Hidden history

“Big trees from little acorns grow,” as Tolkein noted. But history doesn’t look too deep and, more often than not, a large and very significant part remains unconsidered, or is completely ignored. Tupperware, punks and ‘gangsta’ movies aren’t the sort of phenomena that make for great academic careers or even the briefest of footnotes.

The problem with history, as we know it, is that it is the same old story again and again. It has a horrid resemblance to Heraclitus’ maxim, “You can’t cross the same river twice”. In other words, the river may always be there, but the water that flows down the river today is not the same water that flowed down the river yesterday, and the river might have changed shape, albeit very slightly and bearing in mind the possibility of heavy rains in the highlands with subsequent flooding in the lowlands.

History is pretty much the same. War follows conflict follows war, in an uninterrupted stream of dubious cause and gruesome effect. And let’s face it… History wouldn’t be all that interesting if it were an uninterrupted stream of diplomacy. Guns or swords are the things that most heroes hold in their hands, and the stuff of the most viscerally exciting stories.

Am I justified in saying this? With due deference to at least one of my friends who is an avid follower of history, if humanity persistently refuses to learn the lessons of the past, it has to be the adventure stories that keep the field going. There is no other rational explanation of which I can think.

But amongst all the tedium of startlingly similar causes and effects, distinguished only by the names of nations and whatever people they accept as their leadership, there is a secret side to history that fascinates me.

History has a tendency to concentrate on large numbers of people: the more involved, the more worthy the occasion for inclusion in the annals of the years. But the root causes of history can always be traced back to individuals.

Ideas aren’t arrived at simultaneously by committee members. Each idea begins in the head of an individual, and there is always one committee member who is slower on the uptake than the others. Then there is the small matter of arriving at resolution.

Nor are emotions entirely collective. It takes one person to experience an emotion and communicate his or her feelings, before the emotion is recognised and begins to spread. For instance, the distorted mind of some twisted conspiracy theorist may blame all the woes of the world on left-handed people, but will require a lot of public ranting before southpaws need begin to fear the threat of genocide.

And only if that one individual comes to be associated with the idea and the emotion, and only if the numbers are large enough and the results interesting enough, will the individual enter the history books.

Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama Bin Laden and others, have all earned their places with large-scale bloodshed and mayhem. But what of all the other individuals who made noteworthy contributions?

Earl Tupper invented Tupperware, but is not noted for the toehold that Tupperware parties gave to women in the economy post World War Two, and the subsequent empowerment of women. Malcolm McLaren almost single-handedly gave rise to punk, but is not noted for its impact on Richard Branson’s cash flow at the time, and the subsequent impact on business styles, nor punk’s influence on political and social attitudes and activism. Nor are Brian de Palma and Oliver Stone credited for the film Scarface, and the subsequent rise of ‘bling’, the ostentatious wealth-based culture of the inner city and the rapper.

“Big trees from little acorns grow,” as Tolkein noted. But history doesn’t look too deep and, more often than not, a large and very significant part remains unconsidered, or is completely ignored. Tupperware, punks and ‘gangsta’ movies aren’t the sort of phenomena that make for great academic careers or even the briefest of footnotes.

Perhaps it’s a matter of hindsight though. Perhaps after a couple of hundred years, people will look back and marvel at the impact of Tupperware, or the evil wrought by Scarface. But probably not. History as a field is myopic and the only events that are recognised are the ones that are big enough to be seen through the haze. And what does it matter, if we never learn anyway?