Saturday night before the hockey game, the Spousal Unit and
I went out for dinner and talked about life and stuff, as you do when you’ve
got almost a quarter-century of shared history. In fact, history was one of the
things we discussed. Specifically, the way some people seem to have a very selective
understanding of the past, a sort of idealized vision of a world that never
really existed.
(A page from the Book of Kells.)
Earlier this month I talked about my affection for science
and technology, and how much I adore living in the future as we do. But I’m
also glad to live in a time with so much easily accessible knowledge about the
past . . . and it’s kind of sad when people don’t take advantage of that
opportunity.
There are people with idealized perceptions of the
past—fueled in large part, I think, by the relentless negativity of the 24-hour
news cycle—as a place without random violence or scary people who are
different, or whatever. If it wasn’t such a menace to the stability of our
society, it would be hilarious.
Grab a book about the Thirty Years’ War. (Go
ahead; I’ll wait.) Or about one of the many, many horrible pandemics that
routinely destroyed huge chunks of the population all over the world. Or a book
about slavery, or the Armenian genocide during World War I, or the Holocaust
during World War II, or Stalin’s terror . . .
I trust I’ve made my point. Bad things happen in every time.
There was no lovely golden age where children didn’t come to grief, and
regardless of what the talking heads on CNN or Fox News would have you believe
in their relentless quest for higher ratings, kids are much safer, much more
likely to live to a ripe old age today than at any other time in history. I
would no more willingly raise my kids a hundred and fifty years ago than I
would drive them around without their seatbelts on.
I’ll admit, too, that I used to keep my blinders on as much
as possible, in that comfortable zone of heroes and villains. My fall from
grace started in college, with a history professor who specialized in research
on the late medieval/Renaissance period in central Europe. His work fascinated
me—rather than an illusionary time of wholesome nuclear families, their lives
were just as messy and fraught as any modern community. We just didn’t know
about it before, because no one had bothered to look.
Since then, I’ve delved into the founding of the good ol’ US
of A—which is even more remarkable once you understand all the negotiations
that made it possible, all the squabbling and searching. One of my favorite
biographies is David McCullough’s John
Adams, in large part because he presents Adams as a complete person, a
prickly genius who struggled with ego and faith and service. His
accomplishments and his humanity are all the more remarkable when his
fallibility becomes clear. And I think one of the dangers of idealizing the
heroes of the past (however awesome they are) is that we can fail to understand
our own capacity for courage and goodness.
(A portrait of John Adams.)
I’m not sure I believe that forgetting history means we’re
doomed to repeat it. But I do think we can’t move forward until we have an
honest understanding of the past rather than a naïve wish for a storybook time
rather than grappling with reality. And remember, those who forget history are
doomed to get a verbal smackdown from someone who’s done the homework.
(Danse Macabre--Even kings must bow to the greater powers.)
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