Reading history

Among grade school students, history has a reputation for being boring. Why care about the activities of a bunch of old dead white people, the story goes. With some rhetorical trickery, generous government funding, and naive compliance on the part of parents, the study of 'history' for millions of students in the United States transformed into "social studies". Now, holding proto-Marxist views has become the norm for fresh high school graduates.

Acknowledging class warfare, extensive institutional racism, and everything in between seems to be positively correlated with grade inflation. Hmm.

Why is 'history' boring?

What makes studying stuff that occurred in the past ('history') boring?

Allow me to suggest irrelevance as an explanatory factor.

'History' becomes boring when it provides no immediate perks nor any obvious prospects of being useful in the future. Suppose, for example, that you consider Thomas Jefferson to be an irredeemable slave-driving bigot. Except for remembering factoids that support this claim, the thought of TJ becomes irrelevant to the modern 'enlightened' individual. This mofo couldn't even accept and support some basic moral truths, so why should we care about the details of what he wrote about?

Here's another example. An elder talks on and on about family history, traditions, and the like. Cheeky kid thinks he already knows everything he needs to know about his family history; ma n pa r hypocrites and we gave up the traditions of the past for a reason. 

So history becomes irrelevant; there is nothing to learn from misguided morons. 

A final class of boring-ness comes from studying the past of things you don't care about to begin with. A person that isn't interested in peanut farming probably won't pick up a book on the history of peanut farming.

How socialists get people interested in 'history'

Does a history of oppression pay reparations?

People may become interested in the most mundane details of he-said-she-said if becoming conversant in those details means monetary pay-off.

If we can convince people with money that they owe us money because history, then history becomes very relevant [1].

Understanding 'Chinese history' becomes very important for Chinese Americans that are interested in asserting their unique hyphenated identity, getting special benefits for being Americans++ [2].

Identifying with oppressed classes means affirming the right to take stuff from other people. Insofar as 'history' is helpful in this, you will curiously find many people becoming overnight history pundits...

Shitstory

Historical accounts should not be evaluated solely on how well they align to a particular narrative, but on how well they are supported by evidence.

People that are interested in history only insofar as it confirms what they already believe (confirmation bias) should be regarded with great suspicion. Are they really interested in knowing history, or are they just after some fast status and shekels?

On the other hand, those that are willing to ponder historical evidence (which may take the form of paper documents, statistics, banjo purchases in the year 2017, etc.), even if that evidence goes against their particular political leanings, should be esteemed as true scholars, individuals interested in pursuing truth.

Erudition and Incentives

Knowing about stuff is cool and fine and provides its own intrinsic rewards. I think relatively few people are motivated in this manner, however. I, for one, will admit that I am not. Most of the things I want to know about give me some easily identifiable reward. For example, I would like to know about meditation practices so I can have a more enjoyable conscious experience. Likewise, I care to know about web servers, computer programming, and all that stuff because I can use these tools to do cool things and I want to get paid for providing valuable services. 

I believe that there is no problem in admitting that we like money/status/etc. and often pursue knowledge (including historical knowledge) for these aims.

The charlatans are those that claim intellectual 'purity' and try to deny they just want nice things, when evidently, this is the case. Some monks, through their austere lifestyles prove that they are truly primarily interested in history in of itself. 

 These individuals, I think, are few in number.

Notes and References

This essay continues to develop some ideas I began exploring in another essay, "Knowing History" (07/29/2018).

[1] "The Banned New Zealand Speech They Didn't Want To Hear!" (Stefan Molyneux, 2018/08/10)

[2] ++ in many popular computer programming languages means (+1), an increment in value. The programming language C++ is an 'upgrade' of the C programming language. Adding intersections to one's identity makes getting stuff easier.