This past year, American politics has been turbulent, but it offers valuable lessons.
As someone who has followed American politics for more than a decade and spent the last four years at a liberal-leaning Ivy League campus, I see these lessons as a process of learning and unlearning—discovering the similar vulnerabilities the United States shares with other countries and shedding the simple, naïve myths that I once believed about this country.
The most recent lesson comes from Charlottesville, VA. What surprised me the most was not the extremist agenda but rather how ordinary Americans can come out to the streets to show support for extremism. Of course, the extremists in Charlottesville represented only a tiny proportion of the American population, but their presence is the product of two underlying problems visible in many countries: a sense of false historical nostalgia and a deficit in history education.
False nostalgia is the belief that rotten ingredients from the past can work their magic in the present and the future, while the fact is that they never promised progress in history and only their opposites did. In the case of Charlottesville, the elements once thought to have been swept into the dustbin of history are white supremacy and vicious racism, which only served to weaken the strong and prosperous world power. Whether we openly acknowledge it or not, we have witnessed that it is through their exact opposites—tolerance, inclusivity, diversity, and the ability to attract top talents from around the world regardless of race or national origin—that have enabled the progress every American enjoys today.
Echoes of false nostalgia abound in China, where many people still revere the late Chairman Mao Zedong. They contend that a return to the Mao era would make China a better society. However, in the forty years since Mao died, China’s relative economic prosperity and social stability from which the majority of Chinese people benefit today are only possible because of a break with Mao’s politics tactics of brutality and chaos. In this case of false nostalgia, people can either embrace Maoism or enjoy the lives they lead today, but it is practically impossible to have both.
The best way to combat this sense of false nostalgia is education, yet in both China and the U.S. education in history is lacking. I am aware that the government authorities in the two countries treat history differently—one censors information and discourages discussion, and the other makes most information available and allows public debate.
Without knowing history and forming ideas and opinions based on facts, people cannot decide what is really good for their future, and they will be vulnerable to extremist propaganda. Unfortunately, it is difficult to envision a healthy presentation of history education in China in the foreseeable future given the authorities’ tightening grip on information. The United States, in comparison, has a better potential, but is in danger of slipping in the wrong way during the Trump presidency.
One viable action that immediately followed Charlottesville, in my view, has already been taken in many places across the country—removing Confederate statues. Some argue that removing the Confederate statues is sanitizing history, but these representations are not history.
For instance, for three and a half out of my four years at Yale, one of the undergraduate residential colleges was named after John C. Calhoun, a Yale graduate and one of the fiercest defenders of slavery. When the college was still named after Calhoun, Yale students and faculty were aware of Calhoun’s abhorrent ideology, but it wasn’t until taking U.S. history classes that I learned about the larger issues such as slavery and the Civil War. In other words, objects of remembrance alone are not history, let alone the fact that the creation of many Confederate statues was motivated by racism. People should learn history through education, not by looking up to statues of Confederate generals who defended slavery and supported secession.
When the name of Calhoun College was renamed after Grace Hopper, I had to look up who she was. I doubt that most Yale students know the stories of notable Yale alumni such as Walter Camp, who invented American football, or Yung Wing, the first ever Chinese to earn a college degree in the West, or Madison Grant, a eugenicist and a personal hero of Hitler’s. Even with the naming controversy, Yale students still do not know or care enough about the complex historical legacies that they have inherited from the university and its alumni.
Similarly, Chinese and Americans do not know enough about the historical legacies of their own countries due to a lack of education or motivation to learn from our past. Taking down Confederate statues is a step towards combatting ahistorical and anti-historical approaches to the country’s legacies. But educating and motivating the people to study history as a mirror of our own evolution of civilization and civic conscious will have to be a separate endeavor.
Without a doubt, teaching history is not an easy undertaking. Even in the digital age where information is available, certain historical debates can still remain contentious. But if debates that are based on facts and sound reasoning can happen as people develop their opinions, extremism will have little room to grow. The premise, of course, is that facts and reason need to be respected. And in the past year, as facts and reason are under fierce attack in American politics, many people have stepped up to defend them. Another way to fight ignorance and bigotry is to strengthen the education in history.