Welcome to the Tuesday Coffee Hour here on Street Prophets. This is an open thread where we can hang out and talk about what’s going on in our worlds. In order to understand the present and the future, it is important to understand the past. Thus history is important.
In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes:
“we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.”
One of the current examples of flimsy accounts of the past which some people believe to be true can be seen in pseudo-historian David Barton’s book
The Jefferson Lies in which he attempts to prove that President Thomas Jefferson was a devote Christian who would support the current movement toward an American theocracy. Some examples of the misinformation passed off as history in this book include:
Barton says Jefferson helped found the Virginia Bible Society. Did he? Nope. Jefferson made a one-time contribution to the Society because a business associate asked him to. In reality, Jefferson wasn’t too keen on Bible societies, criticizing them in letters to friends for meddling in the religions of other countries.
Barton says Jefferson added the phrase “In the Year of Our Lord Christ” to official government documents. Did he? No. The documents referred to were called “sea letters,” a type of passport that enabled ships to move between nations. By the terms of a Treaty with Holland ratified in 1782, Jefferson was obligated to use language on pre-printed forms provided by that nation. Officials in Holland added the “Lord Christ” language.
Barton says that while Jefferson was a state legislator in Virginia, he proposed a bill that would have punished anyone who worked on Sunday. Did he do this? He did not. Jefferson was part of a committee charged with the task of revising Virginia’s law after the Revolution. Rather than start from scratch, the committee took 126 existing laws and revised some of them. The committee’s work actually liberalized the Sabbath law. They added a huge loophole allowing work done “in the ordinary household offices of daily necessity, or other work of necessity or charity.” The law Barton sees as favoring Christianity actually liberalized a provision that had been much more stringent.
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Daniel Kahneman also writes:
“A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge, or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lost much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.”
More from Kahneman:
“The illusion that one has understood the past feeds the further illusion that one can predict and control the future. These illusions are comforting. They reduce the anxiety that we would experience if we allowed ourselves to fully acknowledge the uncertainties of existence.”
This helps explain the right’s concern for creating a history that reinforces their theocratic image of the United States.
In her 1868 book An Illustrated History of Ireland, Sister Mary Frances Cusack writes:
“To be ignorant of our own history, is a disgrace; to be ignorant of the history of those whom we govern, is an injustice.”
While her concern was the British rule of Ireland, we can apply this same statement to the United States attempts to impose governments in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Chile, and numerous Indian nations.
This is an open thread, feel free to talk about history, the future, art, or anything else.