Great Ideas ranjeet on 07 Dec 2006 02:38 am
Orwell Had It Right
(note: this was originally written in 1999)
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
–George Santayana“Whoever controls the past, controls the future. Whoever controls the present, controls the past.”
–George Orwell
Perhaps the first quote above is true. But certainly, it seems, the converse isn’t true. If I go to the local bookstore and go to the history aisle, I see shelf upon shelf of books to buy or browse. There’s probably even a separate shelf purely for Military History. Clearly, there are a lot of people who haven’t forgotten about history. And yet the last time I checked, people were making the same mistakes all over again. In many cases, I think that History is the problem in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong; I think History is fascinating, and if I didn’t happen to love number-crunching engineering classes and calculating the free energy of Henrian solutions as much as I do, I think I might even be taking some history courses. History is in part great because sometimes it’s just like a big fairy tale. The good guys usually win, in part because they usually write the history. Sometimes, in fact, I wonder if history is just too good to be true…
But back to the point. I’m sure you’ve no doubt heard of the all the ethnic violence in what used to be Yugoslavia. The violence goes a little bit deeper than religious differences, though. This region has long been a hotbed of tension. You see, many hundreds of years ago, Christians went out and killed a lot of the Muslim poplulation. This, in turn, did not engender lots of warm feelings toward the Christians on the part of the Muslims. So now we just have a very uncomfortable situation, with a lot of ethnic violence. I would say that the same would go for Israel and the Arab states, or mainland Asia and Japan. It seems that not only are we repeating ourselves, but we’re dwelling on it in what could only be described as an unhealthy manner.
All I propose is that we do away with history. We just chuck our history books out of the window. That way, no one can remember who wronged who and when and in what evil manner. They won’t remember that many years ago they were taken from their homeland country and enslaved for many years. They won’t remember that years ago, people got stupid and did things that really don’t affect anything now. I liken this to wiping the slate clean, in a matter of speaking. For once in our petty exisences, we can get rid of our inbred prejudices.
Of course, like all my other great ideas, this one will need a little refining. For instance, I fear we’ll have to throw away all the old newspapers and magazines. This will put quite a damper on scientific research, though, since three-fourths of every research paper just restates what five other scientific papers have written. Maybe we should just keeps journals as long as they contain no social commentary or appreciable news. There will also be plenty of people that will go on and on about cultural identity and traditions and so forth. I say that if a tradition isn’t good enough to keep going from generation to generation by plain word of mouth, then it really isn’t making the grade. Who knows? Maybe, in a stroke of blind luck, the lack of cultural identify will galvanize the human population to start something together.
The biggest problem I see is the massive amounts of writers, historians, editors, and storytellers that will enter the unemployment market. This alone will probably undo all the damage control we’ve gone through in the past year. Well, if push comes to shove, and all the damn conservatives refuse to listen to my words of wisdom, radical as they may be, I suppose I could alter the master plan. All the Newsweek article writers and historians will be put to work on the greatest literary program of all time: “The New Authoritative Jeetian History of the World.” In these hallowed annals (well, someday they’ll be hallowed) will be contained all the history of the known world. Those of the current generation might read some of the chapters and claim that things aren’t as they remember them, but these few “forgetful” people will either come to their senses or mysteriously disappear. Trust me, it’ll be glorious. Full of the accounts of the Crusades, where thousands of Christian soldiers paraded to the Holy Land to help the Turks rebuild their cities after a devastating storm. How Pope Pius VI proclaimed in a papal bull that Protestantism, as well as Islam, Judeaism and Hinduism, really all mean the same thing and should be treated as the same by all of man.