Studying History for Personal Growth

What does history have to do with your own development? More than you might expect. We all sit through history lessons at school, but those lessons are squeezed into short hours and filtered through whatever a government or school board has decided is appropriate. A lot gets left out, especially the messy, contested material that can't be handled responsibly in a forty-minute class.

As adults, though, we can go back to it on our own terms. Reading widely about the past of our own country, our people, and the wider world gives us a much firmer grasp of why things are the way they are. Pick up a range of books on major events, on the people who shaped them, on how whole societies were organized, and you start to see the mechanics underneath daily life. That kind of reading tends to lead somewhere you didn't plan on going.

Sometimes it genuinely shocks you. When I first understood the real scale of the enslavement of Africans, I could not take it in. Millions of men, women, and children beaten, raped, and killed so that others could profit. I read how slave traders and masters tore families apart with no chance for goodbyes, how mothers were killed in front of their children, how women were raped in front of their husbands, and I cried. The size of the cruelty was beyond anything I could hold in my head, and it stayed with me.

Reading Willie Lynch's speech helped me see how that trade still reaches into the lives of African American and Caribbean communities today. From there I went on to King Leopold's crimes in the Congo, the genocide in Namibia that Hitler later drew on for inspiration, the treatment of the Aborigines in Australia. What people have done to the innocent still stuns me. The part that cuts deepest is that in most cases the victims have never been compensated or even offered an apology. That offends something basic in me about fairness.

Finding out that your own country has been the site of horrors against other human beings is not comfortable. It is still necessary. We have to learn the truth, accept it, and own it, because that is the only ground solid enough to build real change on. Personal growth works the same way. You have to sit with the uncomfortable, even ugly, facts of your own past before you can plan a future that has any chance of working.

Almost every nation has, at some point and to some degree, been the one doing the violence. And even when the events themselves ended long ago, their effects keep running forward into the present. Owning a country's mistakes alongside its achievements is a sign that you actually love it, that you can be proud of it without pretending it never did wrong. Only honest reckoning gives us a way to put injustices right and leave the place better than we found it.

There is an idea that patriotism means thinking only good thoughts about your country. It does not. The United States was built on the genocide of Native peoples and the torture of enslaved Africans. Admitting that is more patriotic than denying it or reaching for excuses. America's achievements sit right next to its oppression and its failures, and both are real. How could anyone improve the country or make it more just without an honest account of what it has actually done?

The appetite for truth, and the nerve to face it however ugly it gets, is what carries people through to something better. Success rests on an accurate reading of the problems in front of you, because only then do your solutions actually fix anything. If you want your own life to work, you have to look hard at what went wrong before, the things still blocking progress now. That is where real growth starts. The same holds for a nation. If a country stands for justice and we call ourselves its patriots, then the work is ours: push for justice for everyone, and set right what was done wrong.

Iman Mohiki