The Past Is a Foreign Country
The Past Is a Foreign Country, originally published in Great Britain in 1985, is an exploration of the nature of the past and history. What do we mean when we speak about the past, as distinct from the present or the future? What is the reality of the past? Is it the same as history? We have extremely varied attitudes about the past, although our range of attitudes is already determined to a large extent by our time frame and the local zeitgeist. People in different epochs have had ways of viewing the past very different from our own; their conceptions of it depended on the prevailing styles and beliefs of the periods in which they lived. An attitude toward the past, and assumptions about what it actually is—or was—are never constants; they vary greatly according to time, place, and other variables. Writers and ordinary people have always been fascinated by the passage of time. David Lowenthal’s study indicates the variety of attitudes toward the past from early periods with oral traditions to the present. He also includes a vast array of different sources: historians, novelists, poets, politicians, psychoanalysts, popular magazines, newspapers, cartoons, and publications of local historical societies. Although writers such as Petrarch, Michel de Montaigne, and William Shakespeare are quoted, so are the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker; high culture and popular culture are combined in a mix providing a broad sociocultural panorama.
Because so many sources are quoted, The Past Is a Foreign Country sometimes gives the impression that the variety of attitudes toward the past, and history, is infinite. Often the author suspends his own judgment, letting the inhabitants of the past speak for themselves. At first glance, the ground covered appears to be complete, the treatment exhaustive: Lowenthal writes about different feelings and emotions provoked by the past, the various motives for the study of the past, benefits sought in the past, the threats it represents, tradition and innovation, notions of youth and age, decay and progress, methods for knowing the past, and ways in which the past is changed or preserved. To provide more focus at the beginning of the book, four “case studies” are presented to show “how various epochs have endured and resolved the stresses of inheritance.” These are the Renaissance, seventeenth and eighteenth century England and France, Victorian Great Britain, and pre- and post-Revolutionary America. The studies are excellent. They convincingly show very different attitudes toward the past, as well as pasts conceived in almost totally different terms. The author has assimilated much of the abundant scholarship on these periods; the varied sources he quotes are always interesting and well chosen. This section is a joy to read.
Despite the apparent breadth of the study, there are, however, several narrower foci of interest. The historians quoted are largely British and American; the journals referred to are also British and American. French and German sources make fleeting appearances, but they are rare. There is almost no consideration of Eastern Europe and Marxist or Communist countries and very little discussion of the Third World. This is a pity, as they would have added much more drama, especially to the treatment of historiography. Nevertheless, perhaps it is a virtue that the author focuses on Great Britain and the United States—as it is, there are more than two thousand footnotes in the book. Also the approaches of the British and Americans toward the past are radically different; there is abundant material to show contrasting attitudes within the same temporal periods.
A more specific focus in the book is revealed by the title. “The...
(This entire section contains 2141 words.)
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past is a foreign country” is a phrase from a book by L. P. Hartley,The Go-Between, published in England in 1953. The complete sentence which begins Hartley’s book reads: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Lowenthal adds:That they did indeed do things differently is a perspective fundamental to this book. But it is a perspective of recent vintage. During most of history men scarcely differentiated past from present, referring even to remote events, if at all, as though they were then occurring.
A second theme that runs throughout the book is Lowenthal’s disagreement with the British historian J. H. Plumb. In his The Death of the Past (1969), Plumb made an important distinction between history and the past. According to Plumb, the “old past”—with its mythical fetishes of bigotry, national vanity, and class domination—was dying, while history, playing an emancipatory role, was assuming its place. Lowenthal takes issue with Plumb and refuses the distinction.
Both these themes rely heavily on British rather than American evidence. Because of the cultural differences between the two countries, American readers will have difficulty in accepting Lowenthal’s arguments. He admirably evokes the varieties of pasts with which writers and ordinary people have been confronted in different epochs. The convenient distance of the classical past from the Renaissance, which did not overpower writers such as Petrarch or Joachim du Bellay but instead had all the freshness of a discovery; the neoclassical past that had become a heavy, overpowering burden by the end of the seventeenth century; the American infatuation with the classical past during the Revolutionary period, which likewise became overpowering by the time of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists, who sought newness and escape at all costs; the “group inferiority complex” of eighteenth century thinkers who saw decay in nature wherever they looked; the Victorian revulsion against the Industrial Revolution and their fascination with the past, especially the Middle Ages—all of these, and other periods, are brilliantly, evocatively described. Peter of Blois wrote in the twelfth century, “We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.” This view, however, can be startlingly pleasant or can fill the viewer with revulsion depending on what is seen.
