To Covet the Past: A Post-Election Epistle to the Contemplative

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest – forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”

The above quote is taken from a book first published in 1951, by Hannah Arendt, regarded by some today as an influential political theorist. The excerpt appears in the opening of The Origins of Totalitarianism, written in the wake of World War II. After having lived through “Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor,” it may be granted that Arendt had a right to make such a declaration. In fact, the book makes a compelling case for many political propositions.

Not only was this new era which the world seemed to be emerging into fraught with mourning and confusion; not only were the world powers shifting and the old ways receding, but the seething dawn of the atomic age had shed its terrifying light upon the whole of mankind. My own grandfather remarked that he felt both optimistic and frightened by the prospects of the future. An engineer, he was not prone to miscalculation in practical life, and was known as a reserved, yet energetic man, not to be misled by paranoia or unfounded suspicion. At least in theory.

Another human fault, akin to paranoia, called juvenoia, has long plagued the minds of many. After all, “The youth’s mistakes are due to excess and vehemence. They think they know everything.” could have been written yesterday, but it was written in the fourth century, by Aristotle. Juvenoia is the general concern for kids these days, accompanied by a suspicion that the world we live in just isn’t as good as it used to be. We could travel to virtually any time in history and find an example of the assertion “back in my day,” everything was better. Were they all right? Were only some of them right? How many? Why?

I don’t know if if Hannah Arendt has been vindicated by the present; if her feeling that no point in history was so very dire as the one in which she lived, has been proved true. I am not a historian or a “social scientist,” nor an economist or politician. Perhaps the immediate post-war world was, in fact, fundamentally transformed and defined by “sheer insanity.” John F. Kennedy certainly seems to have understood that some of the mechanics of human discourse had been changed by the atomic bomb. He famously stated that “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads.”

The question then becomes, in this context, was that era fundamentally different because it was the herald of a series of irreversible changes, such as had never been seen before? Changes that would restructure the order of human priorities and call into question foundational human assumptions about good and evil. Or, is the truth represented by something more primitive, yet altogether more unnerving? Maybe the truth is that there is no insulating ourselves from change, no permanent victory over evil we can achieve. Maybe there is no absolute truth, no doctrine, no proclamation, no people or cultural heritage which can remain forever unscathed by the ravages of time.

Yet, if this be the case, the realization of such would not be a license to give up the ghost and to relax one’s vigilance in the pursuit of truth and the preservation of human liberty. Your beliefs, your philosophies, your laudable ideas, may be usurped and relegated to a textbook by those who occupy the future. But the hope is that our heirs are the products of better thinking, and greater victories over vice than we have achieved. We hope to inform a better world through our works, but, more especially, through our courage. That courage which strengthens us in the face of the inevitable unknown. Ancient Athens did fall, but was it because of the youth? I don’t know, maybe. But we are here, privileged and safe enough to sit in great libraries, learning to be thankful that Aristotle may have been just a little too paranoid of kids these days.

— Lucas Walsh is the editor of the Cheney Free Press. He can be contacted at editor@cheneyfreepress.com for questions or comments.