The sanctity of history | Dan Mikhaylov
Although conservatives like to pride themselves as custodians of Britain’s magnificent heritage, it is uncommon that we overtly engage in historiosophical debates. Influenced by positivist and empiricist thinking and alarmed by the emergence of such historicist theories as postcolonialism and neo-Marxism, many conservatives unequivocally cling onto the Rankean principle that the past should be narrated “the way it essentially was” and easily dismiss attempts to reinterpret it and alter the historical narrative as malevolent and deleterious.
This defensive behaviour, which rejects questions about the significance of the United Kingdom’s historical journey entirely and subjects foundational myths to scepticism, has tangible social implications. As the progressivist assault on British monuments and the National Trust’s recent decolonisation campaign illustrate, conservatives are surrendering intellectual ground to those spreading contrary historical opinions and giving way to their unpatriotic and at times even outright anti-national accounts of Britain’s history.
Burgeoning separatism in Scotland is yet another sign that conservatives and everyone else who prize our country’s history are being overawed by those who seek to destroy its foundations and undermine its capacity to bind us together. Unlike us, they remember that history is not merely about facts, but also contains an important social and educative function. Historical events like the Blitz and England World Cup victory in 1966 ordinarily fill us with an unmatched sense of unity and pride. Historical role models like Horatio Nelson and Winston Churchill embody the best qualities we associate with Britons.
Historical icons like the Magna Carta help us formulate our socio-political code, founded on respect for the rule of law and democracy. Naturally, these strengthen us and resultantly strengthen Britain, but now that we are enduring an unprecedented identity crisis, it is arguably time for us to return the favour and reinforce them.
What Britain so desperately requires is a stronger emphasis on national history – on producing a comprehensive and convincing historical narrative that would both reflect our civic values and transmit them from one generation to another. This undertaking is what the British philosopher Ernest Gellner would have considered a “nationalism-inducing situation”; in his renowned 1983 publication, Nations and Nationalism, he presents a strong argument that nationalism in the form we concatenate to the advent of European nation-states was a nineteenth-century phenomenon, which originated in something called the “national consciousness”. The latter in turn constituted a product of cultural homogenisation, linguistic standardisation, political centralisation, and the creation of a shared history.
In short, a common – and correspondingly, often simplified – historical account of how a nation came about is a prerequisite the creation and subsequent maintenance of a national identity that guarantees that nation-state’s survival. Furthermore, this national history, we maintain, cannot exist without certain historical moments and figures that are taken to represent national norms, values, and aspirations and that helps students consolidate their knowledge in a way that benefits both them and national cohesion.
Modern Britain is currently devoid of such a normative and sanctified history. A school located in East Sussex has cancelled none other one of the most stoic characters in UK history, Winston Churchill. Although our GCSE curricula are yet to foment the same level of historical guilt that is reportedly widespread in the United States, it cannot be denied that they offer an incomplete, somewhat unbalanced perspective on the past. They either teach history thematically (Edexcel focuses on criminality and law and order, AQA examines migration and healthcare, OCR covers migration and British expansionism) or include in-depth studies of isolated historical moments. This prevents pupils from acquiring a sufficient understanding of British history. They struggle to incorporate disparate facts into a single, mutually consistent historical timeline that will guide their future interactions with resources and interpretations away from radicalisation and towards appreciation of our national history.
To remedy this situation, the government must concentrate its efforts on increasing our national history’s presence in education and corresponding intellectual resilience. To combat the spread of self-liquidating historical accounts, Britain needs a sanctified history, incorporating national heroes that embody Britishness as well as a national struggle, out of which this Britishness was forged. This approach predicates on two policies – manufacturing better teaching materials that echo our civic values and patriotic sentiments and training teachers who are both willing to, and capable of, shoring them up with abstract knowledge and personal enthusiasm. If it is the winners who have the privilege to write history, the Conservative government better begin to participate in the battle for British history.
The Importance of National Struggle
The first indispensable component of a national history is a struggle, as struggles ex vi termini bring people together behind a common goal and encourage individuals to prioritise group needs and wants over their own. Remembering and commemorating it, in turn, could serve to foment such selfless behaviour in society and cultivate societal responsibility during times of opulence. This praxis is as old as Methuselah: Ancient Greeks had deftly exploited the Iliad and the Greco-Persian Wars to strengthen their Hellenic identity vis-à-vis other ethnicities and political regions. More recently, the American defence of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812 is mentioned in the US national anthem, thereby enshrining that struggle against the British Empire as a seminal moment for American self-awareness, while Latin American countries pay comparable homage to Simon Bolivar’s and Jose San Martin’s liberations wars against Spain.
