By Gary Topping–
I’ve posted several times lately about my love for our Catholic Tradition, which is another way of saying our history, our ever-expanding and evolving understanding of the nature of the Christian message. So I thought this week I would address the question directly: why do we study history, anyway?
Believe it or not, in my twenty-plus years of teaching history at the college level, no one ever asked me that question. Why not? It would be a dangerous assumption that my students already had in mind some conception of the value of historical study, and I wasn’t naïve enough to fall for that. No, I’m pretty certain that in most cases those students were brought into my classroom because of a curricular requirement. I remember when I was at the beginning of my own college work, one of my friends who was at the same point launched into a big discussion of his plans for the courses he was going to take. “This semester I’m going to take this subject and get it out of the way, then next semester I’m going to take that subject and get it out of the way. . . .” It didn’t sound to me like his goal in getting through college was a matter of actually learning anything; it was just a matter of removing obstacles. So when I began teaching and would look out over my class on the first day of a semester, I suspected that I was looking at a whole roomful of students like my friend, who perceived me as an obstacle to be “gotten out of the way.”
I wasn’t about to let them get away with that. If they weren’t asking the question, I was going to ask it for them and keep them at it until they began to engage historical study at some sort of philosophical level, however rudimentary. Without searching for some larger meaning, I would tell them, memorizing all those laws and treaties and court decisions would be about as meaningful as memorizing the license plate numbers of all the cars out in the parking lot
I suppose everyone who studies history has their own reason for doing it, even if it’s only to marvel at the elegant clothes and manners of Downton Abbey or the thrilling adventures of Buffalo Bill. I myself study history for several reasons.
For one thing, the study of history can broaden and deepen our understanding of human potential. It is not alone in that, of course, for literature, philosophy, art, music and other fields do that, too. But history opens its own door on the human condition. It takes us to a world that is both familiar and strange. On the one hand, we see people in all times and places struggling with the effects of original sin, the same fallen nature that we feel. At the same time, though, as we see them succumbing to impulses of greed, ambition, lust or egotism, we also occasionally see them transcending those impulses to achieve, sometimes heroically, acts of great compassion, self-sacrifice and charity. So we recognize ourselves in them.
On the other hand, we see them performing those base and noble acts within social, political, economic and religious environments that we find strange, appalling and even intolerable. People have striven throughout history to create environments more conducive to the realization of our better inclinations, but often failing and producing the most inhumane conditions instead. Through it all the study of history opens our awareness of the immense range of human possibilities and enables us to escape the claustrophobia of our own experience.
I never tried that one on my students. I was pretty sure that the opportunity to study the nature of one’s humanity wasn’t going to be enough to tempt them to risk a speeding ticket on the way to class.
Instead, I promised them that at the beginning of every class, I would explain to them how the material we were going to discuss that day has contributed to the creation of the world we are presently living in. That way, I hoped to give them, every day, tools with which to navigate that world more effectively and understandingly. We were studying the past, to be sure, but we were studying it to understand the process of evolution of which we are, to date, the end product.
Did it work? I don’t know, but it was my best shot. In my realistic moments, I’m sure many of those students kept on memorizing those proverbial license plate numbers.
