History rebuilt

There's a sign in the trees below the church about refurbishing work. I thought it was there because they'd never done the work. This is a ruin, after all. But as I looked at the walls I realised that it's a kind of refurbished ruin. That's modern mortar, surely?

So I have looked at the walls and windows and tried to imagine the church as it was, but I might be trying to imagine from the wrong foundations. I might have been served a dummy.

That led me to think how, of course, history is like that. In American schools, WWI is not the 1914-19 war but the 1917-19 war. Until recently, colonial explorers were heroes, not villains. I was taught about their bravery, the adventuring spirit and so on. Not about killing everyone. And it's not just Western history: Native American tribes, once they had horses, re-imagined horses into their mythology. The documentary maker, Karl Ammann, talks about the lack of compassion for animals in some societies, but we killed off all our big animals hundreds if not thousands of years ago. Over the last century, Americans have killed off more than 100,000 grizzlies... not to mention the wolves and the bison.

We shape and remake history all the time.

And as I thought about that, I considered memory - and how malleable that is. How our personal stories become more grandiose and self-serving. How the trespasses against us turn from unconscious slight to unconscionable malevolence.

Then if you like, consider how we "make" the world we sense - our brains selecting from millions of stimuli only those which some unconscious part of us believes to be worthy of attention. And much of what's that - high frequency sound and UV light - isn't even part of the possible picture. Beyond that, we see what we "want" to see. We are remaking the world according to our... inner picture of it.

Nothing is as it seems. And what it actually is, the ding an sich, we will never know.

But that doesn't mean we have a free pass. Our shaping of things can be helpful or unhelpful. Often what seems unhelpful to us might be helpful all things considered, as the philosophers like to say. So I believe we have an ethical duty to question how we read the world and our memories and our histories and investigate how much has been refashioned for our ego and our comfort to the detriment of others.