Question

What are the things which we can know from past?

Answer 1

Answer:

The universities’ culture wars have abated. Most people have grown tired of the debates between the worth of “dead white males” on the one hand, and the sins of politically correct ideologues on the other. Neither side can be said to have won. An uneasy truce reigns, broken by an occasional ­rear-­guard action. But the underlying issues have not gone away. How we interpret the past affects the norms by which we ­live.

For all the ink spilled in these wars, surprisingly little clarity has been achieved. Even the notion that “history is more or less bunk,” as Henry Ford put it, survives. Yet just as we read reality now in this manner and now in that, guided by different interests, motives, and sensibilities, so we have different everyday ways of ­using—­and ­abusing—­history. It is a practice we cannot put behind ­us.

A culture is a unique kind of inheritance. It represents a hoard that can be preserved, nurtured, imaginatively enhanced, and sometimes even invented. It can be wasted, neglected, or allowed to fall to ruin, but it cannot be spent. One cannot trade, say, some hispanidad for a bit of English stiff upper ­lip.

But a cultural legacy is never simply given. As Goethe observed, one must acquire it in order to possess it. To come alive, a cultural heritage needs to be read, deciphered, interpreted, and felt. It is like a landscape: What aesthetic, cultural, and social messages it conveys depend on how you look at it. The same valley looks different in the eyes of a painter, a rancher, or a military planner. Depending on who I am, I can see that valley as picturesque, as good for grazing cattle, or as suitable for deploying light cavalry. And landscapes are sometimes deliberately arranged to suit the expectations or taste of the viewer. The gondolier sings Neapolitan songs, to the delight of foreign honeymooners and the horror of true Venetians. The Houses of Parliament rebuilt after the Blitz are “Gothic,” faithfully reproducing the Victorian fake. Revivals and renaissances are other ways of rearranging the past. As Ernest Renan wrote in his 1882 essay “What Is a Nation?” a nation coheres as much around what it forgets as what it remembers.

There are many ways of apprehending (and eliding) the past, but 12 stand out as most ­common:

Postmodernism. Our past is not revealed to us like a hitherto undiscovered continent. But neither is it a mere figment we can pull out of thin air, as some postmodernist thinkers contend. If Stanley Fish is right to argue that the meaning of a text cannot be reduced to the intention of its author, it does not follow that one reading is as valid or insightful as another. The careful historian and philologist, although aware, as the postmodernists warn, that he does not stand outside history and cannot avoid reading his own understandings into the past, can nevertheless collate and compare evidence, identify anachronisms and contaminations, establish authoritative texts, and reconstruct ­contexts.