What’s Your Story?

I once heard a story about a teacher instructing her young students on the period of Scottish history covering William of Orange, who was no friend to Scotland, when one of the boys shouted, “Our King Billy wouldn’t do that to us” and stormed from the classroom. Obviously, the boy was from one of those families that march every July.

There are two kinds of history. There is the history of the head, dealing with facts, key figures, dates, and legislation, and then there is the history of the heart which has more to do with our sense of identity.

In the film, Blade Runner, the protagonist Rick Deckard realises that the latest model of manufactured humans, called replicants, comes equipped with memory implants. Dr. Tyrell, the owner of the company manufacturing the replicants, tells him:

We began to recognize in them a strange obsession. After all, they are emotionally inexperienced, with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we gift them with a past, we create a cushion or a pillow for their emotions, and consequently, we can control them better.

What memories are to the individual, history is for the group of individuals that we call society or culture. There exists a grand narrative in which we see ourselves to be a part. Within this story we are not simply a part of the existing group but also among those members long dead. It is self-identification.

Just as Dr. Tyrell observed in Blade Runner, controlling how people perceive that history is a key part of controlling them. This is why determining the history curriculum in any school system is critical for those wanting their view of the society to be the dominant one. It is much easier to teach children the history you want believed than to convince adults that the history that they were taught was wrong.

In 1985 a television mockumentary appeared called, “The History of White People in America” presented by comedian Martin Mull. In one scene there is a class where the teacher asks the students to tell their heritage. The black student tells the typical African-American narrative of slavery and emancipation. The Jewish-American student gives the typical Ellis Island story. The white boy she asks is at a loss and described how his family first lived on Elm Street and then moved to Maple Street. The non-white children have a grand narrative of the heart, but the white kids have nothing.

This scene illustrates what historian Professor Niall Ferguson wrote concluding his book, Civilization: The West and the Rest: “…the biggest threat to Western Civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity – and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.”

Pusillanimity is the vice of being timid and cowardly and thus not living up to one’s full potential. So if we go back a hundred years in America we find the grand white narrative of pilgrim forefathers, invention and industrialisation, and Western expansion. In Britain, we see the glorification of an empire upon which the sun never set. Today, those heroes of the past are seen as the villainous murderers of natives and the enslavers of Negros. No wonder the “white race” seems to recoil from its history. The ignorant bury themselves in modern consumption and the learned give only apologies for fear of offending someone. To speak openly and proudly of this narrative is to risk accusations of racism or white supremacy – so best not to mention it.

Imagine if we were visited by an alien race that was a thousand years ahead of us technologically. There are some who welcome such a prospect and look to the stars for salvation. Others fear the threat of hostile invasion from an advanced alien force.

How would these alien visitors perceive humanity? Would they see us as an inferior species and benevolently seek to help bring us enlightenment? Would they teach us their philosophy, introduce their wondrous machines into society, establish advanced government institutions, and extend our ability to produce food, end diseases, and prolong life spans.

Or would they see us as an inferior species fit only for the most menial of tasks? Would they enslave us as a cheap labour force, take our lands from us, defile our great monuments or take them away to their planet. We would fight, but the harder we fought the more ruthlessly they would fight back, especially if we posed a constant danger to their civilians.

The first depiction of such an event came in 1898 with the publication of The War of the Worlds by HG Wells. The author speculated what if Britain was invaded by a superior technology just as it had invaded other less advanced countries. But Wells had the over-simplified view that comes with the history of the heart.

British and American imperialism cannot be so easily reduced to fit either the benevolent bringers of enlightenment or the ruthless genocidal conquerors, although both narratives have been spun and propagated. To focus exclusively on the good creates an appearance of racism whereas highlighting only the bad is to become the victim of racism as the white devil.

Like the alien visitors with technology and social systems a millennium in advance of our own, so too were the European visitors a millennium ahead of the peoples that they encountered. In such a situation the outcome does not bode well for the primitives. If the visitors are predominantly benevolent, then they destroy the native culture. If they are predominantly hostile, then they destroy the native people. There is no version of the story in which the natives are not victims and the visitors not victimizers. It’s just the way the deck is stacked.

Part of the white man’s narrative is our much over-looked “Never Again”. The phrase is the motto for the Jewish Defence League and refers to “never again will we allow another Holocaust”. The same concept emerges among Feminists who will “never again” be relegated to the kitchen or the African-American “never again” returning to slavery and discrimination.

