Once, while studying in high school, I witnessed an interesting scene in the lesson. That day, a history teacher asked the class a question: “Why are we studying history?” He was generally from that breed of teachers who like to baffle their own students with seemingly simple questions. Now this seems ridiculous, but then, after five minutes, graduates who already have a very extensive knowledge base, trained to express their thoughts in sufficient detail, did not manage to formulate clearly to answer why we are studying history. In fact, why? We study foreign languages, as this is an added bonus to our qualifications in future work, we study mathematics and physics because of their applied nature for any engineering business, and why do we study history? No, on an intuitive level, we all understood that the memory of Russian and world history was necessary, but the wording of the answer to the question of why we should study history specifically remained vague and uncertain.
Who controls the past ...
Later I personally built a reasonably logical and true explanation for myself, but it was too lengthy and awkward until a couple of years later I read the famous dystopian Englishman George Orwell “1984”, which painted a picture of the totalitarian future of the planet.
An ingenious phrase was formulated there: “He who controls the past controls the future; he who controls the present controls the past. ” Extremely capacious and at the same time illuminating the whole explanation, answering why we study history. After all, our entire civilization, from its global features to the smallest details, is the sum of all historical development and a direct result of recent and very distant events.
And you don’t even need to go back in time to change the story. It is enough today to present your distorted version to careless descendants, and the face of society will inevitably change. It is enough to retouch the crimes of the past century, and present the greatest criminals in the bright colors of benefactors. And now, new moods are literally changing society. What was shameful yesterday is becoming a matter of pride today. Anyone who was censured yesterday owns the world today. And it’s not so important how everything really happened.
In fact, any historical research is inevitably doomed to impose modern judgments, motivations and moral norms on the acts of the past, and it is impossible to restore the truth in the absolute by definition. What matters is how the distant event is presented to us today. Suppose that it can no longer change the past, but it can very well change the present. That is why historical memory is so important in the politics of any social force. That is why politicians are fighting with each other for their vision of history, since victory in 1939, 1917, 1709 gives them victory not yesterday, but today. And today gives power over the world. And for those who managed to find the answer to the question of why we study history, and learned the lessons of the past, it is often easier to understand the intricacies of today.