Every society has its own unique history against the backdrop of which the foreground events of the day acquire their “significance.”
Without such a historical backdrop and the “meaning” attributed to it by the different groups living in that society, the news events do not make sense or they come across as “strange developments” or “weird events” to outside observers. As such, they “violate” the foreign observer’s expectations of “correctness” or “normalcy.”
Take the recent hoopla (a word which of course immediately betrays my own unhistorical approach to current British events) over the fox hunt ban by the British Parliament. To me it is a “hoopla” because I did not grow up in a society where fox hunting was one of the ways in which people defined and defended class boundaries. However, what to an outside observer sounds like an “animal welfare issue” is actually nothing but the latest episode in the 800-years-strong “war” between the British classes.
George Monbiot, a British observer writing for The Guardian (September 14), expressed it well: “As an animal welfare issue, foxhunting comes in at about number 155 … But as a class issue, it ranks behind private schooling at number two. This isn't about animal welfare. It's about human welfare. By taking on the hunt, [the British] MPs are taking on those who ran the country for 800 years, and still run the countryside today. This class war began with the Norman conquest. It still needs to be fought.”
I forgot the number of times I’ve seen in the Western press the same kind of unhistorical approach to the news from Turkey. One recent example of course is the head scarf (turban) issue. Reducing the turban issue to a “freedom of expression” or “freedom of religion” issue is just like reducing the “fox hunt ban” in England to an “animal welfare” matter. It is just a wrong translation, although admittedly it is the easiest translation available to an average foreign observer.
As the globalization process brings previously distant economies and societies closer, such mistranslations should be expected to proliferate.
There are interesting exceptions to the rule as well. For example, when France, just like Turkey, also banned turbans (together with other religious symbols) from public schools, it was an interesting contemporary convergence based on an unsurprising historical fact: Turkey borrowed the concept of “laicism” from France in the first place. So the identical ruling on the turban issue in two different societies was based more on common “meaning” attributed to turban (as a form of political expression) than on pure coincidence.
However, on the issue of criminalizing adultery, no such common historical backdrop existed between Turkey and the European Union. The ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party), with a lot of “help” from the openly critical EU senior officials and the vocal opposition from Turkish women’s groups, has wisely backtracked on the issue and removed an unnecessary speed bump from its path on the way to Brussels.
A skeptical Soren Kierkegaard said “life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” However, we do not lunge randomly when we go forward. And the “meaning” of that forward direction, that is, the way we explain to ourselves why “it is worth to go this way rather than the other,” can also be understood by only looking “backwards.”
Without taking our own past into consideration, the news of our present will look like the violation of someone else’s past. The fox hunting and turban bans are two examples of that.