Some thoughts on the way history is taught, the way history is understood, and a 15th century axe head that nearly moved me to tears

Teaching history from the top down, so to speak, is probably the greatest cause of the general lack of understanding and widespread myths that allow it to be weaponized against its inheritors

Some time ago I was in a museum and happened to see a Slovenian axe head from the 15th century, dredged from a waterway so it was still in fairly good condition, good enough to see how well it had been forged

Every angle, line, curve, and surface was smooth and perfect, the forge weld straight and even, far better than nearly all axes made today, even the most expensive, and it was made by hand and eye with the simplest tools, hammer, file, maybe a foot powered grindstone

I stood there, staring at this piece of iron and steel, struck by a sudden realization: a master of a sort who no longer exists in this world made that axe. The sort from whom even a utilitarian object, a simple axe, becomes the highest art

In that moment I felt strongly that I am, we are, unworthy heirs to men like that. It makes me happy to know that things like this are possible, but also so indescribably sad to see how far we have fallen

Seeing this axe affected me far more than notre dame burning or other terrible but incomprehensibly large acts of destruction. I've never built a cathedral but I have made an axe head, so I know

The man who made that axe was himself a living monument of thousands of years worth of skill and refinement passed down in a line unbroken, until now. He had a sophisticated mind worthy of great respect

A meaningful understanding of history starts with understanding not what happened but what drove it to happen, and that begins with the way people in history lived, the simplest parts of it, their houses and tools and food and clothes

There is an obsession with classification that leads to memorizing names, dates, maps, periods, other such useless trivia. This is meaningless on its own, and should be the last thing one learns

One who has spun and sewn and reaped and mown and swung a forging hammer and put on a mail coat, even briefly, understands the medieval era better than a man who can name every holy roman emperor, and he will have a much greater appreciation for medieval man

If all one knows is trivia, it's easy to believe the standard
high school history teacher's lies, that men of the past were drunken, crude, inferior, foul smelling imbeciles. Not so when one has tried to replicate even a little of his daily life

There is a kind of respect for what has been that is never found in a book, and is necessary for a real understanding of the past, less coloured by ideas of progress or "historical forces"

That's certainly a lot of words to say stop talking shit about your ancestors and go outside, nerd