The supreme irony of history is that it easily becomes all things to all people—yet, it is systematically undervalued within our education system and in our way of thinking about ourselves. Our dismissive attitude towards the past is both a symptom and a cause of our collective ailments.

In prior writing, I have underscored the important civic (political, even) responsibility that historians are called upon to fulfill. Historians’ skills and field of knowledge are particularly suited to the present challenge of misinformation. The historical method, like the scientific method, does not yield perfect or definitive answers in the short term. On the other hand, it offers a common framework through which people can seek answers and debate conclusions, a common standard of reference bringing us ever closer to truth. The serious, critical study of the past—in a society that values truth—can lay the basis for a healthy, informed public discourse. It is a safeguard against totalitarian drifts. That we should remember on this ignominious anniversary.

In the quest to reassert the value of historical study, we are not starting from scratch. History is far from dead. People still rush to buy the latest works of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough. New digital tools are enriching interest in genealogy. Debates surrounding critical race theory and their place in the history classroom are (nearly) front-page news. Podcasts are bringing new life to old topics and drawing different audiences. We could go on. The point, however, is not that interest in the past (as it was or as it is imagined) has thoroughly disappeared. At issue is how we use history—whether it can help us do more than answer narrow questions or escape to a different, more reassuring world.

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Neil Postman warned us.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly, Postman, a communications scholar, demonstrated the effects of new forms of media on our public discourse and our ways of thinking. Since the advent of telegraphy, our primary challenge has not been information scarcity, but, instead, how to establish truth and apply our knowledge. Then, with the advent of television, communications have collapsed information to appeal to the lowest common denominator and substituted information with entertainment—which has become the primary purpose of news broadcasts. Postman lamented the social effects of a cultural environment dominated by television. Both of his landmark works appeared prior to widespread internet access and the rise of social media, to say nothing of smartphones, and yet these works remain remarkably prescient. They continue to provide guidance in our strange, disorienting media environment.

I am less interested, here, in Postman’s theory of history—which idealized the “typographical society”—than in his depiction of a world where technology crowds out the past and forces a single-minded focus on immediate experience.[1]

More than ever, we face a barrage of entertainment, disguised as information, to which we are leashed thanks to smart devices. It regularly seems as though the latest thing is the most important thing and the biggest thing that ever happened. How else would news be marketed to us? Events that happened six months ago seem like they occurred six years ago not necessarily because so much has happened in the intervening time, but because we’ve since faced a relentless onslaught of “events,” “facts,” and “controversies.”

In other words, our media environment is so built as to make us lose all sense of perspective—media platforms need to keep us hooked, and often have to create events, facts, and controversies to do so. Our inability to disconnect from the regular flow of manufactured outrage and excitement adds to our anxiety and anger. Every political event is the most consequential of our lifetimes—and keeps us locked in an unyielding position where compromise must assuredly mean everlasting doom. Collectively, in politics as in everything else, we are left in a state of childlike presentism, swinging between instant gratification and psychological uneasiness.

Technology has its advantages. Postman was not a complete luddite, and neither am I—of that my blog is some proof. But we should maintain a critical distance from our technologies. Instead of engaging in a material providentialism that will flatten human intelligence, we should adapt technological advances to human dignity and human potential.

When confronted with a new technology . . . one question should be, What is the problem to which this technology is the solution? And the second question would be, Whose problem is it actually? And the third question would be, If there is a legitimate problem here that is solved by the technology, what other problems will be created by my using this technology?

– Neil Postman

The humanities can equip us with questions, with a spirit of critical inquiry, and help recenter the conversation about technology—weak as it currently is—around human needs and concerns. History may be our most valuable tool in that array of disciplines. Only history can provide perspective on the seemingly never-ending, anxiety-inducing present that would not exist without our current communications technologies.

Historical perspective doesn’t entail a perfectly dispassionate detachment from the present. We still suffer emotionally and struggle financially; we should acknowledge our challenges and commiserate. The dire political situations of the past should not instill apathy in the present day. The idea is not to substitute absolute faith in the virtues of technological progress with an equal contentment that silences grievances. Historical perspective isn’t a call to retreat into a modest, unambitious, “it could be worse, as it has been.”

What history does offer is a helpful—essential—counterweight to the crushing mass of present-day culture, a way out of the presentist trap created by technology and so aptly described by Postman. It provides context for contemporary issues, enabling us to sort political rhetoric from the genuine pursuit of justice. We don’t want to live in the past, but neither can we afford to live without the steady anchor of the past. That anchor—the context—can preserve us from waves of hysteria that our technology is calculated to create.

As we launch into a new year, let’s resolve to catch up with a genuine remembrance of the past and to read the present not as a single, critical point in time. Let’s cultivate, each in our own way, our little historical gardens by disconnecting—by using “slow” technology that provides the space to think and reflect before reacting. Let’s enjoy communion with past and present people by understanding them on their own terms, not through a medium that distorts. Finally, in what may be the greatest challenge of all, let’s count our blessings. In our age, acts of communion and gratitude are revolutionary gestures that stand to preserve our shared humanity.

[1] Our current nostalgic moment—in which consumers try to recapture the “good old days” of the 1980s and 1990s through television, cinema, fashion, and so forth—is not the product of historical interest in any meaningful sense. It does not seek to reconstruct the past, pose difficult questions, or provide perspective; instead, it pulls specific items out of their context to deliver them as comforting products.