Why revisit the past? In The Past is a Foreign Country David Lowenthal offers six benefits.
- Familiarity
“The surviving past’s most essential and pervasive benefit is to render the present familiar. Its traces on the ground and in our minds let us make sense of the present.”
2. Reaffirmation and Validation
“The past validates present attitudes and actions by affirming their resemblance to former ones.”
3. Identity
“Ability to recall and identify with our own past gives existence meaning, purpose, and value… Awareness of history likewise enhances communal and national identity, legitimating a people in their own eyes.”
4. Guidance
“The past is most characteristically invoked for the lessons it teaches… In the nineteenth century, growing awareness of the past’s diversity and dissimilarity from the present tempered its authority. But even when history ceased to provide explicit precedents or moral exemplars, parallels between past and present remained instructive.”
5. Enrichment
“The past lengthens life’s reach by linking us with events and people prior to ourselves.”
6. Escape
“Besides enhancing an acceptable present, the past offers alternatives to an unacceptable present. In yesterday we find what we miss today. And yesterday is a time for which we have no responsibility and when no one can answer back.”
Yes, all of them, but especially 5 and 6. Even 6 has problems when you find out the past was not golden. Not least of which lack of golden-ness was personal cleanliness and comfort. I like a hot bath and soft clean bed free of vermin. So 5 is definitely the one: linking up with people from the past without having to go live there.
Cheers to beds free of vermin!