In our context, this national struggle need not presuppose a liberation war, all the more because Britain has not been conquered by any external force since the times of William the Conqueror; rather, we ought to personify Britain by contrasting it against our past adversaries and elevating our values to the foreground of this personified image. Herein, we might recall the Soviet statue of the Motherland, built in former Stalingrad to remind its residents of their forebearers’ defiant spirit and difficult triumph over Nazism.
For better or worse, World War One is not fit for this purpose: though it was undoubtedly formative for the British national identity and replete with instances of heroism and sacrifice that deserve to be elicited in contemporary Britons, it is now associated with remembering the fallen, rather than the victory their bravery had accomplished.
The spirit of the Blitz used to perform this role of a national struggle for many decades, thereby becoming a self-explanatory metaphor for resilience in the face of extreme adversity, but it can hardly sustain this reputation without increased government support and further idealisation of the Home Front in the Second World War. Films and other popular portrayals of this story have not been more vital than they are today, at a time when Britons are prone to forgetting their past and loathing it due to limited understanding of what had actually happened during the Blitz.
In addition to this noteworthy episode in UK history, the government should contemplate placing a greater emphasis on the Napoleonic Wars and the concomitant defeat of European radicalism by Britain and other sovereign nations or on the restoration of the monarchy in the seventeenth century, since the monarchy is an integral element of the British way of life.
National Heroes
Just as a nation requires a formative struggle to remind the living of historical challenges to its wellbeing that their ancestors have overcome, so must it seek to publicise the stories of its great men and women. This statement is not a mere conjecture, founded on the human predisposition towards following figures of authority. Conversely, it is a reflection on Albert Bandura’s social learning theory. This American-Canadian psychologist has argued that high-profile individuals are among the most likely to be emulated social models, and there is no reason why this principle cannot be extrapolated onto national heroes, whose presence in academic writing as well as in the public discourse would cement our values and facilitate intergenerational adhesion to them. All communities construct figures that reflect their values and internal meanings.
In prehistoric times, ancestral cults formed the backbone of the tribal order and legitimated internal divisions and hierarchies. In Ancient Greece, Sparta and Athens engineered respective cults of their first legislators, Lycurgus and Solon, as part of a process that sociologist Norbert Elias has famously called sociogenesis. Sociogenetic development of national role models is also found in the US, whose mainstream rendition of history regards Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator and the man who brought the benign principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution one step closer to reality. In France, Joan of Arc had possessed a similar reputation for most of the twentieth century, her canonisation in 1920 undoubtedly drawing on her secular fame among the French.
Britain is hardly devoid of worthy individuals. We have had outstanding politicians, including Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli (who remains Britain’s only Jewish Prime Minister), impressive authors like T.S. Elliott and William Shakespeare, and scientists, whose discoveries drastically changed how we think about the natural world: Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Alexander Fleming, to name just a few. Her Majesty herself is a fine example of perseverance, optimism, and courage.
The problem is not the lack of role models, but rather how we have been managing them. To do their contributions justice, Westminster should consider creating a similar body to the 1776 commission in the US, envisaged by the Trump administration to be an incubator of educative and patriotic history. Furthermore, in lieu of continuing to name streets after ambiguous words like diversity, municipal authorities must be instructed to assign street as well as bus and train station names to this country’s great men and women. The fact that the government has recently named its educational initiative after the mastermind behind the Enigma machine, Alan Turing, vindicates that such steps are possible.
Returning to the perennial question of “What is to be done?”, we highlight the following theses. Firstly, all homogenous and vibrant national communities predicate on formidable and complex national identities, comprised of persuasive and all-encompassing national accounts of struggle for, and individual contributions to, the common weal. Secondly, conservatives should engage in historiosophical debates and resile from viewing history as a simple agglutination of simple, irrefutable facts. Facts, as the renowned British historian E.H Carr has purported, a priori imply subjectivity, as historians have to determine what constitutes a fact and how important this fact is to the grand narrative of international history.
It is time that those postcolonial interpretations that have birthed the nationwide campaign to decolonise our education are counterpoised with conservative facts and conclusions. Thirdly, and most importantly, this necessitates both local and national government action: redesigning how we teach history, renaming our infrastructure in cities and villages alike, and coaching exponents of this sanctified national history. However overused this truism might seem, history is indeed written by winners. Arguably, it is time that conservatives, whether in government, in the press or in the workplace, entered this contest for Britain’s heart and soul. If we do not fight for our past, we might not have a future.
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