There is a renewed interest around the world in rewriting the history of many nations. These moves can be attributed to political leaders who firmly believe in what George Orwell said: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” ” Previously, nations were defined by ethnicity, language, or culture, and/or by the idea of nationality prescribed by the constitution to reflect a national consensus. But in recent years, many historians have expressed the view that what really binds people together is a shared sense of the past. Do these attempts to revisit a nation’s past have any justification?
For a long time, the dominant belief about human cognition was that what happens in the present matters most to the human brain. It was assumed that our brain is taking sensory input from what is happening around us, processing them and arriving at the output that determines our behavior at that moment. In this input-output model of cognition, one’s past inputs did not play much of a role.
However, over the years, discoveries in neuroscience have established that our brain is not an input-output system, but an anticipatory system. In any given situation, the brain is predicting what might happen under those circumstances. This prediction is based on his past experience of being in a similar situation. If what happens in the new scenario is as one expected, the past experience is further reinforced. If, for some reason, the situation is not according to one’s prediction, it becomes a new learning for the brain how to better predict similar situations in the future. Present human behaviors are influenced by our own past experiences and also those that have been handed down over generations of human evolutionary history. Much of this past knowledge – and even more of our deep emotional memories – is stored in the brain at an unconscious level. So although on a conscious level a person may not be aware of them, they do influence a person’s current thoughts and behaviors.
Not only individual decisions, but also corporate decisions are influenced by the events that happened in the past. Over the past two decades, Big Data Analytics has become the foundation upon which many corporate strategies are built. Big data is about what happened in the past. The basic belief guiding big data analytics is that data on past behavior can help us predict what may happen in the future. So if the current actions of individuals and corporations are influenced by their past experiences, it may not be much different in the case of a nation.
Data analytics experts will remind us that the quality of the data determines the quality of the final analysis. So nations should also have good quality information about their past. But the quality of historical data for most countries is questionable.
One of the major reasons for this discrepancy is that “history is written by the victors,” as former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously said. Most historical data selectively shows what previous rulers did. History rarely captures the lives and feelings of the common people of that time. How do we fix this discrepancy?
There is often an immediate tendency by present-day winners to discard everything from the past that does not fit into their current narrative and record only what fits their agenda. This is just a repetition of a past mistake. The rewriting of history should not be about passing down the principles of guilt and responsibility from generation to generation and trading apologies on behalf of those who have long died. It will only reopen old wounds without the ability to heal them. The study of history should not be based on selective reading of religious texts and other documents. Instead, history should be based on the science of archaeology. In fact, archaeological evidence, no more telling, should be the basis on which the history of a nation should be rewritten, if it should be.
Along with specific archaeological studies, it is very important that we develop a good understanding of the actual context in which past events took place. It is a common strategy of biased manipulatives to separate the past event from the actual context in which it occurred and present it in the present context. Archaeologists and anthropologists should work with sociologists and other social scientists to provide a detailed understanding of the actual social context in which those events occurred.
“The behavior of the past through remembering and forgetting significantly shapes the present and future for individuals and for society as a whole,” writes Martha Mino, former dean of Harvard Law School. A nation has little to learn from remembering its past successes, but much to learn from past mistakes. Like in the airline industry, past errors should be analyzed not to identify who was responsible, but to find out why an accident occurred, for example. Knowing why would help prevent a recurrence of that mistake.
Such an unbiased understanding of the past would provide a far more holistic view of a nation’s history. It will remind us that many of the heroes of our past were not saints at all times and that many villains of the past were not as bad as the historical narrative made them out to be. It will also help in understanding how the past influences the present thoughts and actions of a nation.
Biju Dominic is Chief Promoter, Fractal Analytics and President of FinalMile Consulting
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