One of the greatest gifts my mother ever gave me was the interest and passion for reading. The second greatest gift she gave me in this regard is that I could read anything that I wanted to. Originally I read fiction and fantasy - not surprising in a young boy - and after a short trip into space exploration, started reading more in history, which led to philosophy and theology. Literature happened as well, though initially through the "encouragement" of education; it was not until after college that I realized I could read the great fiction that I found I enjoyed, not the ones I was assigned.
One of the things that comes across from reading about different periods of history and people within those different periods of history is that on the whole, humanity and the problems we face have not really changed over all these years. 2500 years ago the Greeks were discussing what the nature of the individual was. Sun Tzu and Thucydides and Tacitus and Anna Commena and the unknown writer of the Heike Monogatari remind us that war and internal politics have not changed in a very long time
History, Philosophy, Theology Literature - these give us a view into the humanity and all of its glories and failures. Laid out fully before us are all of the follies and foolishness and successes of every thing that humanity has ever done or tried. It also serves as a guide to future endeavors, if we will allow it to be so.
Collectivization of property which will benefit society? Been tried, failed miserably. Restricting personal freedoms and imprisoning those that are against the current regime? The regime falls, eventually, and those that believed and enable it will be excoriated. Start a war without understanding what a war actually is? The nature of war will be understood at the cost of lives and treasure and territory and the rending of social compacts.
To Lewis' point above, most of this will be lost if we only focus on our current day.
Current day commentators who only look at the current day and/or only look at the things that support their views are men and women constantly advancing before encroaching sunset. I say advancing; they are actually running as fast as they can lest the weight of the past catch up with them and overtake them. Modernism can scarcely bear the weight of historical experience; its only hope is to try and outrun it.
Interestingly, the InterWeb has both accelerated and compounded this problem. It has accelerated it in that history, philosophy, theology, and literature can be simply removed and hidden away and facts around it rewritten and obscured. It has compounded the problem in that those same areas can be much more easily distributed and read by many more people.
Were I to have a recommendation or plan for society to right itself, I would recommend that people spend twice as much time studying the past than they do paying attention to the present or the future. Those of the present and future orientation only have theoretical results and hopes to point to; the past can tell us how such things generally work out in reality.
As the intro to Fallout Three stated......War.......War never changes. Collectivization/Socialism/Communism? But THIS time WE'LL do it right!! And the millions of dead will appreciate it! The educational system has to be changed so that reading texts and emojis on smart phones isn't the ONLY reading done by most folks. The ranks of teachers and administrators are important and the type of people in them..... well...........
ReplyDeleteNylon12 - Quoting Fallout Three? You surprise me Sir, in all the best ways.
DeleteUtopianism is something that has never gone away - at least since Plato, anyway. One of the great lies of progress is that such a thing is achievable, and we will do it differently this time.
The body count of history argues otherwise.
Very similar experience for me too. Perhaps because our family never had a television (and they still don't), I fell into reading naturally as a source of entertainment. I too started mostly with fiction and stuck with it until sometime in college. I was home visiting the folks for the weekend and they told me about this great book they had just read that was a page turner. They urged me not to start it since it was a library book that had to be returned the next day. I was out of books and bored so I started it anyway. I finished it around 3 am the next morning. It was "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer. I then realized that if I could be highly entertained reading about something that was real, why wouldn't I only read non-fiction and learn while be entertained. I have largely stuck to this for the last three decades.
ReplyDeleteDuring those three decades, I learned like you, that the world's always struggled with largely the same set of problems. I suppose that is why I became somewhat of an optimist since despite all these problems, we are still here after all these centuries. But I understand the pessimistic side of still not having solved said problems after the same passed centuries. Glass half full or half empty.
Ed - I have never read "Into Thin Air", although any number of people I know have. I will say that the best of authors can take fiction and portray something about real life that makes it a learning experience as well.
DeleteI think I still remain largely pessimistic, only because (as you note) although we have had thousands of years of history, we have apparently learned nothing.
It's always been interesting to me that people can so readily dismiss history with the assumption that they (or their generation) can succeed where peoples in the past have failed. I can't figure out if it's hopefulness or arrogance that makes it so.
ReplyDeleteLeigh, we have a very biased view of the past. We fail to appreciate the accomplishments of the past and think of people as "primitive" because they did not have modern technology. Part of our lack of knowledge is due to data of course (but thanks, Archaeology, for making it better), but part of it is our not wanting to learn more.
DeleteAs we just learned from our trip to Turkey, Constantinople had up to six aqueducts servicing it. Water had to be transported up to 100 km over stone to get there. That is a pretty sophisticated system for people that had only natural materials and no significant machinery other than the basics and human labor. And yet, somehow we are more sophisticated than they are.
In my opinion, it is arrogance that makes is so, a false arrogance based on the fact that we are "modern".
TB, it has been frightening to see how easily and efficiently the internet serves those who want to manipulate and change what is true in the present. The speed at which history can now be rewritten and disseminated, and how quickly the rewriting becomes "common knowledge" can fill me with dread for tomorrow if I spend too much time thinking about it.
ReplyDelete"Modernism can scarcely bear the weight of historical experience; its only hope is to try and outrun it." A terrible thought, but I love how you put it.
Becki, the ability to manipulate information is staggering. Once upon a time news was limited because of the rather primitive technology available; now our news can be limited because of the advanced technology available.
DeleteModernism only holds up if one ignores the cause and effect that modernism often causes. The reality of history is that one can see the cause and the effect; modernism need only present the cause. The effect is something that can be safely kicked down the road until "someday".