up, to interrogate the present to see what of the past remains. Because our present day potential for violence is alive and undiminished.

We need to look into our history, to examine the political, economic, social, and cultural causes of our conflict, which we are trying to expose to the general public, the women, the youth in the schools.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present, and go to that past to seek large views of what is of lasting importance to the human race.

We are a fine species with some potential. Yet we are racked by sickening amounts of violence. Unless we are hermints, we feel the threat of it, often as a daily shadow. And regardless of where we hide, should our leaders push the button, we will all be lost in a final global violence.

The past, and how we view it, is more a reflection of where we currently are than of the past itself. As the psychologist Dr. Brent Slife states in the book Time and Psychological Explanation (emphasis mine): “We reinterpret or reconstruct our memory in light of what our mental set is in the present. In this sense, it is more accurate to say the present causes the meaning of the past, than it is to say that the past causes the meaning of the present. . . . Our memories are not stored and objective entities but living parts of ourselves in the present. This is the reason our present moods and future goals so affect our memories.

As psychologist Brent Slife states in Time and Psychological Explanation (italics mine): We reinterpret or reconstruct our memory in light of what our mental set is in the present. In this sense, it is more accurate to say the present causes the meaning of the past, than it is to say that the past causes the meaning of the present . . . Our memories are not “stored” and “objective” entities but living parts of ourselves in the present. This is the reason our present moods and future goals so affect our memories.

I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. Rather I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself. The past is not necessarily a guide to the future, but it does partly help explain the present. One cannot, as I have written elsewhere, take revenge upon history; history is its own revenge.

Our past is but a former now, our future a potential one.

The times we live in are alternately derided for their failings and romanticized for their emerging opportunities. It sometimes seems that we now live amid greater violence, greater uncertainty; that the world suffers more conflicts and tragedies; that the poor are poorer and greater in number; that race, ethnicity and nationalism divide us more intractably than ever before. But that is not so. Human beings are still capable of violence and cruelty. We all succumb to sin. But look back at any preceding century or even just a few decades, and you will see cruelty, violence and misery on a scale that is, with few exceptions, unknown today.

It is not to revive of the corpse of past erudition that I have any desire, but rather to make more vivid the life of to-day, and to help us to envisage its problems with a more accurate perspective.

If we want to understand the past we must do so on its own terms, and disregard the future of that past, but if we want to understand the present we better not disregard the past steps that were essential for getting to the present. This is of importance especially for those of us engaged in trying to push ahead the scientific path of discovery today. We are not much interested in what scientists did wrong, there is too much of that. We are interested in what they did right, because we are trying to copy them in this, not in that.

Is this reaction about the present moment? Or is it about the past? I can't change the past. But by changing my response to its leftovers, I can change the present.

The past is not yet past. When things happen, the only way we can make sense of it is by telling the story about the past – realising where prejudices come from. And the point would be not only to spin a story about racial violence but to tell how our ancestors have bravely and creatively overcome these things.

I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself.