History and conscience: on pride, shame and historical reflection.(History)

HOW SHOULD NATIONS react to their history? Is it legitimate to feel pride for what our ancestors achieved? Is it legitimate to feel guilt or shame for their sins?

If human beings were creatures of pure logic, neither reaction would be legitimate. Go back a hundred years and whatever our ancestors did, we cannot possibly be congratulated or blamed, in all logic. We simply were not there. And yet people do feel pride and guilt or shame about their ancestors, both the remote ones, occasionally, and the ones quite near in time, rather more often. There is, moreover, a further problem. What differences are there between the concepts of "guilt" and "shame"?

There are other things than historical events about which we feel pride when we ourselves have done nothing. Some people go into ecstasies when their country's football team wins. There is a human propensity to identify with certain groups which are seen as one's own. I used to feel ashamed of British cuisine. Similarly, people feel bad about accidents they have been in, even when they committed no crime or offence. It is well known that people involved in car accidents feel appallingly guilty when someone is hurt, even when they themselves are guiltless. If we did not feel that sort of emotion after accidental mishaps, we would be more dangerous people than we are.

But let us stick to history for the most part. This year, 2007, is the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition in this country of the slave trade. Commentary on this momentous piece of legislation has focused either on the shame and guilt and horror of British involvement in this abominable business--and business it was--or proper pride in such an achievement as abolition, given the almost universal practice of slavery in human history.

What is the proper attitude for people to take towards their past, for good or for ill? There is no easy answer to this question, but considering both the extraordinary creative powers of the human race and alongside them the outrages we find on every page of history, it is an urgent one. How do individuals connect with their past in general? When is pride a suitable response to confronting a past? When is shame or guilt? Is none of these feelings appropriate? To what extent does fashion play a part? To what extent is history a text written by the winners? This was the defence mounted by the Nazis tried at Nuremberg. "You won, we lost. If we had won, you would be in the dock, because of the Allied bombing, or because of the atom bomb." And it is true that certain actions of the allies of the Second World War were very dubious. For example, Soviet judges took part at Nuremberg, when the Soviets had murdered far more innocents than the Nazis had.

Let us work our way into this enormous subject by concentrating in the first place on slavery. This is, of course, one subject on which we cannot confine the discussion to the recent past. We must stress, however, that whichever way we react to it, slavery is an enormously important and frightening historical phenomenon.

There is a view of it written in the Edwardian era, which forty years later most of my generation were taught in schools in England. It is from Our Island Story by H.E. Marshall, a Scotswoman who wrote it in Australia. It was republished in 2005, a hundred years after its initial publication, and is now widely available in most British primary schools, thanks to the generosity of the readers of the Daily Express. What Marshall says is that in Britain this dreadful trade was gradually more and more understood in terms of its horrors, and that when the message had sunk in, irresistible forces combined to outlaw the trade in 1807 and the practice of slavery itself in 1833 throughout the British empire.