History helps us understand ourselves

The argument

Our cultural and ancestral history is a significant part of what makes us what and who we are, because a person does not arrive at their beliefs or their habits from nowhere. Cultural influences help shape our identities and give us a sense of belonging. Ancestral influences give us a legacy we can be proud of. Both operate largely out of sight, which is precisely why they repay study: what is inherited without being noticed cannot be examined until it is known about. By learning about the history of our culture, it helps to create a sense of cultural identity; a group in which we belong. Our culture influences everything from what we believe to the way we dress and the foods we eat, which is to say it reaches the most ordinary parts of a life, the ones that feel like personal preference rather than inheritance. Seeing where those preferences came from turns an unexamined default into something a person can recognise as their own. Learning about our ancestors gives us an insight into why we are the way we are, both in genetics and mentality. The genetic inheritance is the most concrete case: genetics and family medical history shape our personal health and can help predict what medical conditions we may face during our lives, so knowing a family's history is knowing something about one's own future. The inheritance of outlook works the same way at a further remove. What our ancestors believed and how they fit into society often reflects our own beliefs and place in society, so the questions a family faced in an earlier generation are frequently the questions shaping the present one. History is important because it is the route to that self-understanding.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Two different things are being called history here. Family medical history is a clinical record used to assess personal risk, and genetics is inheritance rather than history at all; neither is what a question about the importance of history is asking about, and folding them in makes the case look broader than it is. The argument would go through unchanged in a world with no historical scholarship whatsoever, as long as people knew their grandparents' conditions. The identity argument is also double-edged. History does supply belonging, and it supplies it just as readily to exclusionary and grievance-based identities: national myths, sectarian memory and invented traditions all draw their force from the past, and much organised violence has been carried out by people acting on a strong sense of historical identity. That history shapes identity establishes that it is powerful, not that engaging with it is beneficial — and the critical study of history is often the thing that dismantles the comfortable version a community tells itself. The framing also assumes an inheritance many readers do not have. 'Our culture' and 'our ancestors' presume a single continuous lineage, which does not describe people of mixed heritage, migrants, adoptees, or anyone whose ancestral record was destroyed — most obviously the descendants of enslaved people. On this argument those readers would have less access to self-understanding, which is a conclusion the position should not want. The stronger case is left unused. History's usual defence is that it explains how present institutions and conflicts came about, disciplines claims about the past that are made to justify present action, and trains the assessment of evidence. Those benefits do not depend on the reader having a lineage to identify with.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Cultural belonging is a real effect of historical narrative but not evidently a benefit, since national myths, sectarian memory and invented traditions draw their force from the same source, and critical historical study frequently dismantles the version of the past a community finds most cohesive. [Rejecting P2] Genetics is inheritance rather than history, and family medical history is a clinical record used to assess personal risk — neither is the subject a question about the importance of history is asking about, and the argument would go through unchanged in a world with no historical scholarship at all. [Rejecting C] The premises also assume a single continuous lineage in the phrases 'our culture' and 'our ancestors', which does not describe people of mixed heritage, migrants, adoptees or those whose ancestral records were destroyed — implying they have less access to self-understanding — while the position's stronger support, that history explains how present institutions and conflicts arose and disciplines claims made about the past, goes unused.