Hindsight
Recently, someone reminded me of that old saying, "Hindsight is always 20/20." I've thought about that saying before, and I must say that it isn't true.
Hindsight has the advantage of traversing familiar territory, but if it were always 20/20 — that is, if it always saw things as they were — then we'd have no need for historians. But the point is that we do indeed need historians, because the long look back, even at the immediate past (of say, twenty seconds ago) is always cluttered by the debris of emotion, of irrelevance, of hope and of fear.
In other words, looking back at the past is only slightly less confusing and difficult than looking forward into the future. The only difference is that as we look back into the past, we have some idea that some things actually happened. The problem is that we ornament and interpret, we report and hedge, we simplify and exemplify — we make the past what we think it ought to be.
The past, on the other hand, seldom cooperates. It is more fluid than we would like it to be. It is especially vulnerable to those who have the will and capacity to take advantage of that fluidity in order to impose their ideas on the rest of us.
Just over the last few years, I've been reviewing statements made by many of my ex-colleagues. I have managed to capture a lot of what they said, what they claimed and believed. The surprising thing is how sincerely they were wrong. For example, when someone implied that the old place was ranked in a certain way in a certain year, he had completely forgotten that there were no rankings that year in the first place. When someone else said that we had done very well in a certain year but not so well in another year, the data assembled proved that this was completely wrong.
We all see things that aren't there, because we thought they were there or we believed they should have been there, or sometimes because we hoped that we had seen them there. The only advantage that the historian has over the futurist is that the cumulative evidence can provide support for a particular belief; the only advantage the futurist has over the prophet is that he won't be stoned for missing the mark.
Hindsight has the advantage of traversing familiar territory, but if it were always 20/20 — that is, if it always saw things as they were — then we'd have no need for historians. But the point is that we do indeed need historians, because the long look back, even at the immediate past (of say, twenty seconds ago) is always cluttered by the debris of emotion, of irrelevance, of hope and of fear.
In other words, looking back at the past is only slightly less confusing and difficult than looking forward into the future. The only difference is that as we look back into the past, we have some idea that some things actually happened. The problem is that we ornament and interpret, we report and hedge, we simplify and exemplify — we make the past what we think it ought to be.
The past, on the other hand, seldom cooperates. It is more fluid than we would like it to be. It is especially vulnerable to those who have the will and capacity to take advantage of that fluidity in order to impose their ideas on the rest of us.
Just over the last few years, I've been reviewing statements made by many of my ex-colleagues. I have managed to capture a lot of what they said, what they claimed and believed. The surprising thing is how sincerely they were wrong. For example, when someone implied that the old place was ranked in a certain way in a certain year, he had completely forgotten that there were no rankings that year in the first place. When someone else said that we had done very well in a certain year but not so well in another year, the data assembled proved that this was completely wrong.
We all see things that aren't there, because we thought they were there or we believed they should have been there, or sometimes because we hoped that we had seen them there. The only advantage that the historian has over the futurist is that the cumulative evidence can provide support for a particular belief; the only advantage the futurist has over the prophet is that he won't be stoned for missing the mark.
etched with acid at 10:14:00 am
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