History is a process, not a series of events.

I was just watching the 8pm rerun of last nite’s The Daily Show and the guest, Pakistani Ambassador to the United States made a very good point that got me thinking. He said that the process of abandoning alliances with pro-Taliban / pro-Al Qaida tribal forces along the Pakistani Afghan border is just that, a process, not an event. This struck me as particularly true as well as extreme relevant. This is in fact I believe the biggest problem with how we view and thus how we teach, history. From primary school onward we teach children that history is a series of events. In other words, a long time ago X happened, it was followed by Y and ultimately Z. This is the single most fundamental flaw in how we approach history and quite possibly the single greatest impediment to our complete and total inability to understand why history seems to repeat itself. History is NOT a series of events. It is not even a series of related and interconnected events. It is a process. It is a process with a beginning, middle and end; all of which are ambivalent to us. Imagine a very long book with one letter missing from one word from one sentence. Would the narrative of the book be inextricably altered by that one typo? No, of course not. However, imagine that this book is the only book there is and your task in life was to read and re-read this book. You would undoubtedly be irked everytime you read that particular passage of said book. Furthermore, although as you got further past that passage you might begin to forget about it and get back in to enjoying the flow of the story. This is history as we perceive it. We view history through the eyeglass of the not so distant past. Things like that typo we perceive with the most intensity when the are current but seems dreamlike and unreal the further we are from them. We also believe that they are unique. That they possess a special importance and that this importance is the reason they stick in our collective minds. In reality, it their closeness to now that actually makes them so significant, not any special characteristic that they possess. No war, no revolution, no terrorist attack possesses anymore significance than it’s timeliness gives it. At the end of the day every human life lost, every inhuman display of courage and every mind stirring speech given possesses no more or no less significance than that typo. It’s only importance lies in its proximity to now. This is the process of human history, a process totally ambivalent to us and our very shallow experience of it. We are not the reader, we are a fraction of the typo, an uneasy annoyance in the grand narrative of time.