That was then—this is now

Good morning! I’ve had too much coffee again, so here I go, and thanks for being here…

In the recent piece about radical acceptance of uncertainty, I pointed out that history is not, in fact, helpful in predicting the future; that it can actually obscure a clear understanding of the present. I wanted to dig into that more. I especially want to tackle the ubiquitous phenomenon of the shibboleth, the straw man, the boogeyman—that trope from history, whether a person, a society at a certain time, or whatever else, that another people in another time, and perhaps another place too, feel themselves to be in the shadow of—like a looming storm, that might or might not actually hit depending on how we act.

In the late eighteenth century, thoughtful and politically-aware, educated Britons were acutely aware of the history of ancient Rome. The “classical education” that elite young men received at university at the time saw to that. These people didn’t just learn about people like Horace and Seneca, or on the earlier classical-Greek side, Thucydides and Herodotus. They actually read them. They read them in the original languages, because they were required to learn them. They were steeped in “classical” civilization—meaning, the Greco-Roman civilization of the Mediterranean in the 500 years or so on either side of the life of Jesus.

These were the people who ran the First British Empire—the Atlantic-focused one, that included the North American Eastern Seaboard, including where I’m sitting right now. They were the ones in Britain, and they were the ones in Boston and Philadelphia—the elite of British America. And their acute awareness of “classical” civilization didn’t just form their political ideals—it gave them their principal political fears too.

These fears were so powerful that, believe it or not, they are still with us, even though almost no one in “the West” gets a “classical” education any more.

When the elites abuse power, and the people suffer, and become disenchanted and resentful, then a demagogue can arise, and use oratory (speechifying, as Mark Twain would have called it) to channel that resentment into power—power for himself. This person and his followers can then undermine the political structure and replace shared, or even to some extent representative, government with dictatorship.

That’s Roman, and you’ve heard it plenty, even if just in the background of your consciousness, with no awareness of where it came from. Eighteenth-century political thinkers and officials wrung their hands over it. The more powerful and rich the British Empire became, the more paranoid those in charge of running it became about falling into the corruption—moral and political—that, as they had been taught, led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon encapsulated this in his still-famous The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, written at the time and widely-read.

Those who created the U.S.A. in the 1780s were just as obsessed with this as their counterparts on the other side of the ocean. They saw the seeds of decline and fall before the U.S.A. was anything close to the empire it would become. It’s all over the U.S. Constitution.

You can easily see how this could be helpful; history as a warning, history as a negative example. The trouble is, the differences matter as much as the similarities. If you can’t present both together, and understand both together, then you have a grossly-distorted history, and that won’t teach you much about your own reality—any more than it’ll teach you about theirs.

No matter how huge and looming, no matter how singular a historical event or period or person seems to be, every one of them has a context that was necessary for it to arise as it did, go down as it did, and conclude as it did. No exceptions. If you don’t understand the context, you don’t understand the phenomenon you’re focused on. No exceptions. And understanding context requires either serious, prolonged study, or reading the work of those who have engaged in that study and can present it to you in language accessible to you. No exceptions.

So here we go—let’s just go there, because it’s there whether we acknowledge it or not. For understandable and even commendable reasons, our Roman Empire is Nazi Germany. (And by “our” I don’t mean the U.S.—although we’re included—I mean all of “Western Civilization.”)

Thanks both to the enormity of his regime’s crimes and the existence and effective use of audio-visual propaganda, everyone who doesn’t live under a rock can instantly conjure an accurate black-and-white movie clip of Adolf Hitler shouting and gesticulating in his brown uniform in front of thousands and thousands of people. He looms over us. He is the ultimate boogeyman. And a boogeyman is the man who gets you if you’re bad. If you disobey, if you don’t pay attention, if you stray. It’s used to scare children, and anything that scares you as a child will scare you, at a deep level, for the rest of your life.

Democracy is fragile, we are told. If we do not protect it, we, too, could fall into a totalitarian dictatorship, our Reichstag dissolved or turned into an impotent rubber-stamp-for-show, political dissidents disappearing in the middle of the night, mass state propaganda masquerading as “news.” Fear, suspicion, social control, prison camps.

And we might be afraid that, if we dare to qualify that by pointing out that Nazi Germany arose out of its own unique context, we’re being dangerously dismissive of the possibility that any current society could fall into a similar nightmare.

