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Winston Churchill was born in 1874 in Blenheim Palace near Oxford in England when Queen Victoria was in her reign’s 37th year. It isn’t surprising, then, that many of his views strike us as retrograde. Paternalistic in politics, he “saw British imperialism as a form of altruism.”
Tariq Ali, the Pakistani-British journalist and historian, has been especially blunt in his criticism of Churchill. As he wrote in Jacobin, “In his own lifetime, Churchill was often recognized for who he really was: an unrepentant imperialist and racist, a foe of trade unions and women’s rights, and a defender of elite privilege.”
Churchill, to be sure, has many defenders, who argue that his views evolved over time and that his positions on race and imperialism are far more complicated and nuanced than his critics claim. But the fact is that he was a product of his time, his class and his circumstances—as are we all.
To know all isn’t to forgive all. There are always some people who transcend their times. Still, as the cliché puts it, the times shape the man.
The past, even the relatively recent past, is another country. That’s the title of David Lowenthal’s magisterial account of the past’s ever-changing role in shaping our lives, and accepting the fact that people in the past thought and lived differently than we do is a truth that we’d do well to understand.
As Lowenthal puts it, “Although the past has ceased to be a sanction for inherited power or privilege, as a focus of personal and national identity and as a bulwark against massive and distressing change it remains as potent a force as ever in human affairs.”
The past, in Lowenthal’s view, is “a malleable construct of the present that has been different things for different cultures at different times,“ a “mental object” that people twist to serve their “current needs.” Ironically, as he shows, modernity with its “rebellion against inherited tradition,” produced a counterreaction, giving rise to “the modern cult of preservation and pervasive nostalgia.”
But the past isn’t just a social and cultural construct. It’s also a lived experience. And that history exerts a powerful influence on people’s attitudes, values and perceptions. We can’t hope to understand our forebears without appreciating their circumstances.
You’ve no doubt heard a line attributed to Mark Twain: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”
We don’t know whether Twain actually said this. After all, the quote first appeared in 1915, five years after the great humorist’s death. And anyway, John Marshall Clemens died in 1847, when his son was just 11.
I quote that famous line for a simple reason: when we’re young, we rarely know much about our parents—much as they don’t understand much about us. It takes quite a while before we can understand our parents as people: how their attitudes and perspectives were shaped by their upbringing, circumstances and experiences.
Even if your students reject their parents’ values and attitudes, they’d do well to understand where those ideas come from. In that way, your students might develop a bit of empathy for their parents, much as all of us should hope that succeeding generations will show some compassion for our own weaknesses and failings.
In musician and songwriter Graham Nash’s words,
And you of tender years
Can’t know the fears
That your elders grew by
And so, please help
Them with your youth
They seek the truth
Before they can die.
A friend and onetime colleague, Maurice Isserman, the leading historian of the American left (and of mountaineering), once reviewed a history of the 1960s by a “younger, debunking-minded” scholar. Much to Isserman’s chagrin, he felt impelled to tell that scoffer that you “just had to be there” to truly understand the mood and atmosphere of that decade of social ferment and cultural upheaval.
Among history’s greatest contributions is to allow us to see the world through other people’s eyes, including our parents’ minds.
I’m convinced that our students would benefit enormously from a better understanding of their parents’ (and grandparents’) generation’s experiences. Youth may drive cultural fads, but cultural authority still resides largely with those well above middle age. Remember, the median American voter’s age in 2020 was 47.5.
Every new generation enters the cultural and political conversation midstream. To be unaware of that conversation is to arrive in the buff: naïve, unsophisticated and wet behind the ears.
Much as you shouldn’t enter a business meeting without background research, or a cocktail party without knowing who else is coming and how to dress appropriately, so, too, our students need contextual information—the kinds of information that adults fail to systematically provide.
