November 3, 2025

One of the uses of history is to free us from a falsely imagined past. The less we know of how ideas actually took root and grew, the more apt we are to accept them unquestioningly, as inevitable features of the world in which we live.

Robert Bork (1927–2012), American jurist and legal scholar, The Antitrust Paradox (1978), Jay p.53

How well do you know your country’s history—the real history, not the falsely imagined past?

The question for meditation goes to the purpose of studying history. Bork is making a distinction between history as it is imagined—what should really be termed “myth”—rather than history as it unfolded in reality. The motion picture Gone with the Wind is an example of the former, Twelve Years a Slave of the latter.