A long time ambition of mine, which is being
fulfilled in this writing, has been to conduct a competition to
identify sayings, aphorisms if you will, that are often quoted,
APPARENTLY expressions of great wisdom, that - when they are in depth
and critically, reveal themselves to be utter nonsense or worse. The
object is to take a hard look at REAL conventional wisdom - principles
that most of us actually believe reflect wisdom, as opposed to
attitudes and expressions to which we give lip service for the sake of
getting along.
Some tough rules apply here - because this is
not an exercise in ridicule. The point is to identify the sayings at
which we all nod sagely that don't hold up on second thought. So the
rules have to be hard.
1. No quotes from identified idiots or villains,
e.g., bring your tired old game from Adolph Hitler or Mikail Bakunin
into the key, and it'll be slapped back in your face. Rejection city,
baby. Quotes from respected sources only - the more respectable, the
better.
2. No predictions. For one thing,
predictions that have been proven disastrously wrong have no value as
hard intellectual currency these days. We all know ther's no such thing
as an unsinkable ship. For another, even the best and brightest go
wrong in fortune telling. It's too easy.
3. No obviously stupid sayings Hiqh quality counterfeit wisdom is the name of the game, stuff that can pass as coin of the realm unless it is bitten really, REALLY, hard.
- George Santayana
Something of a surprise? I'd be surprised if it were not. This aphorism (or innumerable variants thereof) of Santayana's is endlessly re-quoted, always with approval. It seems to state a principle of elemental, axiomatic wisdom. But in my (actually rather humble, in this instance) opinion there is some really dubious stuff here, relative to the notion of history as science and history itself.
As to the first, the premise that history repeats itself in any meaningful sense is extremely suspect. The more I learn about some historical event, the more I am struck by the accidental aspects of it, particularly the importance of personality. Discuss the macro-economic factors behind the American Revolution till the cows come home - the importance of the personalities of the Founding Fathers, particularly Washington, are critical to the shape of the contours of the event. As time moves on, the contours become everything.
How can the larger signficance of the Civil War be separated from the personalities of Lincoln, Grant, and Robert E. Lee? What happens if a man wi the courage and wisdom of Joshua Chamberlain is not at the end of the line at Liltle Round Top at Gettysburg? In the same way, the Russian Revolution cannot possibly take the form it does absent the personality of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin?
If events of this magnitude devolve endlessly into details, and ever more profound detail, in what meaningful sense can patterns be deduced from them? I know that the thought causes Hegelian and Marxist scholars to weep buckets, but I don't believe there is any pattern at all to historical movements. The study of history is of supreme value, but as the best and most useful study of human nature, nothing more.
Which leads to the second point. Even if the past did have lessons for the present, how could they possibly be applied? Let me wax lyrical and borrow a metaphor from Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine - the characters in their Pulitzer Prize winning show 'Sundays in the Park with George'. I do believe that our perception of contemporary events can be deemed 'pointillist'. We are ourselves figures on the canvas, both participating in and observing the events of our time. We perceive huge arrays of data points, but too sprawling and unwieldy to be interpreted with any precision (unless we want to bring in our value judgments and decide that some are more important than others.) No one can distinguish for certain between a fad, a trend, or an irrelevant incident. It is a certain distance develops between the canvas and the observer, that these points form themselves into shapes, patterns, colors - and even then, undercut by the effect of random detail, as noted above.
So even if solid lessons could be developed from history, deciding how and to what they apply is impossible - a matter of sheer hit and miss intuition. So what wisdom is there, really, in Santayana's aphorism? Not much.
So this famous quote turns out to be a non-starter. As far as the science of history, there is no area of human study in which God - and the Devil - dwell more completely in the details - so completely that it makes any pretense of 'science' an illusion. (I'd apologize to all those Marxists and Hegelians, but they deserve all the misery they get.)
In the sense in which Santayana uses the term 'history'. not only does history not repeat itself. It doesn't even happen the first time.
[This post first appeared on The American Thinker,
in slightly different form, on February 28th.]
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