History, as I learned it in school, was mostly the chronology of wars. There was an appendix of stories about great men (and a very few women) who made significant contributions to science, political philosophy, and social improvements. They tended to be taught as episodes independent of other things going on in the world. To know history was to know wars. If you learned about other events in time, well that was nice too, but you were not graded on it.
And why not? The last century was a a hundred years of war interrupted by occasional periods of uneasy pauses euphemistically called peace. So far in this century major countries have avoided serious war with each other but the world has not been at peace. Armed conflicts continue throughout the world. I need not mention our own problems with right wing threats. They add up as a constant threat to global peace and it can seem we are the children and progenitors of war. If war has been our history does it have to be our destiny? Perhaps not if we taught history from another point of view.
History viewed through the lens of great ideas that moved humanity forward should be the core of the story. Ideas bequeathed to us by philosophers, scientists, composers, artists, theologians, and political leaders committed to a better life for all, these are the people who’ve given us hope for a better future. They’re the true heroes to be celebrated in every generation.
American democracy, for instance, is an idea made real through adoption of yet other ideas articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Americans didn’t come up with the ideas expressed by the founding documents. They were the descendants of political philosophers and theologians from Socrates to Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes and others of the Enlightenment. Hamilton, Madison, Adams, Franklin, Jefferson and others refined them to create an entirely new form of representative democracy. Moreover, the Constitution is a living document that has been amended and adapted to address changing conditions and to absorb new ideas, as well as to improve the well being of the nation. It’s been far from a perfect process. Not all ideas and the changes made when adopted were good ones. We’ve lurched forward with occasional relapses that have cost us dearly.
The resources available to thought leaders and decision makers are the products of other thinkers in each of the hard and social sciences. They keep expanding the realm of what we know about earth, our island home, and its creatures, including humans. Their discoveries have led to ever more sophisticated beneficial technologies, better health care, higher levels of education, and deepened understanding of what we must do to serve the earth so that it may continue to serve us.
In trying to resolve disputes, we cannot get away from the ease with which humanity turns to the violence of war. Wars are important events in history that have affected the direction of human development but they are not the engines of humanity’s ascent. Rather ideas generated by philosophers, theologians and scientists are. History should be taught as the chronology of ideas, with due recognition of the effect wars have had on it. It would be a reversal of the way I learned history, and I think, a hopeful sign of progress.