The white man’s “never again” is boldly expressed in the song “Rule Britannia” which declares that Britons shall never be slaves. The song first appeared in 1740 during a critical period in Anglo-American history. Here’s the story…

During the decline of the Roman Empire, people sought refuge from the barbarian raiders on the great estates of the wealthy in exchange for work. This evolved into the feudal system of the Middle-Ages when most people lived short, ignorant, and miserable lives on the feudal estate. However in Britain things were slightly different. The Celtic and Anglo-Saxon tribes of Britain were largely free until the Norman invasion when feudalism was imposed upon the people as part of the conquest, but the spirit of freedom remained.

In time, this kernel of freedom grew and became empowered through the forces of the free market, the rise of mass communication through the printing press, and republican government in the Seventeenth Century. By the time Rule Britannia was penned we are seeing the rise of the common man from slavery moving closer to full expression in the ever growing middle-class challenging the noble order.

From the ideas of the Enlightenment to their manifestation as action during the Romantic Era emerges the central idea of Classical Liberal thought and modern Libertarianism. I am an individual, I am free to make my own choices, and I shall never be enslaved.

This is our “never again”. We shall never again be serfs on a plantation. We shall never again be slaves to the state. This spirit of defiant individuals is what is fuelling the modern global libertarian movement. Those of us who know our history possess an extended memory that transcends the limited boundaries of our lives. We “remember” the slavery that was and how it was fought against and freedom secured. We say “never again” as the signs along the road to serfdom present themselves with ever more frequency.

Yes, some of the people who first made that statement owned Negro slaves and some even made their fortunes trading in them. What is forgotten is that as soon as the realisation dawned that these comparatively childlike primitives, a thousand years behind us technologically, were in fact human, the abolitionist movement began in full force almost over-night. Britain and America turned its back on one of the most profitable industries of the day and fought through the marketplace of ideas and with gunboats to stop the global slave trade. Although the causes behind the American Civil War are debatable, many individuals signed-up to fight and die not just to preserve the Union, but also to free the slaves. White Britons and Americans died so that black men could be free.

So when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown publically apologised for Britain’s role in the global slave trade what he should have said was, “You’re welcome”. But that does not fit in with the popular narrative required of the penitent descendants of the white devils.

The French philosopher Voltaire famously said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”, recognising a human psychological need for the divine, likewise he said that history is a fable agreed upon. This too is a psychological necessity. Each of us carries within ourselves our unique sense of the history of the people we instinctive claim to be our own. It is our own unique history of the heart. Some stories may be vaguer than others and some truer to the history of the head than others. Like the boy and his “King Billy” in my opening story, the history may be propagandistic nonsense, but it serves a purpose. It’s the fable that binds his community together and the same holds true for national cultures.

As for my country, the United States, it likes the fable of being a nation of immigrants. Of course it’s not true. My ancestors were not immigrants to the United States. My story does not fit-in with the nationally accepted narrative. My ancestors were colonist landing on a rocky shore surrounded by a mysterious dense forest from which they built the Plymouth Plantation. It’s more than a question of semantics to recognise that a colonist arriving in a wilderness is not an immigrant arriving in a city. Likewise, the migrants from one part of Britain arriving in another part of Britain are not immigrants. Those people who called themselves the “True Americans” in the 1860’s and their descendants are being white-washed from history in favour of the more popular “nation of immigrants” identity.

I agree with Niall Ferguson that our culture’s pusillanimity will be our downfall. In the name of timidity and cowardice we no longer teach our national story to our children except in the negative. Some participants seek to distance themselves from the perceived sins of our fathers, such as the Scottish National Party trying to teach a history of Scotland that excludes the disproportionately large role the Scots played in the Empire. Another example comes from the city of Portland, Oregon where a statue of a pioneer family intended for the entrance to the history museum was relegated to a residential neighbourhood for fear of offending the Indians. The message to the people of the Anglosphere is clear. Reject your history, denounce the Empire, and condemn the Western Expansion. or be damned as right-wing racists. My answer to that is no.

I am descended from the Scottish Royal House of Dunkeld, the English Royal House of Plantagenet, and the English noble House of Percy. My ancestors landed on Plymouth Rock, one of whom was the first governor of Massachusetts, another ancestor took the first British prisoner of war in the American War of Independence, at least three great-grandfathers fought for the Union during the Civil War, one of whom was the cousin of one of the fathers of American literature, and my grand-father fought in the Great War. I am a proud British-American and “my people” in Britain and America literally created the modern world through their imagination, invention, industry, enterprise, and perseverance. That’s my story. What’s yours?