The Wisdom of History

The Teaching Company has put out another brilliant lecture series by Professor J. Rufus Fears (see my book list on the sidebar) entitled “The Wisdom of History”. Professor Fears argues that most of the really terrible things that have happened recently, such as World Wars I and II, Vietnam, and our current mess in Iraq could have been avoided had the nations involved only had leaders who had understood and learned from history. Or as Colin Gray has put it in the introduction to his book “Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare”: “[I do]…not argue that nothing changes, only that little if anything of importance does.” And of course the famous quotation from George Santayana also applies: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Working his way from Ancient Greece forward to the modern day, Rufus Fears shows that each age thought that “things were different” in their age, and the horrors of history couldn’t possibly be repeated in their time – an argument one hears yet again in our time. Surely democracies don’t fight wars with each other (in fact they do, and they are generally longer and bloodier than wars between tyrants), surely modern weapons have made all-out world warfare unthinkable (the same was said of the machine gun and the crossbow in their time), surely if we are all interconnected in a global economy we won’t have such wars (it has happened before, more than once). As usual, we all live in the midst of myths unsupported by history.

In fact, Fears argues, history shows that individual freedom is not a universal value, despite our current political rhetoric. Throughout history, the Middle East has been the graveyard of empires, a fact apparently unknown to the neoconservatives. History shows that nationalism (national self-determination) and religion are far more powerful and universal drivers of history, and that the lust for power is probably the single most durable and dependable human value across all societies. This will offend many who hold sacred our current American idealism, but his arguments and the lessons of history that support them deserve serious attention, if only because the history-blindness of our current political establishment will no doubt sooner or later put America on the “trash heap of history” along with all the great powers and empires of the past.