Quote of the Day (John Gray, on History, ‘The First Victim in Dictatorships’)

“[H]istory is the first victim in dictatorships. Because perceptions of the past constantly and inevitably impinge on contemporary debate, we depend on historians to provide us with a richness and variety of grounding. Historians should not be too complacent about their ability to do it….Then again most historians have led sheltered lives, few have gained the insights offered by actual experience of popular engagement, and inevitably most of the historical record they work with was created by the elite. Yet history without any realised sense of the experience of the underclass, or, say, of women, is only half a history….I wouldn’t suggest supernatural predictive powers for historians. In my part of the world [Northern Ireland], we know enough of the tyranny of biblical prediction to too readily adopt other formulaic certainties. What we can usefully do is to point to other possibilities in the face of any prevailing consensus. We will serve best if we engage in an endless process of exploration, of critical assessment of what has gone before, of self-criticism to the point where it is just still possible to write—to move our understanding of the human condition forward. In doing so we engage in the one inevitable feature of the process; that revisionism will always be followed by post-revisionism.”—Belfast social historian, civil-rights activist and former librarian John Gray interviewed by Peter Collins, “Gray’s Elegy,” History Ireland, Spring 1999