Druidry at the end of history, part 2

Part 1 is here -

http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/druidry-end-of-history-part-1

I gave up on the formal study of history when I was fourteen. I was sick of the world wars, and due to a shortage of books we had to study them in the wrong order, which made it very confusing. I suspected geography would b both easier and involve less Hitler. History and I parted company for a while, right up until I got to doing my Degree. A horrible truth dawned on me. All books come from a point in history. Many of them don’t make much sense if you don’t know the context. Try doing Shakespeare without understanding any of the history! Istarted swotting up, and during that process another alarming truth occurred to me. That came because I was minoring in psychology, and they taught us initially by teaching the history of the subject. Every subject has its own history. We didn’t do the history of chemistry at school, with its origins in alchemy and magic. How different would that have been? The history of medicine is terrifying. The history of sex really puts an interesting spin on things.  We do not teach children the history of how people have thought about the world. A few minutes with that one is enough to show how fragile and ephemeral out whole culture is. We live in a web of stories held together by ideas about ideas. In time, all of it will probably change or be discarded.

All most of us learn is political history. Every human activity and tradition has a history, be it known or unknown. It all came from somewhere – not that we should assume that means it must also be going somewhere. How much of it do we even know?

What does the end of history mean? It means having no idea where you came from or who you are. It means having no roots, no sense of connection to the enormity of all that went before. How many people are conscious of the roles they have been born into, or the patterns they are living out? How many people repeat history precisely because they have no idea what history is. Not the history of politic and rulers, but the personal history of family and culture.  These are the kinds of history we don’t much talk about.

I ask, how can we be free and capable of self determination if we do not know what shaped us and what might be pulling our strings? The end of history is all around us, in the minds of anyone who is re-enacting all that they are oblivious too. It’s nothing new. I rather suspect this kind of end of history has been with us all along.