Saturday, October 29, 2016
TO SEE OR NOT TO SEE
You
either have a deep feeling for the past and the importance of telling the truth
about it, or you don’t. I can’t prove that telling the truth is a good thing to
do. Plenty of people believe it is bad. Upholding tradition, even if it
promotes a false picture of the past, is considered by many to be the right
thing to do, the thing that society needs more than anything else.
I
believe that traditions which falsify the past do more harm than good. Others
believe that tradition is always good and exposing the wrong ones does more
harm than good. I don’t know that either side can prove their case.
This
is not about fighting for historical justice, which is a virtual impossibility.
The past that happened cannot be undone (which is one reason why so many believe
it should be left alone). There is no way to correct past injustices or punish
the perpetrators, if it is something that happened a long time ago. The victims
in history cannot be healed or made whole. It’s too late for any of that. The
only correction that can be made is to put an end now to the untruthful telling
of the past. That won’t change the past itself, but it will change our attitude
towards it. If the only thing it accomplishes is to expose the arrogance of
those who believe they have a right to tell lies, the truth about history is a
good thing to pursue.
I
can talk it up until I’m blue in the face, but if you do not already believe
the past needs to be told the right way, none of my words will mean a thing.
It’s a religious thing. Devotion to historical truth is like a religious
belief. It is fundamental. It cannot be proven. You either believe in it or you
don’t, but no amount of empirical evidence will convince anyone to change their
beliefs about this.
Years
ago when Homicide, the police detective
series, was on TV, I remember an episode in which a detective who was Catholic
explained that he investigates homicides because his religion teaches him to do
that. The dead cannot speak for themselves, so he has a sacred duty to seek
justice for them. Of course, in this case, concerning the recent dead, there is
a good possibility that the culprit can be caught and punished. With long ago
history, this isn’t possible. But the sacred feeling this detective had for the
dead and the need he felt to find the truth about what happened still hold. You
can carry these feelings for what happened long ago and far away just as much
as for what happened yesterday or last year.
Take
Judas, for example. I wonder what it’s like to be falsely accused of being a
traitor for 2,000 years. Do the dead have feelings? No one has produced one
piece of unambiguous, relevant evidence (relevant to the charge of being a
traitor) to establish even a remote possibility that he was a traitor. All the
evidence (except one piece) is ambiguous. What does it feel like to be
condemned on practically nothing?
By
the way, the Gospel authors knew exactly what they were doing in presenting all
this ambiguous evidence. They weren’t trying to tell the story of a traitor.
They left a trail of clues to what really happened. In the meantime, tradition
changed what they recorded to make it over into a story of betrayal. I wonder
not only how Judas feels about this, but how the Gospel authors feel to see
their story so misused.
Forget
the dead. What about the living? Does any living person feel a sense of shame
that Judas stands convicted on the basis of nothing? I think that Catholic
detective would be moved to take up his cause. But that detective is fiction.
No one in real life cares a dollop. What happened long ago, how careful the
Gospel writers were not to invent false evidence against Judas, but to record
it all as ambiguous, how lies came to be told about what is in the Gospels, how
scholars still distort what the Gospels say—it’s all a bad dream. We may never
wake up—except in fiction.
Consider
Charles Darwin. The fictional Darwin created by so many scholars is another bad
dream we may never wake up from. In his published work and in letters, the real
Darwin had no trouble proclaiming that the Anglo-Saxon race would triumph
throughout the world and that all the lower races would be exterminated. In one
letter, he added that when the lower races are all gone, humanity as a whole
will rise. Yet Darwin is most often remembered as a great humanitarian.
Something is wrong with our memory of the past, no?
In
another letter, concerned about a friend’s trip to North Africa, he says he has
no idea what the natives there are like, but he is sure they must be
bloodthirsty. As a friend worried about his friend’s safety in a strange land,
that is understandable. But that a scientist should say such a thing makes me
shudder.
That’s
one good reason to study the past: To shudder over what humanity has done to
humanity. Akira Kurosawa, the Japanese film director, said that he did not want
to give audiences merely something to digest, but something to make them
shudder. The idea that scholars can put someone in prison for thousands of
years, with no unambiguous evidence to justify it, or that they can make a
racist seem like a humanitarian—it all makes me tremble. And if I’m alone in
feeling that way, then so it goes.
©
2016 Leon Zitzer