Lowenthal’s thesis that “the past is a foreign country,” and that there is a sharp disjunction between past and present, is surprising in this context. He establishes that the past, in certain circumstances, is sometimes regarded as a potential ally and friend. He further develops his argument by saying that this disjunction has become particularly marked in the last two centuries, with the rise of the antiquarian spirit, the development of historiography, the proliferation of museums, attempts at preservation, and the awareness of a plundered, very precarious past. The title, then—The Past Is a Foreign Country—would apply to the recent past but not to the many previous epochs when the past was or was not “foreign” depending on numerous variables. To buttress this interpretation he provides a lengthy discussion at the end of the book of the cult of relics and antiques, especially in England. Lowenthal gives evidence of a similar concern for preservation in the United States since the 1960’s. Although this has been an area of concern, it has been far weaker in the United States than in England, and the American reader is likely to be puzzled or disappointed by the book’s ending. Lowenthal seems to have embraced the British cult with too much passion. Instead of merging the British and American pasts, a sharper distinction should have been made between them. There are many pasts and many foreign countries. It is doubtful that for an American in the 1980’s, the past could assume a cumulative weight that would overpower anyone as the weight of the Founding Fathers overpowered Emerson in the 1840’s. In England, the situation is different: The culture, and the past, is more unified, and its weight more easily becomes cumulative.
Lowenthal’s second contention is that the past, as defined by Plumb, is not “dead” at all but alive, an object of widespread concern and cultivation. Plumb’s book The Death of the Past was intensely discussed in the 1970’s, both in England and the United States. Plumb’s past was not only the “old past” but “that evil old past” as well; he described the past as dual. To simplify his argument, one mandate of the past is identified with the ruling class, authority, and bigotry; another mandate he calls “history” and identifies with criticism, skepticism, freedom of choice, and orientation toward the future. Both coexist in what is normally called the past. In Lowenthal’s conclusion, he recommends a study of the past that is very much like Plumb’s history: “Without a past that is malleable as well as generously preserved, the present will lack models to inspire it and the future be deprived of a lifeline to its past.” The misunderstanding seems to stem from Plumb’s distinction between two aspects of the past. Does Lowenthal also recognize a past whose main function is to legitimize authority? He points out moments in time when the past came to seem unbearable, a dead hand suffocating the present—for example, the end of the seventeenth century, or the Habsburg Empire before the Viennese Secession—but this use of history is less important to him, and less of a danger, than it was for Plumb.
Lowenthal embraces the past above all as a professional historian. The study of the past is constantly beset with difficulties, and it is the function of the historian to ask what “really” happened. It is he who must see through the myriad distortions and falsifications, created by people of both goodwill and ill will, that hinder a just assessment of the true past. Only rarely does Lowenthal call this past a living past—he insists that it is different from the present and must be guarded from encroachment by the present. He does not emphasize the presentness of the past. He recognizes that specific periods in the past were once “the present” and hence momentarily more alive than any other preceding period, yet this is not of major importance in his schema. Whether or not these people thought of themselves in the present tense, his emphasis falls on the difference of these past people from ourselves.
Certainly Lowenthal is free to choose his emphasis, but the question arises, is this not itself an anachronism, a falsification? In his last chapter, he criticizes the various distortions of the past that surround us, sentimental or commercial, bogus “pasts.” He claims that after two generations of modernism, after numerous twentieth century attempts to break with “the whole corpus of inherited European culture,” there is a general “crusade for cultural amnesia,” the modern cult of originality seeking to scuttle the past entirely. History has become academic, the domain of a minuscule, decreasing number of professional specialists. Lowenthal’s diagnosis may be correct. It is sober and carefully stated. Two powerful arguments may be brought against it.
The first is that modernist movements in the arts were far more concerned with the past—in carrying on a dialogue or dialectic with it—than Lowenthal recognizes. It is enough to mention Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, the major modernist writers in English. Pound boasted of knowing the literatures of more than a dozen countries, and his goal was to become the most erudite poet alive; Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is one of the most meticulous “imitations” of a classical work that exists; and as Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land (1922) show, the poem is almost swamped by the cumulative presence of past cultures. The past is alive and well in modernism.
A second argument is that the past might be felt, periodically, as a “foreign country” (the present might be one such time), but this is purely episodic. Sometimes the past is felt to be more foreign, sometimes less. Surely it is an anachronistic projection of a present attitude on the past to imply that the past was foreign to all periods. Many epochs have believed that human nature is universal, that basic human motivations and attitudes toward the present, future, and past vary less than the superficial forms of material life. The concept opens up a whole area not considered by Lowenthal, but it is one of the most crucial, the most important uses of the past. This is that it is possible for an individual to find allies in the past—to find others who lived and breathed in a present just as he does, whose concerns were strikingly similar to his own. These people in past periods might be even closer to him than many who live in his same time, country, city. It is not possible to say to someone oppressed by a hostile regime—a person in prison in Czechoslovakia, Poland, or the Soviet Union, in Santiago, Seoul, or Kabul—that the past is a foreign country. On the contrary, it is his greatest hope, and, if he understands it, his native country. While the immediate, local present might be hostile or laughable, an alien land.