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.
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.
I agree with you that we cannot be certain what the future will bring.
Having said that, this comes perilously close to sounding like justification for just sitting back and waiting, because the future will be whatever it's gonna be. And if you're an academic historian, you should know that history is not a thing that *happens*, separate from people's actions; it is something we *create*, through those very actions. Will this be an era that changes very little? That rolls back the bad developments of the past? Or that cements them and makes them worse? The answer to that will depend on *what people do*.
Ada Palmer's *Inventing the Renaissance* just hit the shelves, and it's entirely about how people living in a chaotic, uncertain time ended up creating what we call the Renaissance. To quote from a piece she wrote about it recently, it's about
"the way I, as a historian, see history actually working, not as big inhuman forces that grind on, but through exclusively human forces: the tiny decisions made by innumerable people whose efforts interact, resonate, magnify, flow, and cascade, changing the world in a messy, zoomed-in, and infinitely plural way, in which lots and lots of people try to change the world and none of them get exactly the world they wanted, but all of them contribute to changing the world in bigger, newer, weirder, stranger ways than they ever imagined."
I liked your series when I signed up for it, but the last several have felt . . . apathetic is the best word I can find for it. Like you don't believe any of this really matters in the long run, whether it's what Trump does, or what his opponents do, or whatever, we're just dice in a cup being rolled by fate. And that fundamentally is not the case. I know plenty of people living with massive psychological scars from lockdown, who absolutely disagree with you that it's "forgotten" now, who hate how many people are *willing* to forget. The same will be true of current events. Whether we can steer this ship toward better waters or not, it matters whether or not we try.
True, the Nazis behaved like many on college campuses now days, or toward inanimate objects (cars) violently attacking anyone who disagrees with their world view....So there are some similarities I guess...
Thank you for your writing; I look forward to it as part of my 'self care' in this time. It provides much needed ballast and a pause from all the hysteria. My main takeaway: how astonishing it is that at the pinnacle of power, the arrogance of certainty is still so egregiously present.
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.
I agree with you that we cannot be certain what the future will bring.
Having said that, this comes perilously close to sounding like justification for just sitting back and waiting, because the future will be whatever it's gonna be. And if you're an academic historian, you should know that history is not a thing that *happens*, separate from people's actions; it is something we *create*, through those very actions. Will this be an era that changes very little? That rolls back the bad developments of the past? Or that cements them and makes them worse? The answer to that will depend on *what people do*.
Ada Palmer's *Inventing the Renaissance* just hit the shelves, and it's entirely about how people living in a chaotic, uncertain time ended up creating what we call the Renaissance. To quote from a piece she wrote about it recently, it's about
"the way I, as a historian, see history actually working, not as big inhuman forces that grind on, but through exclusively human forces: the tiny decisions made by innumerable people whose efforts interact, resonate, magnify, flow, and cascade, changing the world in a messy, zoomed-in, and infinitely plural way, in which lots and lots of people try to change the world and none of them get exactly the world they wanted, but all of them contribute to changing the world in bigger, newer, weirder, stranger ways than they ever imagined."
I liked your series when I signed up for it, but the last several have felt . . . apathetic is the best word I can find for it. Like you don't believe any of this really matters in the long run, whether it's what Trump does, or what his opponents do, or whatever, we're just dice in a cup being rolled by fate. And that fundamentally is not the case. I know plenty of people living with massive psychological scars from lockdown, who absolutely disagree with you that it's "forgotten" now, who hate how many people are *willing* to forget. The same will be true of current events. Whether we can steer this ship toward better waters or not, it matters whether or not we try.
True, the Nazis behaved like many on college campuses now days, or toward inanimate objects (cars) violently attacking anyone who disagrees with their world view....So there are some similarities I guess...
Thank you for your writing; I look forward to it as part of my 'self care' in this time. It provides much needed ballast and a pause from all the hysteria. My main takeaway: how astonishing it is that at the pinnacle of power, the arrogance of certainty is still so egregiously present.