Reading History

The Question

Recently in my history of missions class, one of my students said, “I hate stories.” I am not sure what fuels his dislike of stories, but I suspect that many in our society would echo, “I hate history.” That being the case, one can reasonably ask what benefit there is in reading history. Since I am presently working on a history of the missionary enterprise in my own church of origin (the Brethren in Christ), this is an existential question for me. Am I wasting my time?

The Case for Travel

Allow me to move towards a response by way of reflections on the benefits of travel. What benefits do we derive from travelling to other countries, or even better from living and working in another culture? The International Volunteer Exchange Program (IVEP) sponsored by Mennonite Central Committee believes there are real benefits. On their web page, IVEP states, “During your IVEP year, you will make new friends, gain work skills and have new experiences — you will see your own culture from a new perspective. You’ll also grow in your faith as you meet and worship with Christians from around the world and learn what it means to be a peacemaker. See how a year with IVEP will transform you. You will learn new things and grow in ways you may have never expected!” 

Similarly, the VS (Voluntary Service) program run for many years by the Brethren in Christ provided young people with two years of cross-cultural experience, broadening their horizons. The experience of living in another culture opens participants’ eyes to new ways of thinking, which in turn helps them to see their own culture and worldview more clearly. A truism states that the best way to discover what is at the heart of one’s own culture is to be transplanted into a new culture with different worldview assumptions. 

Living in another culture does not guarantee such growth. It is possible to travel through Europe and Asia and Africa and South America with one’s eyes metaphorically closed. David Livermore specializes in helping short-term workers develop the ability to learn the new cultural contexts through which they move. He seeks to help them “serve with eyes wide open.”[1] His books and web site are devoted to helping people improve their cultural intelligence by keeping their eyes and minds open to the sights and sounds and ideas around them. 

To put it another way, living in another culture can broaden our perspectives if we approach our hosts with open hearts, open minds, and open eyes. If instead we measure everything and everyone by our own cultural understanding, we demonstrate ethnocentrism and become the kind of American described in the 1958 book, The Ugly American.[2] This term “ugly American” has entered popular culture as a depiction of Americans overseas and measuring everything by their own standards. The term is not intended as a compliment. 

Jonathan Haidt has described his own experience as an academic moving to a conservative highly religious part of India to pursue his academic research. He writes about the struggle he felt as an American liberal atheist, committed to the principle of the complete equality and autonomy of the individual, but now living in the state of Orissa, India. “My first few weeks in Bhubaneswar were therefore filled with feelings of shock and dissonance. … I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine.”[3] Haidt here describes the necessary commitment that makes it possible to broaden one’s perspectives. In his own case, it led him to discover an unexpected appreciation for the worldview perspectives of his hosts. Such appreciation is basic to living well with people whose cultural perspectives differ from our own. 

To summarize: Living and working overseas can broaden one’s perspectives, making one’s life fuller and richer. This truth comes with a caveat: It requires open eyes, an open heart, and an open mind. Livermore describes this attitude as being mindful.[4] Mindfulness is being intentionally aware of what is going on around oneself in a new culture, suspending judgment on these experiences, and seeking to understand them as one’s hosts do. 

Travel in general can have a similar benefit, but it is easier to travel with one’s eyes metaphorically closed and requires more deliberate intention to learn from travel as a tourist. Similarly, short-term experiences require greater intentionality than do long-term experiences. The practice of such learning is, of course, well worth the effort it takes. We develop into fuller human beings, better able to negotiate the increasingly multi-cultural world in which we live.

What about Reading?

These thoughts bring us back to reading history. When we read historical accounts, many of us, many of us are like thoughtless tourists travelling with their inner eyes closed, or like someone who works in another country for a three-year stint but experiences nothing of that culture in the depths of his/her being. We read about the period of the Civil War in the (dis)United States and measure the choices people made as if they were our contemporaries. Similarly, we read about the events of the first generation of Americans as if our cultural standards of morality were the same as theirs. 

This attitude is a kind of chronological colonialism or imperialism similar to the attitudes of Western settlers and missionaries during the period of high imperialism in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Anthropology has taught us to evaluate varying cultures from within, rather than imposing our own categories on the host culture. For example, the first missionaries in Africa often condemned polygamy without considering its function in society. Such condemnation marginalized the additional wives, who now were cast out of the security of family provided within their own culture. Missionaries had to learn to listen to the people within society and to acknowledge their right to determine acceptable practice within their own culture.[5] 

Similarly, many people today are ready to judge attitudes towards slavery held by the first generation of people in the new United States of America. Thomas Jefferson, we are told, was clearly a racist because he owned slaves. This evaluation may in fact be correct, but it must measure Jefferson by the ethical standards of early America. We can only provide such judgment if we have learned how the first Americans thought and lived – if, in short, we have entered their culture as guests and learned from them what their thoughts and practices mean. 

This does not mean that we accept polygamy or slavery. It means only that we evaluate people’s attitudes towards these issues by the standards and practices of their own culture and time. Such evaluation is aided culturally by living and working cross-culturally and historically by a close reading that enters the story with open eyes, open hearts, and open minds.

A Closing Synthesis

How do we bring these observations together? My basic point is that reading in general and reading history in particular resembles travelling and living in another culture. Lack of reading history, then, narrows one’s view of the world, just as lack of travel narrows one’s perspectives. Reading history is a form of time travel, taking us to different places and different times where different worldviews and life perspectives await us. Entering these worlds, like entering another culture in Africa or Asia, broadens and strengthens our worldview, which in turn helps us analyse and strengthen our own life perspectives. 

The practical results of such broadening require another essay. Here I note only that most North Americans have fairly narrow and rigid worldviews. (I recognize that this is a subjective judgment and that others may disagree with me.) Conservatives and Progressives alike have clustered into tribal silos. Reading history is one way to help us begin to see what is of value in those with whom we otherwise radically disagree. Provided that we read with open eyes, open hearts, and open minds, we discover the good and worthwhile contributions made by people whose attitudes initially repel us. We can learn from them without abandoning our own fundamental convictions, but only if we enter into their lives accepting the times and worldviews within which they lived as valid for their time. To do otherwise is to practice a form of chronological imperialism, a sad failure for people whose rejection of imperialism and colonialism is fundamental to their identity.

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[1] David Livermore, Serving With Eyes Wide Open: Doing Short-Term Missions With Cultural Intelligence. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006. See also Livermore, Cultural Intelligence: Improving Your CQ to Engage Our Multicultural World. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009. Livermore has a web presence at https://davidlivermore.com/cq/

[2] The book describes a physically ugly American who was in tune with the people of the country in which he lived, in contrast with the well-dressed Americans with money and influence, who had no concern for the host people. They were truly “the ugly American” because they cared only for American interests.

[3] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012, pp. 217f.

[4] Livermore uses the term “mindfulness”, which comes from Buddhist practice, where it is a necessary trait for moving beyond the illusion of reality to see what is really true. It has been appropriated by a variety of academic disciplines in Europe and North America, such as psychology and anthropology.

[5] See, for example, Eugene Nida, Customs and Cultures (Pasadena, CA: William Carey, 1954) and Charles Kraft, Anthropology for Christian Witness (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996) and Worldview for Christian Witness (Pasadena, CA: William Carey, 2006).