I read a short article recently in Internazionale about a survey in Great Britain that suggested a quarter of Britons under twenty thought Churchill was an imaginary character, and Gandhi and Dickens too. Many of those interviewed, though the article didn’t say how many, apparently put Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, and Eleanor Rigby among those who actually existed.
My initial response was not to take the survey too seriously. First of all, I’d be interested to know what social background that quarter of youngsters who got it wrong about Churchill and Dickens came from. If they had interviewed Londoners in the time of Dickens, or those we see in Doré’s engravings of London poverty or in scenes from Hogarth, at least three quarters of those filthy, brutish, starving people would not have known who Shakespeare was. Nor am I surprised that people think Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood really existed, because there’s a Holmes industry in London that lets you visit the flat in Baker Street where he was supposed to have lived, and because the character that inspired Robin Hood did in fact exist. The only thing that makes him unreal is that in those times of feudal economy they robbed the rich to give to the poor, whereas with the arrival of the market economy they rob the poor to give to the rich. There again, as a child I thought Buffalo Bill was an imaginary character until my father told me that he had not only existed but that he, my father, had seen him when he had passed through our city with his circus: Buffalo Bill had ended up making a living from the legendary Wild West in Italy’s Piedmont.
It’s true that people’s ideas even about the recent past are vague, and we realize this when we question the young about it. Some Italian schoolchildren, when tested, thought that Aldo Moro had been a member of the Red Brigades, that Alcide De Gasperi had been a Fascist leader, Pietro Badoglio a partisan, and so on. You could say that it was a long time ago: why should eighteen-year-olds know who was in the government fifty years before they were born? Well, at the age of ten, perhaps because the Fascist schools used to test such things, I knew that the prime minister at the time of the March on Rome twenty years before was Luigi Facta, and at eighteen I also knew who politicians like Urbano Rattazzi and Francesco Crispi had been, and that stuff went back to the nineteenth century.
Our relationship with the past has in fact changed, and probably also at school. At one time we had great interest in the past because there wasn’t much news about the present. A newspaper used to report everything in eight pages. Now, with the mass media, there’s a vast amount of information on the present, and just think how much news there is on the Internet about millions of things, even the most irrelevant, happening at this very moment. The past as described by the mass media—the exploits of Roman emperors, for example, or Richard the Lion-Hearted, or the First World War—is viewed, through Hollywood and similar industries, along with the flow of information on what’s going on now, and it’s hard for a film audience to appreciate the difference in time between Spartacus and Richard the Lion-Hearted. Likewise, the difference between imaginary and real gets blurred or at least loses its significance: tell me why any child who watches a television film should think that Spartacus actually existed and Marcus Vinicius in Quo Vadis didn’t, that the Countess of Castiglione was a historical character and Emma Bovary wasn’t, that Ivan the Terrible was real and Ming the tyrant of Mongo wasn’t, seeing that each much resembles the other.
In American culture this flattening of the past onto the present is viewed casually, and you sometimes come across a professor of philosophy who tells you it’s irrelevant to know what Descartes had to say about our way of thinking, seeing that what interests us is what cognitive science is discovering today. He is forgetting that, if the cognitive sciences have come as far as they have, it is because a particular discussion had begun with seventeenth-century philosophers, but above all there is a failure to use the experience of the past as a lesson for the present.
Many dismiss the old saying that “history is life’s teacher” as banal, but we can be sure that if Hitler had made a careful study of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia, he wouldn’t have fallen into the trap that he did, and if George W. Bush had properly studied the British wars in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, or even the most recent Soviet war against the Taliban, he would have planned his Afghan campaign differently.
You might think there’s an enormous difference between the British idiot who thought Churchill was an imaginary character, and Bush, who goes to Iraq convinced he can wrap up the war in fifteen days, but there isn’t. They are both examples of the same phenomenon: losing sight of history.
2008