What’s the Point of Knowing History? Part 2

UPDATE: ok, this diary didn’t quite go as planned, and getting distracted while writing i never got to the point that had prompted me to write it. i’m going to leave it as is and get back to that unwritten point later. read it for what it’s worth.

Hello again.  Thanks to everyone for making the last diary so interesting to participate in.  It’s always neat to see other conversations develop in a diary that you’ve written.

Ok, it’s not always interesting… or rather, sometimes it’s not only interesting, but tedious and irritating.  It depends, I guess, on what sort of thing you’re really into.

Which brings me to the subject of this second diary, titled:

What’s the Point of Knowing History? Part 2 Section 1: Finding your Place
I want to deal with the point that SallyCat raised, because I think that inside her rather rigid insistence she had one.  Her point, in fact, was bascially an echo of the title of my diary.  

To ask what the point of something is to ask what is the purpose in it.  Where I disagree with Sally is in the notion that there is a single correct frame of history that is integrated.  The Former of Forms is Formless, as the taoists say.  Or rather – as a great lover of the God Emperor of DUNE – I’ll entertain the notion that there is a true unified view of history. I just don’t think any of us here know it.

I certainly dont.  Do you?

SallyCat, if you’re lurking out there, I want to explain again why it seemed to me that you were encountering so much resistence to what you were saying.  And I want to do so because it bears directly on the point I’m trying to make.  

If you insist that there is a true integrated view of history, then it falls upon you to explain what that view is.  To simply insist that such a view exists, and that therefore lists of disconnected facts are irrelevent, establishes a position that cannot in any way be engaged.  

If, on the other hand, you were to take upon yourself the task of explaining what the Grand Unified Theory of History is, then you would both give something to the discussion and open yourself to the possibility of having your own view changed.  

(You seemed to me, rather, to be passionately advocating for a collective view of history while at the same time opposed for some reason to any process toward getting there.  For you, apparently, the process has ceased.  You’ve seen all the lists you need to see, and arrived at a sufficiently encompassing integration of History to become positively active in the world.  Good for you, to the extent that that’s true.  Why, though, do you insist upon denying others their process?  If it’s because they’re indulging in the wrong sort of process, then do tell what the right sort is.)

To give of one’s perspective while remaining open to having it changed is just good manners.

I think DailyKos is well demonstrating where an absence of good manners gets you: eventually, if the condition persists long enough, into the pages of Newsweek.  It might, in other words, make you popular and powerful, but it’ll never make your fair and just and honorable.  These seems exactly the great contest within civilization, and so history.  

Which side are you on?  A Democrat, a Republican… Are you part of the problem, or the solution?

Personally, I’m guessing, for me, both and neither.

HENCE, I hereby found a third and fourth political party: The Both and Neither Party.

Our Slogan

Are you lost?

Our Four Credos

Our Official Greeting

Are you with me and against me?