In this blog I wrote about history and how best to manage it. In this blog post I just want to add something else important to it - something that probably isn't considered often at all. A
good reason to be accurate on your views is the danger of how those views can
be mapped in history. In other words, if we are sloppy in the present we run
the danger of distorting future perceptions of history. Here's an example of
what I mean. You'll hear some people say that Tony Blair is a war criminal and
should be tried for war crimes for his involvement in Iraq Iraq invasion
unjust, that it was based on faulty intelligence, and that Blair is very
culpable in the emergence of ISIS . But it
absurdly distorts the picture to put Blair in the same 'war criminal' category
as people like Adolf Hitler, Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. Even the
most entrenched anti-war propagandists don't really believe that Tony Blair has
the same propensity for wickedness, oppression and cruelty as those men.
But
a long time in the future, people's version of ancient history (our present)
will be compressed to less detailed packets of information, just as ours is now
when we speak of long and complex periods such as the Bronze Age, or Acadian times, or early Roman times, or the Dark
Ages. Even though every generation records more
information than past generations did, future humans will still have the same cognitive limitations
when it comes to memory and attention span, so they will still oversimplify
history, and they will still distort information in a way that their distant
ancestors would see as being carelessly inaccurate.
Suppose
we fast forward to a time so far in the future that Blair's involvement in Iraq was seamlessly lumped in among other
historical events involving crimes against humanity like Nazi Germany, the conflicts
in Bosnia , Croatia and Kosovo, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq
