A Sense of Perspective
{Some thoughts prompted by reading Norwich's one-volume version of his history of the Byzantine empire, but which first arose a couple of years ago reading Gibbon as I had always promised myself I would do after learning it was the inspiration for Foundation.}
Americans (including myself) struggle to have any historical perspective. My cousin did a research project and found ancestors back to the early 1600s. Pretty impressive, until you make some comparisons. That 400 year time period is about the same as the time period from Hadrian to Justinian. Double it, to 800 years, and you've got the period from Constantine the Great to the First Crusade. And you're still left with more than 400 years before getting to the 1600s.
To Americans, anything that happened before WW II is ancient history. This leads to uninformed speculation about the causes and consequences of various actions and public policies. I spend part of my academic life trying to educate people to have a bit of perspective on urban structure, so I am most familiar with the problem there. But I am sure it arises in other contexts. On the other hand, we are fortunate in our forgetfulness because old dividing lines are erased rather than reinforced. Even Civil War reenactors don't carry the past into the present the way that Irish marching to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne (1690) still do.
To preempt the smart alecks that share my reading tastes, let me mention that I am well aware of the admonition from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series that the one thing that people cannot afford is a sense of perspective.
Americans (including myself) struggle to have any historical perspective. My cousin did a research project and found ancestors back to the early 1600s. Pretty impressive, until you make some comparisons. That 400 year time period is about the same as the time period from Hadrian to Justinian. Double it, to 800 years, and you've got the period from Constantine the Great to the First Crusade. And you're still left with more than 400 years before getting to the 1600s.
To Americans, anything that happened before WW II is ancient history. This leads to uninformed speculation about the causes and consequences of various actions and public policies. I spend part of my academic life trying to educate people to have a bit of perspective on urban structure, so I am most familiar with the problem there. But I am sure it arises in other contexts. On the other hand, we are fortunate in our forgetfulness because old dividing lines are erased rather than reinforced. Even Civil War reenactors don't carry the past into the present the way that Irish marching to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne (1690) still do.
To preempt the smart alecks that share my reading tastes, let me mention that I am well aware of the admonition from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series that the one thing that people cannot afford is a sense of perspective.
Posted by William T. Bogart on
Monday January 23, 2006 at 11:11am