About sixty years ago, R.G. Collingwood wrote, "Every new generation
must rewrite history in its own way." Inasmuch as his thinking was
suspended somewhere between hope for a science of history and an
awareness of its practical limits, philosophers of history have been
arguing ever since about what he really meant. But one thing he must
have meant is that what interests us about the past is at least
partly a function of what bothers us or makes us curious in the
present. As Collingwood said, "As far as we can see history as a
whole . . . we see it as a continuous development in which every
phase consists of the solution of human problems set by the preceding
phase."
Human affairs generally move so ponderously, or in such complicated
ways, that contemporaries have trouble seeing "history as a whole",
or detecting the phases to which Collingwood pointed. But as a
glacier or a tectonic plate may slip to dramatic effect, so sometimes
major events rattle us into historical awareness. When they do, it is
uncanny how we find ourselves reassessing the significance of dates
as symbols of the touching points of historical phases. On September
1, 1939, 1918-19 suddenly shrunk in significance for Britons and
Frenchmen and 1870-71 suddenly grew. When the Berlin Wall fell and
the Soviet Union dissolved, 1917 suddenly became a less important
date, and 1914 a more important one. September 11, 2001, was such an
event, so it is worth asking how our historical perceptions may
change as a result of it.
