Why Study Old Stuff?

History is about dead people. Archeology is about dead people. So is art history. Even literature is mainly about dead people, unless you somehow confine your attention to living writers.

I've been interested in literature for a long time and studied it in college. If you're into some of the really old literature, I think you almost inevitably find yourself concerned with the history of the period as well, and in fact I did. And within the last few years I've acknowledged to myself an interest in archeology.

So, I'm interested in lots of old stuff, even antiques. And I find it disturbing to consider that a lot of people have no interest in the past. I'm sure that the course of study that a lot of people follow in post-secondary schools includes little or no study of the fields that have to do with old stuff or with dead people.

It's disturbing to me and I think it's unfortunate; but I understand it pretty well, I think. There is money to be made, livelihoods to be earned, if you study really new stuff, such as the newest computer hardware and software. By contrast, I might know a lot about Old English poetry, but who values that knowledge and will pay me for knowing it? Where can I put that knowledge to any use, let alone to profit?

So maybe the people who want to learn about some of these areas are not practical-minded, don't care enough about whether they're going to be equipped to make a living. And it's really only sensible to worry about having a field that will produce an income.

Wanting to study IT rather than history is not a new phenomenon. In the protest days of the 1960s and 1970s, students and others were not just protesting a war. Demonstrations on college campuses were protesting that college curricula were not "relevant." And curricula changed. A mark of so-called academic liberalism is that students might study Puerto Rican poets rather than Shakespeare. And while these poets may not be "classic" like Shakespeare, and maybe not as good as Shakespeare, they have the merit of being living. Let's study and worry about our world, and not dig up dusty old books where the language is funny and hard to understand.

The debate over what, if anything, the past has to teach us is ongoing and endless. I for one don't feel that the past has to prove its relevance. Some human concerns are timeless and unchanging. Twenty-first-century people—no matter how much our world seems to have changed in some respects—are not freed from the same life events, emotions, worries that have been aspects of the human condition for thousands of years.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein