Before The Past Was New.

Why should we bother trying to understand?

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As always, thanks to those who tirelessly supply translation in other languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here. Hubert Mulkens has completed another translation into French, which I intend to publish in a couple of weeks. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. Now then:

Most of us live our daily lives as uncomplicated materialists, silently accepting an essentially nineteenth-century conception of the world. Reality is made up of solid, distinguishable objects, and we all perceive it in the same way. Our perceptions and our memories are essentially mechanical, and our memories are stored somewhere, just as this Essay I’m starting to draft will be saved to an identified physical space on my computer, and when I want to write some more, it will appear on the screen unchanged.

If we’ve ever taken an interest in quantum physics, we understand that the world isn’t “real” in the traditional physical sense at all. Making small talk with a perceptual or a cognitive psychologist, we quickly learn that much of what we think we see is constructed not revealed, just as memories are, and it is perfectly possible for people to remember, in detail, things that never happened. Writing an article or a book, we have to rely on our memories and judgement to distinguish the useful from the irrelevant.

And yet these discoveries about perception and cognition—decades old now—have had remarkably little impact on the way that we understand contemporary or historical events, whose supposed meaning, in the end, comes from fallible analysis by fallible individuals of the second-and third-hand memories of other fallible individuals. Journalists, pundits and historians have to make gigantic assumptions about the reliability of perceptions and memory every time they write even about recent events. And of course there is the tendency to privilege accounts of personal experience and “how I feel” over impartial analysis, and the influence of the Cult of the Victim that has dominated for several generations now.

It’s true that there is a degree of scepticism now about perception and memory, especially among professionals. Police forces in many countries no longer use eye-witness evidence in court unless it can be supported by other forms of proof: there have been too many embarrassing miscarriages of justice. Worse, our memories change over time, and can vary with the situation. As time passes, our memories become more generic and less specific, and we start to assimilate our own memories to wider narratives we have heard and read about. Well-known studies in the 1960s of accounts of people who had lived through the London Blitz in 1940-41 and kept diaries, showed that there were significant differences between what they remembered twenty-five years later, and what they wrote at the time, generally favouring the version that was most current in popular culture.

So this week I want to look at how our impressions of the past are actually constructed, from the relatively mundane to the extremely significant, and why both psychological and political factors often make it unattractive and tedious to engage with the past as it actually was.

Those professionally involved in analytical work are aware of these sorts of problems, and of the wider problems of cognitive bias generally in handling information. I see the Wikipedia page on Cognitive Bias now lists dozens of variants, with references to many more. There are even textbooks on Intelligence Analysis intended to help analysts generally to avoid them. Yet what lasts, and what informs our view of the past in non-specialist terms, is seldom subject to such rigorous analysis, and little thought has been given to the political and other consequences of the fact that in nearly all cases, our understanding of even the recent past is filtered through successive layers of potential error. Let’s take an imaginary scenario to show what I mean.

We’ll assume that there is a new conflict in the North of Sudan, and a regional expert based in the West is trying to produce a note for a specialist newsletter. That expert contacts several other experts, including one in Khartoum, who have no first-hand knowledge of events, but know people and hear things. Hidden in the final paper, which may be quite lengthy, are references to the alleged presence of Chinese troops in the country, to opposition claims about massacres in the region, and to the fact that the Sudanese government has a history of using mercenary forces in distant parts of the country. Everything in the paper, of course, has already passed through four or five stages of summary and analysis at that stage. The story is picked up by non-specialist media, and rendered down, such that the “opposition” is now claiming that Chinese troops are responsible for the massacres. (This is of course denied by Beijing.) Eventually, since the “opposition” realises it’s on to a good thing, a campaigning journalist is fed rumours that “Chinese mercenaries” are responsible for the massacres. The vast majority of readers, including many in government, will therefore be left with the impression that something terrible has happened, without knowing quite what. And here, the choice of words, and even of punctuation is essential. Consider the difference between:

Chinese mercenaries kill hundreds in N Sudan, sources say.

Chinese mercenaries kill hundreds in N Sudan, human rights groups say.

Opposition claims “massive killing” by “Chinese-linked mercenaries.”

“Chinese mercenaries” linked to alleged killings in N Sudan.

Chinese “mercenaries” linked to alleged killings in N Sudan.

“Chinese” mercenaries linked to N Sudan massacres.

It’s quite a thought that even punctuation may determine how this particular “incident” is remembered in the future, and quite possibly influences government policies, but anyone with experience of the interface between politics and the media will be familiar with the problem. And once such ideas are politically established, even provisionally, then similar accusations in the future are bound to seem more plausible, because they are following a path that has already been trodden. And then there will be reports from the “opposition” forces that among the alleged dead mercenaries are some who “look Nepalese.” Since former Gurkhas have been employed by Private Security Companies as guards in Afghanistan and Iraq, some, let us say, “investigative journalist” will decide that British companies must be involved somewhere: thus “REVEALED: Britain’s role in Sudan genocide,” with obligatory references to Northern Ireland, the Mau-Mau emergency in Kenya and allegations of extrajudicial killings in Afghanistan. Which will in turn provoke angry online articles by people who have never been to Africa, but with titles like “Britain’s Shame in Sudan” and much use of words like ****, **** and even ****.

Which is to say that what is about to become history as the educated public understands it, and remembered as such in a decade or two, is often uncomfortably close to fantasy. This is not to criticise the people involved, necessarily: many journalists are privately aware of how unreliable much of their raw material is. They do the best they can. But between the gulf of interpretation and understanding of the incident (which after all may never even have happened,) and the various cognitive biases that even the most scrupulous analyst is subject to, the “truth” about something that happened even last week may never be known, assuming for this purpose that there is single “truth:” frequently there are several.

Then there is motivation, where we are notoriously limited to those things that we can understand and are familiar with. Thus the hilarious attempts to psychoanalyse Vladimir Putin, or hold the British Empire responsible for the war in Ukraine. The alternative, of finding out what people really think, and thought, and taking that seriously, notably involves work, but also risks coming to conclusions that will upset people and may be controversial (a point I return to in a moment.)

Recent history has just as many problems. I’ve been interviewed from time to time by researchers about my humble role in events long ago, and I’ve done my best to be objective and to answer question fully. But I’d be the first to say not only that memory can be deceptive, but there are things I didn’t see, or may have misinterpreted, as well as the normal process of turning often chaotic events into a coherent narrative. A historian, after dozens of such interviews, has to decide, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, what to include, what to leave out, and which interpretation is the most convincing.

Thus, a historian writing a book about the Fall of Yugoslavia might be interested in a key meeting of European states some time in late 1991. Most of the major players are now dead or long retired, but looking through archives, our researcher happens on what looks like an interesting report of the meeting from a junior participant, writing up the official record for his government. This document puts quite a different slant on the evolution of European policy at the time, and contradicts a number of things said then. It’s sufficiently interesting that our historian writes an article which starts a minor controversy. But few of the surviving participants have a very detailed memory of how the meeting went, and the archive material that has been released gives rather different accounts.

Then our researcher tracks down a former colleague of the report writer, now long retired. “Look,” he says, “at that point Yugoslavia wasn’t a big issue. That meeting went on all day, and as far as I remember, Yugoslavia took up about thirty minutes of it. Some delegations had already left. The big issues were things like the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Gulf War, the Political Union Treaty, Soviet nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the future of NATO, that kind of thing. Yugoslavia was just a nuisance, but the Chairman insisted we discuss it. The discussion was pretty scrappy as I recall, and didn’t lead anywhere. We didn’t really decide anything.”

Whilst most historians are at least theoretically aware of the dangers of looking at texts like this without context, the difficulty is often knowing what the context is, and recognising that what seems important to us now did not necessarily seem important then. In my own small way, I have often encountered suggestions that people thought in ways that I know they didn’t, and acted in ways that they could not have done, simply because of the writers’ ignorance of context.

This is a problem at all times and for all cultures: indeed, there’s a book to be written on the incapacity of cultures around the world to understand each other. Yet many societies have trouble even understanding the context of their own past, and probably none has greater problems than western Liberal culture, for reasons we’ve discussed a number of times in the past.

To recapitulate, Liberalism is an ideology based on a priori assumptions, towards which Liberal societies try to bend reality, acting as though the assumptions are objectively true. Chief among these are the belief that people act rationally in pursuit of their economic interests, and that they continually try to maximise their personal autonomy. Any wider shared identity or collective interest is by definition excluded. Thus, Liberalism cannot tolerate the existence of any competing structured system of thought, especially not one based on pragmatic evidence, and even less one that is based on assumptions about collective interest. Liberals have therefore always been fierce enemies of Socialism, and have also managed to derail much Marxist thought into identity politics. Liberalism has managed to neuter Christianity, turning it into a kind of gutless humanism, and has essentially absorbed and regurgitated Buddhism (look in your local bookshop and you will see the majority of books on Zen are by westerners. Western Zen is like western sushi.)

The ideological system that most troubles modern Liberalism is Islam, which it has completely failed to influence, let alone absorb. Islam typifies a phenomenon that Liberalism cannot understand: people acting, even against their immediate economic interests, in furtherance of a faith that they believe to be literally true. And to make it worse, Islam has a detailed and complex ideology, which presents itself as the complete answer to all the problems of life, politics and economics. Liberalism cannot deal with that, so it ignores it, treating Islam, as it treats all religions, purely as a secular communitarian identifier, whose adherents in this case are vulnerable minorities requiring protection. It thus ties itself in knots trying to somehow reconcile the attributed victim status of Muslims with the fact that Muslim societies frequently oppose and seek to repress violently the most elementary principles of Liberalism.

We’ll leave Liberals to try to sort that one out themselves, but it’s worth mentioning two consequences very briefly. One is that the Liberal incapacity to understand religion, and especially Islam, has led to disastrous interventions abroad, and the incapacity to understand and deal with consequences of the waves of Muslim immigration to Europe over the last generation. The other, by extension, is the complete inability of Liberal societies to understand Political Islam, still less to deal with it, especially in its violent manifestation. The idea that people can think that killing unbelievers, heretics and apostates is not only justified but commanded by their religion, and that their religion constitutes a complete basis for the organisation of society, without the need for secular law or governments, is so far beyond what Liberalism is capable of absorbing that its existence is essentially denied, because racism or something. Outbreaks of murderous violence are rationalised away and then forgotten: after all, even talking about the problem can only “strengthen the extreme Right.” Literally any explanation that can be somehow reconciled with Liberal theory (“it's the CIA!”) is to be preferred to actually grappling with an ideological system on which Liberalism has never been able to get a purchase.

This is an extreme case of the generic inability of our culture to grasp the context of most of the problems of the world, since the tools of Liberal ideology are so sadly deficient when compelled to respond to real-life situations. But if the present is bad enough, the past is massively worse. The Liberal toolbox is small and limited, and its explanatory spanners and screwdrivers work only in very narrowly-defined contexts. It is largely helpless to understand why things have historically happened as they have, or how and why society changes, and political systems and institutions develop as they do. Of course, Liberalism is not the only belief system shackled by the limitations of its ideology: Marxists have to go on grimly insisting that Imperialism is the Last Stage of Capitalism, various religious groups are condemned to look every day for signs that The End of Times is around the corner. But unlike other contemporary ideologies, Liberalism is very influential, and its limitations, and in particular its total incapacity to understand past events correctly, have a significant effect on our understanding of history itself. Let me give two examples of very powerful and widespread cases that Liberalism has not been able to cope with, and which have been tidied away into a corner to avoid upsetting people.

One is racial science, whose very existence these days is regarded as an abomination, and whose demonstrable historical popularity is denied, and attributed only to fringe fanatics. A single reference to racial science found in the work of a nineteenth century author is considered grounds for expelling that author from the Pantheon. Yet a hundred years ago, the idea that humanity was divided into races with different characteristics was as unexceptional among educated people as the idea that the Earth went round the Sun. So were they all mad, slavering fascist idiots? Not really.

To most people then, the idea that there were different “races” seemed too obvious to be worth arguing about. After all, humans were observably different not only in their physical appearance and skin colour, but in their social structures, customs and ways of living. White Europeans lived in complex cities: West Africans did not appear to. In any event, humans simply seemed to imitate all other species of animal. Anyone familiar with dogs, cats or horses (which was pretty much everyone in an era when people lived much closer to nature than they do now) knew that there were different “breeds” with different physical and psychological characteristics, and that these “breeds” were selectively reinforced through careful mating. Anyone with a garden knew that the same was true of flowers and vegetables. Why should humans be the only exception? Was it not obvious that some races were hardier, stronger and more intelligent than others? Was it not obvious that careful breeding could improve the human race as a whole? Most people, whatever their political or moral opinions, seem to have thought so.

In turn, both pragmatic observation and recent scientific theory suggested that different ‘“races” of humans were engaged in a struggle for existence, in the same way that animals and plants were. It was a matter of everyday experience that one species replaced another (grey squirrels replacing red squirrels, for example) and invasive plants made their home in your garden at the expense of your flowers. There was no reason to assume that human “races” were any different, and indeed history suggested that civilisations rose and fell, that races clashed and the losers were driven out, enslaved or exterminated. The ruling elites of the time had been brought up on the history of Rome, which consisted in large part of invading other countries and enslaving and exterminating all resistance And recent discoveries in archeology, and observation from the new European colonies, appeared to suggest this was and always had been a worldwide practice.

Darwin, although he hadn’t intended this, had provided a scientific basis for these observations. Likewise, an entire field of scientific study grew up around racial differences, with textbooks of cranial measurement and photographs illustrating in great detail the physiological differences between “races.” Those who advocated specific policies of racial separation (with obvious implications of status) believed that they were doing no more than applying in practice the latest exciting scientific discoveries.

Now it’s at this point that people start to shuffle their feet and look nervously towards the nearest exit. It’s one thing, after all, to hear these ideas from the mouths of thugs and fanatics. But how do we handle the fact that such opinions were held by large numbers of highly educated people, at least as intelligent as us, for long periods of time, and organised along rigorously scientific lines? Moreover, it turns out that most civilisations in history had theories of racial superiority over others, that justified enslaving them, driving them out and even exterminating them.

The easy answer is that with the discovery of DNA, the old idea of “race,” with all its political and intellectual baggage, is no longer sustainable (though there have been attempts from the Liberal direction to reinstate race as a cultural construct: I can’t imagine why.) But that’s only part of the issue: if such erroneous ideas, thoroughly diffused among the literate and educated population of the time, have since been overthrown by scientific discoveries, then what ideas of ours, even if widespread, may themselves be overthrown in the same way, especially as our own ideas are very largely based just on a priori Liberal assumptions? The possibility is terrifying. So such ideas are best not studied at all, but rather exiled to the Siberia of unacceptable concepts, never to be examined, never even to be mentioned except in tones of uncomplicated condemnation. This means, of course, that there are many things about the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century that we do not understand because we choose not to engage with them, but that is surely a small price to pay for avoiding feeling uncomfortable.

The refusal to engage with the reality of religious belief mentioned above comes from a position of moral and intellectual superiority, (“they can’t really have though those things!”) and produces reductive and misguided interpretations of everything from the Crusades to the nineteenth century Missionary movement. The refusal to recognise the widespread acceptance of racial theories in the first part of the last century leaves the terrible practices of the Nazis ontologically stranded, as though the perpetrators were Martians, instead of unoriginal thinkers who murderously operationalised contemporary intellectual clichés for an exterminatory War in the East. And that, of course, enables us to feel morally and intellectually superior to those who should have known, who should have anticipated that this would happen, whereas such anticipation was in fact impossible. As I discussed a couple of weeks ago, most history is written in this sense: working back from what actually happened, to select evidence pointing to the actual outcome, and disregarding the rest.

I suppose this has never been done to a greater extent than my second example, the historiography of the 1930s, which is of course related to the above example as well. Now, the recognition that the Treaty of Versailles had solved nothing, and established the conditions for another war, was very widespread. Indeed, over the whole culture of the inter-war years, there hangs a cloud of grim foreboding, of the inevitability of something worse than 1914-18, of the destruction of European civilisation itself. But this is not to say that the unresolved problems of 1919 were inevitably going to produce this war, between these actors, and that governments of the 1930s should inevitably have known this and taken account of it. Indeed, there was no way they could have done so.

Here, we encounter a question of enormous importance that is hardly ever raised, and never answered in a consistent fashion: should everything possible to be done to prevent any war, anywhere? The theoretical answer is yes, and many people would be scandalised even to hear arguments to the contrary. Yet the same people were, and are, furious that Britain and France did not declare war on Germany in, say, 1936, just as they should have attacked Serbia in 1992, and were right to invade Iraq in 2003. What’s going on here?

