All that is left of the Abbey in Dale Abbey
When I was younger, I used to work on archaeological excavations in the Middle East. I spent 8 seasons digging in Cyprus and Israel. When I was 22, I travelled overland across Central Asia to see the giant Buddhist statues in Bamyian, Afghanistan.
The statues were blown up by the Taliban in 2001 because they were offensive to pure Islam's notion of history. They were anti-Islam or pre-Islamic. In August of this year, ISIS destroyed the Baalshamin Temple in Palmyra, Syria. Blew it up. It was also offensive to ISIS' notion of what was historically acceptable.
Recently, my wife and I bought a small cottage in the rather bucolic English village of Dale Abbey. It's one of those chocolate box villages, a dozen houses, a pub, a church, two small streets and at the middle, an ancient arch that stands alone. The remnant of the Abbey that once was the center (or centre) of Dale Abbey.
The Abbey was founded by Augustinians in 1150 AD. The Abbey was blown up (or as close as they could get) by Henry VIII in 1539. It was offensive to his notion of history. It was a reminder of the power of Catholicism after the Act of Dissolution in newly Protestant England.
As I took the dogs for a walk (this is England, after all) past the arch, it occurred to me that the shattered and ruined Abbey (some of the cottages in the village were built of the old Abbey stone), was in fact not so very different from the ruins of the Baalshamin Temple in Palmyra. Destroyed because it was a reminder to Henry of a history that was no longer acceptable to him. Nothing more, really, than a physical demonstration of his power.
"He who controls the present, controls the past", wrote Orwell. "And he who controls the past, controls the future." In 1539, Henry controlled the present - and to the past, and so the future, so he hoped.
That was true for Orwell, it was true for Henry, and it is true for ISIS.
And many others.
I like Gilbert and Sullivan. (I am the anglophile around here). My wife, on the other hand, who is actually British, can't stand them. So I keep my humming to myself. I was, therefore, properly astonished to read that The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players had cancelled their proposed production of The Mikado, a G&S classic, last week because the show was now deemed racist.
Its portrayal of the Japanese is now considered offensive. That may be, but The Mikado is an historical artifact. It is a kind of truth from the past, no different in some ways from Dale Abbey which Henry VIII found so offensive, or the Baalshamin Temple, which ISIS finds so offensive.
This, of course, brings us to America's discussion about the confederate battle flag, now pretty much banned from public sight, or the subsequent conversations about removing statues of Confederate generals or perhaps blowing up the giant statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis at Stone Mountain, Georgia. These historical remnants are now as offensive to us as the Bamiyan statues were to the Taliban. Reminders of a time in history they would rather wipe clean and pretend never happened.
This may be a natural human instinct, this desire to rewrite the past to match our current sensibilities. My friend, Neil Silberman, wrote a wonderful book about this entitled Digging for God and Country, a study of how archaeology was and is used to justify political goals.
There is a longstanding human desire to seek physical proof of religious beliefs. And when the physical does not meet the narrative, there is an equal desire to destroy that physical manifestation and obliterate if from the collective memory.
The early Soviet Communists were great at retouching photographs to match the ever-shifting narrative of Soviet history. We look at their ham-fisted attempts and laugh. We look at ISIS and shudder. But as I walk past the ruins of Dale Abbey, I am forced to wonder, are we all that different in the end?
Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it, goes the well-worn quote from George Santayana. But what happens to those who instead of learning from history, erase the parts that they no longer like. Can they learn anything at all?