Thinking Through History

This is one of the chapters from my book, Truth, Will & Relevance. Read the rest via the Table of Contents in the sidebar or buy your copy from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.

Reading history leads me to marvel at how much we misunderstand. Even the “great” creators, leaders, and discoverers tended to miss the full importance of what they were doing. And then there are the not-so-great leaders and followers who tried standing in the future’s way. It isn’t so much that they’re wrong, it’s that they’re completely oblivious to something essential. Of course, we’re smarter… right?

There’s a quote I keep revisiting in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s book about Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. He observes that “we are always in a zone of imperfect visibility so far as the history just over our shoulder is concerned.”¹

Experts are still grappling over the causes and consequences of that economic crisis from the first half of the last century; how can we expect to fully understand our own? We have to proceed with whatever imperfect information and ideas we have. Developing ways to do that more effectively is what this book is about.

One of the reasons I look at history is we can actually make sense of it, whereas our own time will take decades to understand and explain. We need to know what happens next before we can fully appreciate the character and importance of what’s happening now. The best we can do is get a sense of the longer-term undercurrents by looking a few decades further back, at what we can understand, and work from there.

When I tried making sense of the frenetic and uncertain world of work I was entering in 2000, I strained to find something stable. Everything was in flux. We’d gone from Dotcom hype to the Dotcom crash as people who thought the Internet would put them on the fast track to financial independence learned, well, it’s a little more complex than that. Music, publishing, and advertising — unfortunately the three industries I thought I’d start my career in — were already well on their way to turning inside-out, and it didn’t take much imagination to sense they were mere harbingers of things to come.

It wasn’t that I didn’t approve of change. Exactly the opposite: I loved imagining the emerging possibilities. I went looking for the larger narrative for the sake of anticipating and affecting what would happen next. It was by thinking about our future that I learned to think through history.

History isn’t an escape from the present, it’s an attempt to identify objective reference points with which to understand the apparent chaos we’re living in, either by finding events that conditioned our current situation or by finding times in which people dealt with circumstances like our own. As eloquently phrased by Jacques Barzun, one of the great historians and teachers of the 20th century, “History is formative. Its spectacle of continuity in chaos, of attainment in the heart of disorder, of purpose in the world is what nothing else provides…”²

The late 19th century makes a lot of sense to us now (for those of us who bother to look) but it would have looked quite different to someone living inside that historical moment — not unlike our own mixed feelings of wonder and fear in the face of “prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor…”³

We see all the specifics that made 2000 so different from 1900 and 1500 but we don’t see the general shapes and tones that make those moments part of the same historical era — or rather, the similarities are obvious but they don’t stand out as features, because we don’t know enough about the world as it was (and might be) without them. In a few hundred years people will look back at all of these complex developments as a few simple strokes, perhaps as an extended crescendo of themes developing since the Reformation and Renaissance: individualism, secularization, abstraction, complexity, automation, arrogance…

We should never be too confident that old things will survive, nor too triumphant over their demise. All of our bold new ideas and institutions will eventually suffer the same fate. Today’s young, self-assured dreamers and strivers (a cohort to which I belong) will grow up to be deaf and blind to changes championed by our children or grandchildren. Every generation answers at least one critical question by saying, “This time it’s different.” It usually precipitates a very humbling lesson.

The single most important lesson we can learn from history is this: it is too easy to forget history’s lessons. Incredibly — despite how many times we’re reminded by charming quotes alarming us to the risk of repeating past mistakes — we seem to keep forgetting when it counts.

Our ideas aren’t necessarily wrong — but they probably are (both the old and the new). Resting with too much confidence on presumably certain ideas seems to be something we’re naturally inclined to do.

While we probably can’t deny this innate need for supposed certainty and narrative coherence (nor should we deny the benefits that often come with our resulting faith) it’s time to grow more mature as a society — to exercise more reason and restraint, to be critical when selecting and promoting the most effective ideas while staying alert to what we might have missed.

As I came to learn more about the world I developed a sense that the answers I was looking for would never take the form of definitive statements. In the process of writing this book I realized the process was itself the answer I was looking for. We’re never going to get things perfectly right — and even if we could, the fact that life keeps occurring means that unexpected events will keep occurring, which will require us to adapt our ideas and practices yet again.

We should welcome that; we should learn to enjoy the unexpected; we should learn to love the process of discovery and reconceptualization for its own sake, rather than resenting the process as a buffer between the present and our desired future.

The process is the purpose. The experience of taking steps toward attaining a goal — even if we’re not perfectly sure how to articulate the ultimate aim — is what makes projects meaningful and compelling. The final products and accomplishments simply help us tell better, simpler, more effective stories. So in this sense, even “final” accomplishments aren’t simply ends; they’re means to continue cultivating more relevance in the world.

That’s how I’ve conceived this book: not as the final word but as a way to tell a better story and move the conversation forward, in the most generative, open-ended, and enduring way manageable.

This is one of the chapters from my book, Truth, Will & Relevance. Read the rest via the Table of Contents in the sidebar or buy your copy from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.

1Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Crisis of the Old Order (1957): p. ix.

2Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors (1974): p. 124.

3Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1918, ): Ch. XXXV.