encountered on an errand, it helps to recall that in 1958, the appearance of a Black student teacher in the French school’s grade 7 class was a newsworthy headline. (See page 4 here.)

Eating

The Big Book of Bread has encouraged me to try making simple loaves… Basic White, and a whole-wheat Everyday Bread. I’m learning about controlling the temperature of the ingredients so that the dough doesn’t overproof. I like the feeling of bread-making as an art.

Postcard

We had three days of frost on the trees, the third being the most impressive…

Happy Sunday!