In fact, this illustrates a fundamental tenet of Liberal thinking about War: War is always unacceptable except when it’s morally obligatory. The same writers in the 1960s who railed against the war in Vietnam went back to their offices to continue writing books railing against the refusal of Britain and France to “stand up to” Hitler thirty years before. I remember them.

This schizophrenic attitude can be traced back to a willed inability to understand what the 1920s and 1930s were actually like, and what was in the minds of the statesmen and the populations of the era. This inability is important, because any recognition of the actual mentality of the time, and the problems that governments faced, could only undermine both our certainty in the correctness of our judgements today, and the consequent moral superiority that we feel entitled to enjoy.

Back in the days when I carried a guitar around and sang for pennies, anti-war songs were obligatory. Few of them were, shall we say, intellectually distinguished, but one that I heard Joan Baez sing during the Vietnam War impressed me, even at the time, with its obtuse refusal to face reality. As far as I recall, it began:

Last night I had the strangest dream, I’ve never had before

I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.

And so on, with peace treaties signed and weapons destroyed and universal rejoicing. This perfectly encapsulates the modern Liberal view of war: needless destruction perpetrated by misguided politicians and stupid Generals, with an assist from the good old Military-Industrial Complex, where all that’s needed is an outbreak of common sense and for reasonable people to sit down to settle their differences. I wonder what the effect would be of making a YouTube video with that song, and images of the 1938 Munich Conference displayed on the screen. I suspect the video would last about five minutes before being taken down.

Yet in many ways the banal sentiments of that song are much closer to the mentality of the 1930s that modern historians are, especially those of the moralising tendency. Their studied inability to understand how both rulers and ruled felt at the time is necessary if they are to preserve their sense of moral superiority, and if by extension they are to lecture today’s leaders on how to avoid the “mistakes” of the 1930s, by not “giving way” to Putin.

Bearing in mind the problems we discussed at the start of this Essay, of limited knowledge and understanding, of the fallibility of memory and the difficulty of context, as well as the compulsion to fit historical events into pre-existing patterns, it may seem strange that the historiography of the 1930s is so firmly and clearly established now, and in such black and white terms at that. War with Germany, it is confidently argued, was inevitable, but only a few far-sighted people like Churchill and De Gaulle saw this. So it’s obvious that the “Guilty Men” of Munich and before simply tried to avoid it out of cowardice and stupidity, or even Nazi sympathies. Now this is both an entirely unfair portrait of the politicians of the late 1930s, and a travesty of what Munich was about, but here I am concerned more with the deliberate refusal to complicate a nice little moral tale with any interest in trying to discover what the leaders and the publics actually thought and why. The model of an ineluctable descent towards war, typified by books with titles like The Dark Valley (not a bad book actually) could easily be challenged by other books recounting the incessant and increasingly desperate attempts to preserve peace and negotiate disarmament, but relatively few such books have been written, because they do not respect the dominant narrative. So let’s set out, very briefly and as best we can, what people thought.

I would suggest that it is the First World War, not the Second, that constitutes the fundamental break in western civilisation’s approach to War, and is directly responsible for the schizoid approach of Liberalism described earlier. Consider: it was never actually agreed even what the War was about, and controversy continues today. Yes, there were territorial disputes and tensions within Empires, yes, countries were afraid of being attacked, yes nationalism and expansionism were factors, but, as the French say, “All that for that?” The industrial-scale butchery, the unbelievable cost, the economies ruined, the armies of the disabled and psychologically scarred, the countries laid waste, the Empires torn apart, the civil wars and large-scale violence and displacement that followed … remind me again what the purpose of the War was? Yes, new countries received their “freedom:” most relapsed into conflict or dictatorship quite quickly. The issue of military dominance in Europe had not been settled: Germany considered itself betrayed rather than defeated, its industry was untouched, its population and economy the largest in Europe, and at some point it was going to demand a reckoning. When that happened, there would be a war which would destroy Europe forever. Was that not, perhaps, something to invest a little effort in trying to prevent?

So gigantic and terrifying was this eruption of uncontrolled mechanised violence, so bottomless its apparent appetite for human flesh, so pointless and tragic the progress and the outcome of the War, that indeed preventing a repetition was seen as the most basic duty of governments, not least because new technologies promised to make future conflict even worse. The major combatants were in a kind of shock for a decade after the War (what we think of as “war literature” essentially belongs to the years 1928-32). So apocalyptic was the destruction and the suffering that it took that decade just to absorb and begin to come to terms with it.

Let’s start with France. Almost one and a half million Frenchmen died in the War, and over four million were wounded. This amounted to more than two thirds of those who served. Losses came from all layers of society, because this was the only war in history where the middle classes fought in the front line. I was passing through the Gare de l’Est in Paris recently, where the trains for the front departed, and there is a memorial to the railway workers mobilised for service who died in the War: there are at least a thousand names. But the smallest church in the smallest village in France has its own butcher’s bill: sometimes every younger male member of a family was killed or wounded. And go to a university or a professional institution that existed in those days and you will find similar lists of students, teachers, scientists, doctors, engineers … it goes on and on. So many men were killed, in fact, that an entire generation of women never married, or stayed widows. And everywhere, in every town, the sight of terribly disabled veterans begging in the streets. On the whole, preventing a repetition of that must have seemed a worthwhile idea.

The British mobilised fewer men and suffered slightly lower casualties, but the effect was even more cataclysmic for a society which had never known mass mobilisation and mass casualties before, and had no intellectual resources to help them understand the nature of the Calvary they had endured. Again, the dead came from all sections of society: again, as with the French, politicians and decision-makers had either fought in the war or seen children and friends perish in it. Village greens and university chapels suddenly spouted terrible lists of those who would not return, and whose bodies would often never be found. A special Commission had to be set up simply to gather the dead together and bury them decently. It still exists today. The Oxford Union resolution of February 1933 never again to fight for King and Country has been dismissively interpreted as middle-class lack of moral fibre: in fact the subtext was, Won’t Get Fooled Again. Up until the very outbreak of war, many British intellectuals, including George Orwell, were convinced that the government was trying to drag the country into an unnecessary conflict. Oh, and a small note from my youth: many of the dead soldiers were only recently married, and the folk-dance revival of the nineteen-sixties attracted many elderly women who had been widows for fifty years to dance again: Austin Marshall wrote a song about it.

And all this for what, exactly? Much had been destroyed, much had been weakened, but nothing had been settled. So how do you feel about doing it all over again? Not very enthusiastic probably. After all, the underlying issues were the same. The consequences of the fall of the Hapsburg and Romanov Empires had not been worked through, the mismatch between territories and populations had no obvious solution, Germany was unsatisfied and feared the Soviet steamroller to the East as it had feared its Romanov predecessor. Add economic collapse, internal political strife and the apocalyptic vision of air bombardment, then might some effort to prevent another War be reasonable, even if it meant dealing with regimes you don’t like? To argue that events after January 1933 were foreordained in detail, and that politicians of the time should have known this, and abandoned any search for peace or compromise, is historically ridiculous, and the product of precisely the kind of deliberate blindness and inattention to complexity that this Essay has been concerned with.

After all the German claim to the Sudetenland was not just reasonable, in the view of many, it was precisely the kind of issue which, unless it was dealt with carefully, could spark another 1914. Modern historians seem to be cool with the idea of tens of millions of dead to prevent the Sudetenland becoming German: neither the populations nor the governments of western countries were quite that complacent at the time. There were a small number of overt Nazi supporters in Britain and France, though their writings suggest they were pretty deluded about their object of worship, and there were a larger number who argued that any future war should be left to the Germans and the Soviet Union, and that Britain and France had nothing to gain by their involvement. But successive governments and large swathes of public opinion hoped that a policy of military strength through re-armament on one hand, and a search for a negotiated settlement on the other, could avert war. These days, we think they were wrong, partly because we know things they could never have known, and so we have rearranged what we think they did know, or should have known, into a tidy moral pattern, but partly also so we can feel superior to them, and lecture their ghosts on how they should have waged an aggressive war on Germany in, say,1938.

As time passes, the rough edges are sanded off the sides of history, and the nuances are ironed out. Factions compete to seize control of the narrative and use it to their advantage, to make the past new again. Finding out what people really thought and why they acted as they did, becomes more and more difficult and tedious. In the end, perhaps it’s not really worth it The problems of memory, the contexts of texts, the thought paradigms that have disappeared, are just too difficult, and there is always the chance that if we do some serious research we might wind up finding things that upset us. And Liberal political culture can’t really cope with that.