My History Lesson

When I was a boy, history was ancient. Greeks and Romans. Even further back, Egyptians and mummies. 

As I got older, I learned that it wasn’t just the ancients who fought epic battles. Skirmishes great and small happened all the time, more or less continuously. Except maybe in the Dark Ages. I was never very clear about what happened in the Dark Ages, apart from plague and misery. In the Renaissance, though, the histories of battles resumed. The Catholic Church got in on the wars among the Italian city states. All across Europe, Kings warred. 

This territorial and ideological push and shove endured with little remission until, and culminating in, the great World Wars of the twentieth century. I was born at the end of the last of those, and so, apart from provincial skirmishes like Korea and Vietnam, it seemed to me as a young man that the world had calmed down. There was the cold war with Russia, mutually-assured-destruction and all that, so I guess my sanguinity was technically unwarranted, but I was young and optimistic. Of course we would, as a civilization, make progress now. Why else was I alive and part of it if not for that?

My wife, Meg, is a novelist, and lately she has written historical fiction set in and around WW II. We go to Europe and see the places that suffered in that great war and the one before it, and the people, and I think about the rise of Fascism, the almost hypnotic rage it provoked in otherwise ordinary folk, and I wonder at how it happened. What were people thinking? Hitler? Really?

Since WW II and the wars in Korea and Vietnam, we have taken up global meddling again, like a medieval king or pope. We’re currently up to our necks in the quicksands of the Middle East. A close look at the sects that are at each other’s throats there, and have been since long before we got involved, has opened my eyes to a sad fact: I’m not living in a special time. The years of my time on this earth are no more transformational than the millennia that came before. Engineering has raised skyscrapers and science has vaccinated us against the diseases of early times, so we live longer, but we don’t live much differently.

We still fight about everything. We still raise the banners of religion and nationalism to rally ourselves to vanquish the other. Our weapons are more fearsome, and one day we may wipe ourselves out, but in the meantime, nothing else about human interaction is fundamentally different than it has ever been.

And now, once again, not in some ancient time, not in the last century, but right now, in this decade, we are falling for demagogues and autocrats again. Trump. Putin. Bolsonaro in Brazil. Orban in Hungry. What the hell? Didn’t we learn anything from Hitler? Didn’t we learn anything from ourselves?

William Faulkner famously said: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” I always thought that sounded terribly clever, but, honestly, I never understood what he was trying to tell us. 

I do now.