Look around. What do you see? Often, it’s what you expect to see, not what’s really there.
All of us share this tendency. Language, too, affects what I see. If I don’t have a word for it, I probably won’t see it. And of course, the language I speak was given to me by my culture.
My culture gave me something else: My history. Through formal schooling as well as the informal learning that came through the media, the books I read and the conversations I have been a part of, I developed a sense of what happened before I arrived on the scene.
Richard Conville
Here’s one way to think about that history. If I’m standing in an open, flat field of immense size, I am able to see about 3 miles in every direction. So imagine that circle (6 miles in diameter) as a metaphor and let that distance instead stand for time. With me standing in the center, that circle is a useful way to think about my time horizon.
Here’s what I’ve seen in myself. I think my time horizon is more like an ellipse than a circle. An ellipse is an elongated or stretched circle. For most of my life, an inordinate amount of my attention has been cast into the future and far too little of my attention has been devoted to the past.
Look at the calendar on your phone. Future events. Look at “the news.” However you come to know what’s going on in the world, it’s mostly about the future: Will NATO survive Trump? Who will win the World Cup? Will Social Security be around for me? Will China take Taiwan while the U.S. is preoccupied with Iran? When will gas prices come down?
Using this image of me standing in an ellipse and focusing way too much on the future and way too little on the past, I’ve been trying over the past few years to enlarge and deepen my backward-facing time horizon by filling in events and people I missed along the way. Backfilling history.
One example is the Doctrine of Discovery. This doctrine encompasses several edicts issued by several popes, but one particularly eloquent one was issued by Nicholas V in 1455, Romanus Pontifex. It granted all the kings of Europe the right to commission their explorers (who were just beginning to venture beyond the horizon) “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all … the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities (and) dominions (they encountered) … and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to (take their) possessions and goods and to convert them to … their (own) use and profit.”
“I’ve been trying over the past few years to enlarge and deepen my backward-facing time horizon.”
Thus slavery came to be a common practice in the Caribbean and South America in the 16th century and arriving in North America in 1619. African slavery in the U.S. did not spring from nothing; it had been customary in the Western Hemisphere for more than a century. Monied interests were financing it, whole industries depended on the labor of those enslaved people, and many ordinary people’s livelihoods depended on the institution of slavery.
If only I had known!
A second example concerns Easter Sunday 1939 when Eleanor Roosevelt had invited Marian Anderson to sing at a gathering in Constitution Hall, near the White House. The sponsoring organization, the Daughters of the American Revolution, objected because Anderson was Black. Roosevelt then arranged an alternative site for Anderson’s performance: The steps of the Lincoln Memorial where the audience grew to 75,000.
Easter 1939 was celebrated just short of five months before Nazi Germany invaded Poland the following September, igniting World War II. Racism was alive and well on both sides of the Atlantic in 1939.
If only I had known!
If only I had known, what would I have done differently? What would you have done differently? What if these events had been part of our backward-facing time horizon all along? I don’t know. But I do know Mark Twain is reputed to have wisely observed, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
I think (or hope or believe) if I had been aware of how complicated the past was and how dark some of its darkest days were, I would have watched more carefully for the rhyming. And I would have been on the lookout for the reappearance of dark and violent times as well as the return of hopeful and secure times. I think (or hope or believe) I would have resisted the dark and fanned the flames of hope — trying all the while to bend the moral arc of the universe a little more toward justice.
Richard Conville is professor emeritus of communication studies and service learning at the University of Southern Mississippi and a long-time resident of Hattiesburg where he is a member of University Baptist Church.