It should come as no surprise that most of our students know little about the relatively recent past. After all, they didn’t live through it. My undergraduates had never experienced high levels of inflation or violent crime or a foreign power invading its neighbor. They knew little about the world before their birth: not just a world without social media, apps and streaming media on demand, but a world in which the Overton window, the range of ideas that the public was willing to accept, did not include racial intermarriage—fewer than half of adult Americans approved of “mixed” marriages in 1990—let along gay marriage.
Nor, of course, do my students have any personal memory of the Cold War; JFK’s, RFK’s or MLK’s assassinations; the Vietnam War; Woodstock; the Watergate affair; the Iranian hostage crisis; the Three Mile Island partial meltdown or even the attacks on the World Trade Center. It’s not only that they have no meaningful recollection of the presidency of George W. Bush; they barely remember Barack Obama’s two White House terms.
And yet, to participate meaningfully in civic life, background and context are essential. But how are my students supposed to pick this up? By osmosis, I guess, since high school history and social studies courses rarely discuss the recent past. Students are lucky if they learn which countries won World War II.
So what might we do? The answer is straightforward: we need to introduce our students to the forces and experiences that shape their parents’ generation—their tastes, values, hopes and fears. This is also a wonderful way to teach our students about how radically life can change over the course of a single generation and how and why such transformations occur.
Here are some techniques that you might use to bring the relatively recent past to life.
- Review opinion polls. To trace shifts in public opinion over time, consult the Roper iPoll Survey Database, the Odum Institute archive and the ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research) collections of social science data, all available online.
- Construct a timeline. Arrange key events in the parents’ lives in chronological and graphical form.
- Create a word cloud and Ngrams. Consider generating a word cloud or an Ngram out of relevant news headlines and articles and books.
- Identify key cultural and political controversies. Over the past century, the major divides in U.S. society haven’t rested on class or region, but conflict over values, as groups seek dominance for the ideas, beliefs and practices.
- Look at popular culture. Don’t focus exclusively on politics. Look at the fashion, slang, popular music, dance and the visual and performing arts during parents’ formative years.
- Don’t ignore private life. Ask yourself how family life or childhood or youth differed from today. History is the story of change over time, and even seemingly bedrock institutions have undergone profound transformations.
- Conduct interviews and oral histories. Your students might ask parents, older relatives and other family friends how their upbringing, attitudes and experiences differ from those of today. Interviews can offer insights about inner thoughts, decisions, motivations and perceptions that are available in no other way.
Bobby Duffy, a professor of public policy at King’s College London, has argued that generational divides aren’t as wide as the public tends to believe. Indeed, he goes so far as to claim that talk about generations “is all about divisions.” Exaggerated claims that boomers are narcissists who are stealing their children’s future, that millennials are entitled snowflakes and Gen Zers are lazy and psychologically fragile only are tired stereotypes that only serve to promote unnecessary conflicts. To be sure, he acknowledges, there are generational differences in attitudes toward money, sex, religion and politics, but these differences pale in comparison with differences rooted in socioeconomic class, level of educational attainment and race.
Still, I think our students would benefit in many ways from knowing more about their parents’ world, and not just because it will help them better understand the realities that lie behind today’s cultural and political divides. It will also help them break free from the generational condescension and estrangement that have become an increasingly ugly feature of contemporary society.
So let me conclude on a literary note.
Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe’s heartrending, semiautobiographical 1929 novel, is perhaps the greatest and certainly the most poetic American coming-of-age tale. Subtitled “A Story of the Buried Life,” it begins with a poem that is among the most forlorn and unforgiving in English-language literature:
… a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
These bleak, despairing words point toward a series of ideas associated with postwar existentialism: that each person is profoundly alone, that there is an “unbridgeable gulf between oneself and any other human being,” that there are certain emotional truths that are incommunicable. Wolfe’s metaphors reflect these ideas: “the stone suggesting longevity, the leaf transience and the door transition and departure.”
Whatever truth lies in existentialist philosophy, with its claims that life has no transcendent purpose and that each individual must stoically face the universe’s absurdities unassisted and salvage personal meaning from the void unaided, it is still the case that we can do much more to connect ourselves to others, to view our own parents as people before it’s too late.
