At 17, I dismissed history as irrelevant. At 24, I know better

A video on the Internet made me cry recently and it wasn't about cats.

It showed a line of men on their motorcycles, caught in a traffic jam and waving cheerfully at a camera-drone flying above them. They were waiting to cross into Malaysia by the Causeway.

I am not a Malaysian and I do not have family in Malaysia, but I know many people in Singapore do, and they have been separated from their families for the greater part of two years as borders closed on March 18, 2020, due to the global pandemic and reopened on April 1 this year. Their jubilation was palpable and I was so happy for them that it moved me to tears.

As I was basking in the joyous mood of collective celebration, I remembered that this was the first time that the Causeway had been closed for such a long time since it was blown up to defend against the Japanese in 1942 during World War II.

And I recalled that even after Singapore and Malaysia separated into two sovereign states in 1965, such a blockade of movement was considered unthinkable to many. The fact that many families continue to live with one foot in Johor and another in Singapore lays testament to the deep ties the two countries share.

These ties have their roots in a shared colonial and geographical history. It was a sobering thought - one that the 17-year-old me, who despised history and wanted nothing of it, could never have imagined the 24-year-old me having.

To put it kindly, I was a spirited and irreverent student who wanted to explore the frontiers of science and saw in its study a way to extend some control over the future. My first exposition essay written in junior college was about how history was irrelevant.

I did not score very well for that essay. My teacher backhandedly praised my "passionate but shallow" dismissal of the past.

In my callow arrogance - I was a biology-chemistry-maths-economics student who wanted to study viruses and save lives - I dismissed his dismissal of my work.

Thankfully, my views have tempered as I grew older and slowly began taking to the study of history as a "nice to know" subject or a hobby. However, my understanding of history remained bubble-like, a small microcosm of niche interests and a smattering of interesting facts.

I did not have a "historical consciousness", which I term as a chronological understanding of how dominant phenomena at the time could have had a cascading effect on other events that follow. Such dominant trends and contexts are like the trunk from which many other subsidiary historical events branch off from.

I was also vastly more interested in the history of other countries as opposed to my own. I had found the Singaporean history I learnt in school "propagandistic" before I even learnt what propaganda meant. Such cynicism often earned a lot of social credit when you were a teenager.

While I'm more well-versed today in the reasons why history would have been taught that way when we were younger - simplified into a set of rules about good governance and its policy priorities - I also think that teaching school history in too simplistic a fashion does a disfavour to Singaporeans who need to learn to make sense of the swarm of opinions online which have become increasingly politically polarised.

On social media, where communication is not directed but lateral, everyone communicates directly to a shapeless audience about what they think, and these opinions have increasingly begun to take on a didactic tone.

This is in no small part because of "educational" pages that have popped up of late, that have become part of what many term "infographic culture". These infographics tell people what to believe and why they should believe something, along with evidential information presented in the form of bullet points.

Such strategies have been observed in the political right and left, where anti-vaxxers have presented lists of why vaccinations might be bad for you, and in the local context, you are presented with lists of how Lee Kuan Yew was a communist who betrayed his fellow communist partners, alongside sensationalist headlines published prior to independence.

It is common infographic parlance to simply list evidence that supports your opinion, prioritising persuasion over comprehensiveness. In online spaces where attention spans are limited, such a trade-off is deemed acceptable to many. The onus lies on the receiver to look into resources at greater depth, to question if the infographic provides the full picture.

However, most of us do not follow through with this duty and we end up consuming information that supports what we already intuitively believe.

Consider this: It only takes one second to click share, 20 seconds to sign a petition, but conceivably a lifetime to explore a topic in totality. This is one factor that has contributed to the reactivity that so characterises online life these days: people yelling at one another to prove that they are right.

I, too, was someone like that.

When the Yellow Umbrella protests erupted in Hong Kong in 2019, I recall getting into a series of passionately hostile arguments with my father about the legitimacy of such protests, where I saw protests as a political tool of last resort the populace takes if it cannot reason with the authorities about the legitimacy of your national identity, which I saw as non-negotiable.

On the other hand, my father was more "realpolitik" in his stance. Since a contract was already written for Hong Kong to be returned to China by 2047, it was futile of the Hong Kong populace to default on this contract, especially with China's nationalistic ambitions and historic stronghand rule. To continue to insist upon a sovereign Hong Kong would be to prolong the suffering of ordinary citizens, for an unwinnable fight.

It was clear to me that we were at an impasse on this issue. We were approaching the situation from different perspectives. For me, from a pro-democracy and ideological stance; for him, a stance pragmatic and dependent on the balance of power.

However, in the time I was huffing about how I was right and a "power-dominated structure of the world" was wrong, I realised that in my desire to persuade my father to "join my side", I had neglected to even understand why and how the city of Hong Kong was partitioned from China at all. Instead, I deemed nothing more important than the will of the people for self-governance.

However, after reading more about its history, I understood that the fate Hong Kong experienced was one similar to that of many other post-colonial societies, where entire geographical regions were partitioned by whim and will and the stroke of a pen in agreements between bigger powers.

I later understood Singapore's own chequered history in that respect - how its fortunes varied throughout history, when it was a port city within larger empires in the region, or a vassal state to regional powers. In various eras of history, it was under the sway of Chinese, Thai, Indian, Malayan, Indonesian or British spheres of influence.

For two brief years, Singapore merged with Malaysia to form one independent state and then separated into two. Being a sovereign nation is an anomaly for Singapore, and all the more precious for being so.

Learning more about the history of countries, the hard choices they made to respond to quickly evolving circumstances, I came to appreciate how states make decisions about their future - and how imperfect those decisions might look in retrospect, and yet could have still been the best decision at the time, and how the different "historical winds" blowing through the time might have influenced them.

The nascent understanding of the world made simple things much more murky to me.

For a start, I am a lot less sure of my political opinions now than I used to be. Simple questions about whether I support things like the death penalty have become broadened into for who, what country, during what kinds of time, and how?

People often think that the reward of knowledge is clarity. With this clarity, they hope to be able to move confidently into the world, strike down opponents like an omniscient judge with an all-knowing mallet, and call for change without doubt.

But actually, the reward of knowledge is uncertainty, nuance, layered and on-the-surface contradictory opinions, which require the presentation of a unique circumstance to assess.

The reward of knowledge is that when presented with a situation, your first reaction is not to feel - as they say these days - "triggered", but to feel curious enough to investigate if you've missed something out.

We must not be afraid of having difficult conversations with one another about what we believe. But we must not be too reactive to jump into such conversations before understanding why someone might hold an opposing viewpoint. And we must also have the humility, after exploration, to believe differently, instead of rooting our feet into some ideological territory out of intellectual stubbornness.

The onus is on each of us to educate ourselves, try to develop a radial understanding of a situation first, instead of chiselling away at a hard problem with the obstinance of a single viewpoint from the very beginning.

It would be a good practice to ask your interlocutors about their starting assumptions and context, and try to create a more comprehensive perspective of the situation should you disagree.

But when faced with the sheer joy of family reunions widely shared on social media when the Causeway reopened, sometimes historical analysis is redundant.

Even without understanding the history that binds Singapore and Malaysia, we see in those joyful moments something even more invaluable - human connection.