The Past WAS a Foreign Country

Randall Stephens [The Past Is No Foreign Country, HNN, June 28, 2010] commends my The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985) for tracing post-Renaissance awareness of the past’s difference.  He chides Glenn Beck and likeminded conservative ideologues "incapable of coming to terms with change over time" for ignoring that difference.  But flagrant presentism is no right-wing monopoly; it now suffuses all popular culture, from evangelical biblical literalists and strict constitutional constructionists to bleeding-heart apologists for ancestral iniquities from slavery to sexism to class hierarchy.  In appropriating the past, partisan heritage domesticates it by purging or bowdlerizing its unpalatable oddness.  Discussing the Victorians in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, old Mrs Swithin says, "I don’t believe that there ever were such people, only you and me and William dressed differently."  Like Mrs. Swithin, we don’t believe in history.

Over the past quarter-century, historians have stressed the manifold differences of humanity’s complex past, so unlike our own circumstances they seem bizarrely incomprehensible.  But the public at large increasingly domesticates that past, refashioning it in modern terms, and then praising it for echoing with their own precepts or damning it for failing to conform to them.  The foreign past gets reduced to exotic sites of tourism or filmic period fantasy; the past cherished at home becomes a haunt of chauvinist heritage, nostalgic tribalism, and retro remakes.  The wholesale perversion of history persuades me, in revising my book for publication in 2012, to retitle it The Past WAS a Foreign Country.

Today’s presentism has multiple causes:  idealizing wished-for pasts to compensate for loss of faith in the present and fear of the future; media stress on the very recent past and schooling devoid of all but stereotypes of earlier times; privileging memory over history, empathy over critical understanding; website promotion of personal memoir at the expense of shared historical experience.

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.

—Philip Larkin, “Reference Back”