You Can't Step Into The Same River Twice
It’s Passover and Easter week in the Western world, and whether you are a believer or not, it seems fitting to pause for a moment and consider the wider arc of history. It seems clear—or as clear as anything can be in a messy present where we are all in the process of steering into an unknown future—that there is an unusual degree of flux in what was once called the global system. That must come with the major caveat that said system was hardly peaceful, orderly, or simple. The Cold War system that held until 1989 gave way to a muddle in the 1990s, and then to a period of American hegemony that brought massive instability and terrible violence to the Middle East and Afghanistan. Even so, there was a loose sense and consensus about a post-1945 state system with the United States as one of its pillars.
Much of that seems to be coming to an end—if not structurally, then conceptually. What remains opaque is what it’s giving way to. And if there’s one thing we humans detest, it’s uncertainty—that miasmic fog about the state of the world and where it’s heading. Most of us will take false certainty over honest uncertainty. Yet, as Voltaire reminds us, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” Further back, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus intoned, “You can’t step in the same river twice,” as a way to express the basic reality that the only constant—the only truth—is change.
What, you may ask, does any of this have to do with Easter, or with the roiling politics of the United States and the world just now? It’s to remind ourselves—in the midst of stories and snippets on social media proclaiming that the changes occurring are “irreparable,” “permanent,” “no going back,” “end of an era,” “a terrible loss,” “a great triumph,” “a brave new world,” “the dawn of a new age”—that all of that is likely wrong. Or rather, that whatever we think we know about the long-term consequences of short-term realities is provisional at best.
We thought COVID was going to change everything. In the end, it changed hardly anything about society per se, and—on the upside—did demonstrate that drug development, in an age of genetic sequencing and CRISPR and AI married to government urgency and less regulation, can massively accelerate the creation and adoption of new drugs and therapies.
Around the world, there seems to be a startling amount of certainty that whatever the Trump administration is doing will change everything—either for the better or the worse. But just like the projections in April 2020 about what COVID would do, most of what we think we know right now will likely turn out to be wrong. We’ll look back at this moment years from now and shake our heads at what we thought we knew.
Of course, someone will be right. Some prediction, some set of fears or hopes will prove accurate. The problem is, we just don’t know which ones—no matter how much we want to.
The loop back to this week—held holy in the Judeo-Christian tradition—is a call to embrace humility about our ability to understand the present. I was trained as an academic historian, at Harvard of all places, and my mentors tried to drill in one core lesson: no one in their present ever knows how their actions will turn out. Yet so often, we write history backward. We tell stories about how we got here in ways that radically distort what actually happened, because we know how it ended. But the people making that history didn’t.
We can say today that the wave of violence, protest, and euphoria that characterized student uprisings in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Prague in 1968 neither destroyed society nor remade it. But in the summer of 1968—in Paris or New York or Mexico City—they didn’t know that. They didn’t know if they were on the edge of violent revolution or magical reform. It was bewildering, and exhilarating, and scary as shit to be alive then, precisely because the future was unknown.
This holiday week is a lesson in humility about how little we can know. Yes, for believers, it’s humility in the face of an all-powerful God. But set that aside, and it’s still a reminder of how helpless we are to predict the future.
The past three months in the United States—and their echoes around the world—have been dizzying, in part because so many people are rushing to conclusions about what it all means. There are very few things I’m sure of, but I am certain that five years from now, most of what’s dominating the headlines today will be utterly, completely forgotten. You’d hardly know that five years ago today, every country in the world had ground to a halt—no travel, no gatherings, no normal life. Today, it feels like a distant memory. A bad dream whose contours are rapidly fading.
I’m sure some of you will read this and feel a degree of frustration—that putting the present in a longer arc can sound escapist, or like a failure to grasp the urgency of the moment. So be it. The urgency of the moment is in no danger of being lost. Apathy and complacency are not our current global disease. The arrogance of certainty is.
This is, without question, a more elemental political moment for the United States. Things are being broken, shaken up, questioned, jumbled. That happened in the late 1960s into the ’70s, though more slowly. It happened after 9/11. It happened in 2008–2009. It’s happening now. Each of those periods was unique. Each felt like a moment on the edge.
9/11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the expansion of government powers in the name of fighting terrorism—all of that was a dramatic break. And indeed, the Trump administration’s current deportation tactics rely on post-9/11 laws that let the Bush administration round up thousands without due process and send hundreds abroad as part of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, where people were subjected to “enhanced interrogation” in foreign countries. What’s happening now is deeply troubling. But so was what we’ve done before. And what any of it ultimately means—for the future of the country—is as murky as ever.
This, then, is another call to lower the temperature. To take a step back. To take a deep breath—not in complacency about due process or limits on executive power, but in not assuming we know how this all plays out. We haven’t quite been here before. But we’ve been here before. And chances are, we’ll be here again. Just not quite like this. Except for the human condition, which—of course—always will be.
I get what you are saying here, we actually don't *know* the future. However, this time, we can read The Plan (aka Project 2025) for the future being implemented right before our eyes. We can reflect on what it was like in Germany about a century ago as their government was moulded into the Third Reich/Nazism and all its horrors. We can read the authoritarian playbook and watch it come to life. We do have to pay attention if we want to shape a different future than the one unfolding AND do something - now.
The tone of this suggests that current events don't matter that much because it all averages out and reverts to the mean.
But that's off base. The Nazis didn't have to take over Germany. The decisions of some people in power, and a lot of rank and file Germans, could have stopped it. That would have mattered. Likewise, the bullsheviks didn't have to win in Russia.
It's good to have a sweeping historical perspective. But I don't think that points to quietism. It may sometimes be the antidote to despair. But if anything, it's a motive for more intense feeling and more valiant and decisive action.
It's true that historical actors didn't know the future. But they often did know that their actions were good or bad, loving or hateful, brave or cowardly, greedy or generous. Sometimes to be fair to historical actors we have to recollect what the actors thought or expected, that didn't happen. But the deed is the deed nonetheless.