Our thankfully former president, after he lost his popular mandate, used to reassure himself by invoking the immortal judgment of a history yet to be written. Bush wasn't bad, just untimely. What looked like incompetence and malevolence in the present would become wisdom and courage in the future. That is, assuming the future was bizarro world.
In recent months, during the transition from the Bush to Obama administration, pundits on both sides have dusted off the Ouija board of their own mediocre minds to learn how Bush will be remembered by the future.
Now you, too, can play this game so beloved by politicians and journalists in the comfort of your own home— ( http://www.gallup.com/poll/113806/Americans-Expect-History-Judge-Bush-Worse-Than-Nixon.aspx). It’s a game for all ages and political persuasions—no one is too daft to play. Just ask yourself whether ‘history’ will know Bush as the worst American president ever or as an untimely visionary who did not fear the fickle boos of popular opinion—then air your idle speculation!
Once you’ve reached a consensus, don’t worry, this game has potential for infinite variation. Just think about any contentious goings-on today and figure out what history will say about it. Iraq War? Global warming? AIDS in Africa? No nut is too tough for history to crack. And why limit yourself to world political issues, when the future verdict of history is right here ready to solve your most vexing existential crises. Beach vacation in Mexico or skiing in Utah? What would history say? Ranch or vinaigrette? History knows!
One can’t help but question the sanity of an age that looks to the future for its history so that it may know how to judge the present. Pundits are shoddy enough fortunetellers when they have their crystal ball statistics in hand, but in the realm of future historical judgment we have no numbers to belie our absolute ignorance of what shall be. So why invoke the authority of a backward-looking future?
The underlying supposition is that, unlike the present—marred by opposing political views and manifold interpretation—the future will somehow be free of these messy complications. The good history-writing citizens of the future, perched on the heights of hindsight, will discern the patterns of our actions in the befogged present.
I don’t mean to sneer here at the virtues of historical reflection, but rather at the two fallacies that lead us to appeal to the authority of future historical reflection. The first fallacy is that of a monolithic posterity. When we say history will remember George W. Bush as a worse president than Richard Nixon, which historically-reflective posterity are we referring to? Next year’s? The next generation’s? Posterity five hundred years from now? Each of these posterities presumably would have different historical understandings of our age.
Even if we could pin down where in time this future historical perspective of ourselves is located, who knows how anyone or anything will be “remembered” by any point in the future? Who’s to say whether in two hundred years George Bush and Richard Nixon won’t both appear as nostalgic icons of a prelapsarian golden age before a later Commander-in-Chief in 2112 accidentally sat on the button while humming the nuclear launch codes and plunged the world into nuclear apocalypse?
The second fallacy at work in our prediction of future historical judgment is the belief in an objective history. The future, under the guise of ‘history’, has become a stand-in for an idealized objectivity that we no longer claim in present judgment. Whereas now speculation on the legacy of George Bush’s presidency or the Iraq War is ideologically charged, in the future it will simply be historical truth.
We may like to think we see things more clearly than those we study did at the time, but, frankly, we only see them from the perspective of the present. And if history is a mirror of the present, then why should we expect the future present, whose history we will become, to be any different? In other words, history is an enterprise of the present, deeply embedded in the present, with all its contingencies and cultural and political dimensions that shape and constrain what we may know, and there’s no reason to think future history will transcend these limitations.
The truth is, when statesmen, pundits, and Gallup pollsters talk about how history will judge a person or an event, they are not thinking about history at all. They are talking about how they want us to judge that person or event right now. By invoking all-knowing History (replete with deified capitalization), they’re hoping to impress upon their opinion the stamp of singularity and finality that has long been considered a hallmark of authoritative judgment.
But if we’re looking for singular and final judgment, we’ll have to look somewhere beyond history. Traditionally, religion has been the outlet for this fantasy. I vote for keeping it that way. And so does History.
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