Fair enough. All of that is valid—all of these concerns are valid concerns. It’s just that we could do better for ourselves by going beyond that. We can “dare” to consider the context without automatically setting ourselves up for dangerous, potentially-fatal complacency and naïveté. Why should we bother? Because if we want to make—or support—the best decisions about what to do next, we need the most accurate understanding possible of what’s now. History, as I wrote in the earlier piece, can help with that—or hinder it.

To understand the rise of Nazi Germany requires understanding a set of primary situations. The Great Depression, which is difficult for anyone now to fathom (almost everyone who remembers living through it has died). The fact that national democratic government in Germany was, in 1932, just over a decade old. The deep culture of Prussian militarism. The experience of Germany in the Great War of 1914—18, and the psychic scar of defeat and humiliation at the hands of the victors. The wide culture of early twentieth-century racism—which was overt, not coded, and grounded in a distortion of Darwinian concepts of evolution. Fear of Soviet-style communism—and of its militants, who fought in the streets against the militants of the National Socialists on the right. Lots of unemployed, traumatized war veterans, acculturated to inconceivable violence, looking for purpose. And revenge.

And then Hitler himself, with his particular talents, his drive, his discipline, his ruthlessness. He was one of them. Gassed in the trenches.

So I lay this out—a short paragraph about which entire libraries of good stuff have been written—and I bet most of you have already had mental flashes of how some of this might look here—that we could experience our own versions of some of these conditions. Yes, we could. I didn’t write this to say “worrying about democracy is a waste of mental energy.” (Although I do believe that, in general, worrying about anything is a waste of mental energy—that’s just far easier said than put into practice.) What I am saying is that, in terms of what it has to teach us about our own situation, that’s about as far as we can go with Nazi Germany. From there, we need to understand our own situation, and our own situation is, of course, different.

We are not living through the Great Depression. We did not lose a sizable proportion of our male population in a horrific war that only ended a few years ago. We have a radically different political history than that of 1930s Germany. A radically different political culture. We do not have two militarized ideologies fighting in the streets. Our government, despite its deep flaws and problems, is not impotent. Racism is still here, unfortunately, but it is not 1930s racism. The conditions that produced Hitler are not here, so it should be no surprise that there is no Hitler.

We need to actually think about what is going on—what we do have. The basic fact that is driving our politics and our political culture is drastic socioeconomic inequality—period. We love to distract ourselves from that by focusing on other issues, but that doesn’t help. The stuff we like to blame is stuff that only thrives because of that basic reality. We cannot understand what is happening politically without understanding that, because that is what explains who is voting for whom and why. To put it in David Brooks’s terms, we can’t understand the “wrong answer” if we don’t understand the “right question.” How can people vote for AOC and Trump? How can people vote to enshrine abortion rights in a state constitution and vote for Trump? How can people who fervently supported Bernie Sanders vote for Trump? How can a black person or a Latino vote for Trump? How can so many people just stay home? There are answers to these questions—well, basically, there is one answer, and the rest of them stem from that. And until we understand that, and until we mold our politics to really address that, then we’re left just throwing up our hands. Sure, there is madness here; nothing like this is ever purely rational. But that doesn’t mean it’s incomprehensible. And history can help us understand it—but we’re better off looking at our own history, and especially our most recent history, and not the history of ancient Rome or Nazi Germany. That may sound so obvious that it’s facile, but it isn’t. Americans—and Britons, for that matter—are burdened with an obsolete self-mythologizing that blinds us to some critical realities we need to tackle to fix what we need to fix, to move past this particular turmoil into a “new consensus,” to use Brooks’s terms again. But we can do that. “Humans are ingenious,” to quote him yet again, and history certainly backs him up there.

We are in sort of an interregnum, a period of disruption, and that disruption needs to happen. We may be groping around, making bad decisions (but not all bad), wringing our hands, but we can get through this, as we have gotten through all the ones before. But we will get through it by doing our best to grasp our own current situation, not by being pushed around by the fears we’ve conjured out of history and turned into our nightmares about the future.

History teaches us not just what we have in common, but how different we are in different times and places and circumstances, even though, biologically-speaking, we’re all nearly identical. The Romans lived in a different reality from ours. So did the Germans in the 1930s. We can’t ignore history, but we can’t be controlled by it either. So be skeptical of history-as-propaganda. Be skeptical of history from the political podium.