History

"It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain"

-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

History has been defined as "the study of past events, particularly in human affairs" or "a continuous, typically chronological, record of important or public events or of a particular trend or institution" (Oxford Dictionary of English).

I believe history is really important, as it helps us learn about both mistakes and successes in our past and it helps us understand why we are now as we are. However, there is one really interesting and frustrating thing about history and it is that we can never really know the truth about what happened. In some cases we can hear or read testimonies of people who were present when the event we are studying happened, this makes it possible to reconstruct the events. The thing is we do not always have testimonies and so we have to speculate about what really happened. Also it would be absurd to think people would recall or remember things as they happened: humans are always biased. Our emotions and beliefs tend to get in the way even when we try to put them away; it is impossible for a human being to put their emotions and cultural context apart entirely.  Testimonies are never exact, in fact they can be completely different from the actual events.

What I am trying to say with this, it is that we cannot just believe everything written in a history book, because it could all be wrong or it could be telling the story only from only side. I am not saying there is absolutely no truth in what we know about our history, but we have to remember all of it has gone through a political and cultural filter, and not everything gets past it without being modified. Take this for example: When I was younger, I used to believe everything our teachers told us in school were absolute truths, that teachers really knew what they were talking about and were always right. But a couple of years ago, I had a history teacher who taught us about the Spanish Inquisition and told us how horrible and unfair it was. She talked to us about the massacres, about how people were judged just because they thought differently, how emotion and political affairs got in the way. She was an atheist. That same year, we learned about the same topic from our religion teacher, who was extremely Catholic, and his view of this historic event was completely different. He justified the Inquisition, minimized the amount of deaths it caused and never considered it was unfair to judge people in that way. 

Another example, can be seen in the Palestine-Israel conflict. I watched a documentary in which kids from various parts of the Israel territory and the Palestine one had had the opportunity of spending a day together. All these kids were interviewed about what they thought of the conflict. They had grown in such different environments, some of them having lost their fathers in hands of Israelites, some others extremely religious, that they had completely different perspectives of the conflict. The idea of putting them all together for a day, was to see if they kept their views after spending a day together. The funny thing was that those who met  each other began to understand better the other side of the story and understood there was a lot behind their 'enemies' actions, that maybe both parts were right in a way. They had never seen the other side of the story and their society and the things they had experienced had made them shape the truth of the war in different ways. However, the same children who had reached those conclusions were interviewed again some years later and their mind had changed completely. These children had gone back to their lives and societies, which, once again had influenced their views. The most understanding kids, claimed they had to protect their country, and all the progress made during the filming of the documentary was lost.

These examples show how information never gets to us without having been biased by the cultural contexts, beliefs, etc. of the person who is recounting the facts. We cannot possibly know the truth of what happened, there are so many perspectives and so much subjectivity. That is the reason we have to listen or read from different sources and perspectives in order to make our own judgements  and create our own theories of what really occurred.