MAY 8, 2019 – I once heard an historian say that a probative history can’t be written until the subject matter is at least 50 years in the past. By extension, I suppose, the historian would caution us against making any judgments about the (always) tumultuous present. If you think hard enough about those correlative propositions, you wind up in a confounding corner of inquiry.
In the first place, your view of any event or episode—past or present—is defined by your “frame of reference.” Your frame of reference, in turn, is a function of many factors—your family and upbringing, your circle of friends, your formal and informal education, your successes and failures, your personal experiences, your daily news sources, your relationship with religion, your book club books, your dispositions . . . the one that was inherited and the one that was nurtured.
Second, your frame of reference changes as time passes. The world around you isn’t static. A practice or attitude that was once widely accepted becomes unthinkable in later times. A quality that once got you hired would now get you fired—and vice versa in the case of a prominent national figure of our day.
Actually, the latter transparent reference provides an excellent example of how the viewing frame changes. Several years ago I read Robert Caro’s 3,600-page, four-volume biography of LBJ. (The fifth volume, about the Vietnam War, has yet to be published!) The work doubles as a political history of the United States across much of the 20th century. If I were limited to a single word to describe the 36th President, it would be “Outrageous.” But that was before the 45th President took office. My frame of reference changed.
However, the foregoing example also reveals how “frame of reference” works in the other direction. My knowledge of LBJ’s “nonsense” over 50 years ago informs my view of the current version of White House “nonsense.” Specifically, LBJ’s version was coupled with competence.
Likewise, my thoughts on race relations in America today have been deeply affected by my reading about Reconstruction—or rather, its utter failure, intentionally orchestrated by some very dark and devious political forces afoot in the last decades of the 19th century. But wait a second! My judgment of the “dark and devious political forces” of yesteryear is formed by a 2018 frame of reference, which is influenced, in turn, by my study of history, and so on in a feedback loop.
Ah, the feedback loop! It hovers everywhere, particularly over revisionist histories and bronzed Civil War generals wearing pigeon poop laced with histoplasmosis.
When I think about “frame of reference,” I often wonder what future generations (or even we ourselves!) will think of us. What will they think, when peering through their frame of reference—a double abyss of ecological disaster and health care hell—they learn that we drove gas guzzlers to McDonald’s—McDonald’s!—where like pigs, we gorged on beef and fries?
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
