What is History for?

5/10/2020

Everyone knows the old saying: "those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it." The old German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer summed up all of human history with the phrase: eadum, set aliter -- same, but otherwise. He thought that once you had read the ancient Greeks, reading any other history was just a clumsy re-hashing of the same triumphs and follies inherent to human nature. It is so foundational to acknowledge the cyclical nature of history that even the terms we use to talk about it contain this assumption. Consider "revolution": In the political sense we use "revolution" to mean a sudden and fundamental change in political affairs, but "revolution" literally means to complete a cycle -- as a wheel turns around an axis, those on the bottom are now on top, only to eventually go back to the bottom in their turn. Can studying history enough allow us to break the cycle? To construct a society that won't inevitably degrade into oligarchy, mob rule, then tyranny?

History would suggest not. A jocular version of the old saying goes: "those who do study history are doomed to stand on the sidelines while everybody else repeats it." There's some logic to this: the history professors are too busy writing books and giving lectures to lead institutions or states. Plus, the predictive power of history is not actually that great. "History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme" is a nice witticism but doesn't help us make decisions today just because some aspects of our current situation are kind of like some aspects of 16th century Florence. Furthermore, in the re-telling of history we are just as likely to project our hopes and fears about the present onto what we believe happened in the past.

My book for week fourteen of 2020 was How Rome Fell by King's College historian Adrian Goldsworthy. He spent the first hundred pages talking about prior histories of Rome, modern fascination with its fall, and the inevitability of perceiving ancient Roman events through the lens of whatever is happening around us, to the detriment both of our understanding of that time, and our understanding of the present. We might think that Rome fell because of their lead-lined pipes not because of any evidence, but because we are afraid of our powerlessness against invisible and ubiquitous toxins today. Whereas in the 1800s, amidst the extreme opulence of the monarchies of England and France, everyone was certain that Rome fell because of the out-of-touch decadence of the Roman aristocracy. Another "theory" goes that the Roman Legionnaires converted to vegetarianism and were thus too anemic to fight off the barbarians (nevermind that Roman soldiers during the fall of the empire spent most of their time fighting each other rather than foreigners).

One theory that Goldsworthy is most excited to rebut is that the Roman Empire never fell at all, but rather steadily transitioned over hundreds of years away from one centered around tribute to the huge cities of the Mediterranean, to one centered around local, pastoral Christianity, and that the so-called Dark Ages are only considered dark because there were no palace historians around to write about the greatness of whoever owned the palace. Goldsworthy claims that living inside the Roman Empire really was better than living outside of it (though perhaps because those outside it had to fear the Roman legions), and that living during the empire was better than living after it. His main evidence outside of what was written by admittedly-biased palace historians is that the archaeological record shows scores of European cities building walls around themselves during the 300s and 400s as Rome's power declined -- these people could no longer trust violence to be kept at bay by far-flung and distracted Roman legions and had to turn to themselves for defense. I won't deny that in their heyday Rome's institutions, organizations, and logistics were far more sophisticated than their neighbors and their descendants, but overall I felt that Goldsworthy's take on the fall of Rome was a little too eager to praise the sophistication of the Romans while overlooking the violence and atrocity underlying their (and all) empire.

Of course, even though Adrian Goldsworthy spent an entire book explaining why various theories about Rome's collapse are too simple and convenient to be totally (or even partly) true, in his conclusion he couldn't resist throwing his own theory into the ring. Goldsworthy said that Rome's competitive edge was the efficiency and sophistication of its institutions: they could declare war on a country 2,000 miles away and put an army outside their capital that was bigger and better equipped than the country fighting on their home turf. But these institutions for taxation, accounting, production, and transportation ended up rotting from the head. After the untimely death of Marcus Aurelius, "The Philosopher Emperor", the seat of power was held alternately by clueless narcissists obsessed with the fanfare and pageantry of being in charge of everything, and brutal warlords suspicious of everyone around them. In this environment, institutions were no longer a means for administering to the common needs of the population, but were turned into vehicles for extracting wealth and maintaining authority. Their purpose rendered wholly exploitative, cynicism spread down the ranks of Roman institutions -- one no longer worked as a bureaucrat out of a sense of duty or patriotism, but to get a social and financial leg up on one's peers. Roman institutions became worse than useless; a parasite living off the remains of the civilization that created them.

I was skeptical going into the conclusion of How Rome Fell, but if history rhymes then Adrian Goldsworthy is Dr. Suess. The parallels to the extractive/exploitative (rather than productive) mode of modern corporations and governments abound. But returning to the titular question posed by this blog: it's all well and good to have a historically-informed theory about why things are bad today and what choices we might make or avoid to avert catastrophe, but what good does being history-informed do for you specifically, or me? Mark Zuckerberg was a Greek and Roman Studies major at Harvard before he dropped out, and by nature of his highly-influential position his opinion on Roman history may have great influence on world events. But you and I are just part of the anonymous mass of people history mostly glosses over. We are the people history happens to -- subjects of history the way peasants are subjects of kings. What good is knowledge of the decisions and outcomes of the "Great Men" of history without "great" decisions for us to make? What is history for, for us?

I've been delaying writing this blog for the past five weeks because I haven't been able to think up a satisfying justification for this pursuit that I find inherently and inarticulably valuable. But just this morning for week twenty I finished Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It's about a future society where intellectualism and knowledge have become so irrelevant and disdained that the government has gone ahead and made all books illegal. Most people couldn't care less about the law against books, but some people still secretly cling to them. The main character is a "firefighter" whose job is to burn down the houses where books are discovered after their owners are carted away to jail. But one woman refuses to leave her books behind and insists on being incinerated with them, which leads the protagonist to wonder just what it is about these book things that makes people feel so strongly. He finally gets his hands on a book of poetry which shocks and confuses him into reading aloud to his vacuous friends who then report him to the authorities. On the run, he hears that the last of the "Harvard degrees" now wander the train lines outside the cities and one night he finds them.

It turns out that these vagabonds are part of a loose global human library. Each has memorized one book that they will eventually pass orally to their children and so on, until eventually they can come out of hiding, one by one, and recite what they know to the printers. But though he is heartened to learn that he is not alone, still "he had expected their faces to burn and glitter with the knowledge they carried, to glow as lanterns glow, but all the light had come from the campfire, and these men seemed no different from any others... They weren't at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light, they were sure of nothing save that the books were on file behind their quiet eyes." I'm afraid we can't get much surer than that.

I was going into writing this thinking I'd end on some platitude about how the median historical human experience has been starvation, sickness, and constant threat of violence and so we should be grateful when we have a life without these things (we really should be though!). Or I was going to conclude that history shows that we shouldn't take for granted any cultural progress we have made because it was achieved by the sacrifices of members of the anonymous masses like us and will readily return to selfish tribalism. But when it comes down to it I study history because it's interesting. It's the most real reality TV show, the most consequential drama. And the cosmic play continues its story right up to now and us, and we might contribute a verse.

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