Judgmental History

My mom commented on the title and tone of Barbara Tuchman’s wonderful book, The March of Folly, that it was so different to see a history book that was judgmental rather than just narrative. And that reminded me why I loved Freedom at Midnight: it too had strong views on the main characters and the events that played out leading to India’s freedom and partition.

Both books made me realize that judgmental history is so much interesting than the one we’re taught history at school, what tech blogger Venkatesh Rao describes as “an extremely dull, non-analytical version of history which is just one damned fact after another”.

Of course, judgmental history is a double-edged sword, as Rao warns:

“In countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, it might be much more deliberately political.”

So I think that it’s better for schools to teach it the way they do in liberal democracies like the West and India (“it’s a bit more open” most of the time, even if it too inevitably “serves certain regional political purposes”). But when we re-read history later in life, we need a different treatment.

Remember that famous line by Francis Fukuyama when the Berlin Wall fell and communism collapsed, the one where he declared the “end of history”? I never ever understood what he meant by that: surely he couldn’t mean that events of significance would not happen anymore?! Turns out what he really meant was more along the lines of saying that all Western philosophy is merely a “footnote to Plato”, or as Rao puts it:

“Liberal democratic forms (of governance), as they exist in the West and certain other parts of the world like Japan and India, represent the end state of political evolution, in a certain sense.”

Rao then cites an analogy from biology that makes Fukuyama’s point crystal clear:

“It’s not that history itself ends as in stops happening, but that a certain aspect of evolution ends. I like the biological analogy, that in the primordial soup there were a huge number of replicator molecules that could self-produce but at some point DNA became the dominant monopolistic molecule that became the basis of all life. In that sense, history ended when liberal democracy emerged as the global standard for governance.”

Interesting point: is Fukuyama right? Or does China prove that a sustainable, enriching alternative to liberal democracy does exist? Or is China just a temporary phenomenon that will either switch to liberal democracy or collapse under the oppressive nature of communism? Only time will tell…