Histories

 

Edo period (1603–1867) / Shibata Zeshin/ Grasshopper and sunflower

Just put out my little solar cell and battery setup.  I suppose that I don't really need it, but I figure that "making hay while the sun shines" and learning just how much solar energy I can harvest on a sunny day may well prove informative for an uncertain future.  I will keep you posted.

"Lie" is a pejorative term.  History is written by the winners at first, then is re-written in a serial manner as the thoughts and beliefs of the culture change over time.  History 1.0 is written by the victors directly.  It is usually pretty shameless in the presentation of the complexity that is the world.  It presents one side and one side only and couches the arguments in terms and values that the victor holds dear.  Should any of these values look dicey, even in the victor's mind, they are conveniently glossed over.  History at this point is written by the public relations crowd.  For great examples of this, one needs merely to re-read the high-school history books of the 50's and 60's here in the US by Madison Avenue in the cold war.

History 2.0 is a little different.  By that time the actual "victors" are in rocking chairs, angrily shaking their fists at the new-age historians who cannot understand the straightforward set of half-truths that the 1.0 used to justify/glorify their actions.  To understand this, one needs to go through and read college history courses in the 70's and 80's.  This is the point where the Boomers (Your Humble Correspondent takes a bow here), started reading unauthorized histories from such completely unacceptable sources as Frenchmen.  Couple this with the moral relativism so prevalent in a capitalist/industrial society and a deep seated and angry contempt toward parent figures and you have a fairly large contingent re-writing history with the history 1.0 as fabricated twaddle and their 2.0 revisions as total truth.

Now we get History 3. I see this lasting through the 90's.  But then 9/11 happened and History 3 came roaring in.  But History 3 was bifurcated.  History 3.1 was an attempt to return to History 1.0.  History 3.2 doubled down on the anger and resentment of mankind being a bunch of fucked up idiots.

History is morality in a sense.  How you read and write history doesn't just let you understand the past, it allows you the ability to judge others who aren't there to explain the moral morass that they had to navigate and the decisions that they regretted.

History doesn't believe in regrets.