finals = joy antithesis
The beginning of my history final paper. It's probably going to be painfully suck by the time it's done. If not, I'll post it. As it stands, its not unlike my earlier political bitching columns. Kinda sorta.
Benjamin Franklin described democracy as “two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.” Ambrose Bierce defined politics as “A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” Kurt Vonnegut explained the study of history as “merely a list of surprises” which can “only prepare us to be surprised yet again.” For my own part, much of history is an attempt to catelogue and cross-reference the exceedingly ugly, the mindlessly absurd, and the hopelessly brutal record of human experience into some semblance of cause and effect. But with every effect being a cause, and every cause open to debate about whether it came before or after the effect, we often lose ourselves in the complexities of trends, patterns, and statistics. The addage that “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” shines momentarily as a beacon giving deeper humanistic purpose to the whole unseemly mess, but one cannot escape the creeping suspicion that those who learn from history are likewise doomed to repeat it by those who either did not learn, or learned and did not care.
Delving through the twentieth century, we encounter what Poe called “much of Madness, and more of Sin, / and Horror the soul of the plot.” Genocide. Torture. The decay of the founding principals of liberty. One hardly need but turn to the foreign (and occasionally domestic press) to find examples of extraordinary rendition (a polite euphamism for outsourced torture), unlawful imprisonment, and illegal monitoring of the citizenry. The blood twentieth century is all we’ve known, and its horror mount like a writ at a demon’s summons. Surely, the nightmare is a new invention a world grown more wicked and corrupt.
Sadly, such a pleasant apocalypse is not the reality. In most areas, we humans continue to fulfill our potential. With each passing generation, we refine our technology, our arts, and our sciences. We grow slowly, though the computerization of the past decade or two would seem to suggest a geometric, if not exponential growth pattern. That said, we long ago exhausted our genius in the field of atrocity. This is not due to any inability or ineptness; rather, human depravity simply exhausted virtually every option long before we even invented the steam engine.
The shattered buildings and bodies in Iraq today echo the South Africans who suffered under arptheid, echo the bloody bodies of the massacred Tutsi, echo the inestimatable Native Americans killed by gunfire and smallpox, echo the countless central American tribes killed by the conquistadors. They echo all the way back to the cities that ran red with blood during the Crusades. Those held without charge at Guantanamo Bay, or at CIA “black sites” remind us, guilty or innocent, of those who fell to the Committee of Public Safety, of those burned by the inquisition, of those taken away by the Schutzstaffel in Nazi Germany. The parallels are imperfect; history never truly, precisely repeats itself. But they are close enough to give us much warrented pause and ask “what has been happening all along?”
The first illusion we must relinquish with a heavy heart is the exclusivity of the rise of democracy with either the rise of “conservative authoritarianism” or genocide/mass destruction. Indeed, even the idea that libery does not slake its prenatal thirst on the blood of thousands cannot be left a foregone conclusion. These are bold, rude claims, but claims rooted at deeply in our history as our freedom is rooted on a mindless past supporting an oblivious present.
Let us turn now to England.
Benjamin Franklin described democracy as “two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.” Ambrose Bierce defined politics as “A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” Kurt Vonnegut explained the study of history as “merely a list of surprises” which can “only prepare us to be surprised yet again.” For my own part, much of history is an attempt to catelogue and cross-reference the exceedingly ugly, the mindlessly absurd, and the hopelessly brutal record of human experience into some semblance of cause and effect. But with every effect being a cause, and every cause open to debate about whether it came before or after the effect, we often lose ourselves in the complexities of trends, patterns, and statistics. The addage that “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” shines momentarily as a beacon giving deeper humanistic purpose to the whole unseemly mess, but one cannot escape the creeping suspicion that those who learn from history are likewise doomed to repeat it by those who either did not learn, or learned and did not care.
Delving through the twentieth century, we encounter what Poe called “much of Madness, and more of Sin, / and Horror the soul of the plot.” Genocide. Torture. The decay of the founding principals of liberty. One hardly need but turn to the foreign (and occasionally domestic press) to find examples of extraordinary rendition (a polite euphamism for outsourced torture), unlawful imprisonment, and illegal monitoring of the citizenry. The blood twentieth century is all we’ve known, and its horror mount like a writ at a demon’s summons. Surely, the nightmare is a new invention a world grown more wicked and corrupt.
Sadly, such a pleasant apocalypse is not the reality. In most areas, we humans continue to fulfill our potential. With each passing generation, we refine our technology, our arts, and our sciences. We grow slowly, though the computerization of the past decade or two would seem to suggest a geometric, if not exponential growth pattern. That said, we long ago exhausted our genius in the field of atrocity. This is not due to any inability or ineptness; rather, human depravity simply exhausted virtually every option long before we even invented the steam engine.
The shattered buildings and bodies in Iraq today echo the South Africans who suffered under arptheid, echo the bloody bodies of the massacred Tutsi, echo the inestimatable Native Americans killed by gunfire and smallpox, echo the countless central American tribes killed by the conquistadors. They echo all the way back to the cities that ran red with blood during the Crusades. Those held without charge at Guantanamo Bay, or at CIA “black sites” remind us, guilty or innocent, of those who fell to the Committee of Public Safety, of those burned by the inquisition, of those taken away by the Schutzstaffel in Nazi Germany. The parallels are imperfect; history never truly, precisely repeats itself. But they are close enough to give us much warrented pause and ask “what has been happening all along?”
The first illusion we must relinquish with a heavy heart is the exclusivity of the rise of democracy with either the rise of “conservative authoritarianism” or genocide/mass destruction. Indeed, even the idea that libery does not slake its prenatal thirst on the blood of thousands cannot be left a foregone conclusion. These are bold, rude claims, but claims rooted at deeply in our history as our freedom is rooted on a mindless past supporting an oblivious present.
Let us turn now to England.