Historical Alzheimers

First of all, a joyous Christmas.

I am routinely amazed and irritated by the supposed "best and brightest" of Western society. This is not so much the semi-aristocratic divisions they make but the degree of culture and competence of those making the distinctions.

One easily gets fed up with entire fields when respected people in them make very simple mistakes. James Barber wrote a book in which one example was the refusal of Herbert Hoover to institute welfare policies. This is galling as economic historians have seen that he did institute several such policies as well as those favoring unions and the like. The historians in favor of such policies praise him for his foresight and those opposed revile him for bringing on or aggravating the Great Depression. The only place where one finds the claim that Hoover did not intervene in the economy is in the electoral propaganda of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who tried to present himself as a radical transformer of the economy and society compared to Hoover.

This was not hard to find but nonetheless the claim remains in the most recent version of his textbook that has for many decades been taught in University classes. The simplicity of such a mistake indicates a failure to research properly. Sadly, this is not the only case. In studies of international relations, long papers have been written about the impact of air power on diplomacy but then fail to note major land offensives. A little common sense and memory would have avoided such blunders but they are made by "respected" people who are not questioned on what contradicts common sense and precedent.

I certainly believe that some division between the cultured and educated compared to the less civilized. The cultured core can exert its influence and guide a society and preserve the norms, direction, and preserve ideas and learning beyond daily stresses and collapses. Nonetheless, as education means less and less in the West, the ability to assess such a privileged position is oriented not around contribution to society but around alternatively wealth or ideological objectives.

Gone are the days when a student was expected to learn the classics, the great wars of the Greeks, Romans, and others. Through such studies, an understanding of a complex situation with real human actors and intents is formed. Now, the recipe approach to History results in such normal and human interactions being reduced to a simple formula that almost never captures even the basic situation. The quality of modern Western political discourse when invoking History gives the same effect as seeing The Merchant of Venice reduced to an episode of the Simpsons (worse exists but I have never watched such shows hence the lack of a more apt comparison) with the vocabulary of supposedly educated men being reduced to what most children surpass in primary school.

There are several factors that I can find for now.
The lack of memory is a crippling problem in any analysis. One may compare a situation to WWII. Many people resort to a Munich Analogy but the validity of a comparison also depends on the similarities between the situation and WWII. One notorious example is many describing the 1991-1995 Bosnian war as a relapse of WWII. That is not far from the truth. The suspicions and goals of all three groups evolved primarily from WWII and all three sides invoked images and ideas from WWII in bother their domestic and international propaganda (often taking place in Bosnia but aimed at foreigners). The problem was that the lack of memory (ie. remembering that Croats and Muslims hade predominatly been allied to Nazi Germany and commited a very entheusiastic genocide against Serbs and Jews) meant that the similarities blamed Serbs for being supposedly the revival of Naziism wheras others with a longer attention span remembered the dubiousness of certain claims.

If you cannot remember data, your theories may be perfect but your result will be wrong due to insufficient or false input. Nonetheless, the whole cult of "self-development" and modernism scorn memory. This is also applicable in the small scale. I learned the Pi number at the behest of my father and since first grade have been noted for a good memory and making connections otherwise impossible without a better grasp of multiple things at once. LTGEN Ion Mircea Pacepa was taught to memorize the phone book and as a result could recal events from years ago providing him with valuable information much more easily.

Such a poor memory results in a strengthening of the bias in favor of immediate circomstances. If one has barely learned of the Punic Wars or of Celtic human sacrifice, it is much harder to formulate arguements against Neo-Paganism when they claim Paganism was kinder than Judaism or Christianity. In many cases, people simple buckle out of a lack of information leading to an inability to formulate an arguement.

The blind narcissism is the worst aspect. The human mind naturally endeavors to protect its ego and so subtly misinterpets things in its favor. The direct approach of building self-esteem has resulted in a habit of approaching History as a cookbook (why do I need to study it?) or as a morality play in which they are the hero (the habit of fighting WWII over again in completely unrelated circomstances) and as a result, such things badly distort History. The cult for understanding can also be subborned into "understanding" such peoples as the Indian allies of France in their wars against the British. Such studies simply are sympathetic portrayals that try to hide the massacres such allies commited against British settlers in an attempt to create an image of the author rising above the conflicts of the past. The result is instead a different kind of distortion but even less respectful of the people of the time.

In short, I hate the idiots of the Western intellegentsia. At least the function as a repositiory of ideas is still handled by the status of those who protect such ideas is in the isolated counter-establishment.