Past and Present

The past is a foreign country, said L. P. Hartley—and it's the truth.  We're used to the success of Europeans over the last four or so hundred years in overwhelming everyone else and conquering the world.  So Europeans are evil dominators and everyone else victims or their ruthlessness.  But move a couple of hundred years further back and suddenly things aren't quite the same.  Instead, it was the Muslims who had overwhelmed everyone else and conquered the world.  And back another few hundred years and it was the Romans.  And back another few hundred years and it was the Persians.  And back another few hundred years and it was the Egyptians.  And so on and so on.

 

It's also the case that the three or four hundred years before the present have allowed the whole globe to focus attention on the success or failure of the countries that border the Mediterranean.  So the success of Europeans over those last four hundred years begins with the domination of the Mediterranean, made more or less possible by the victory of the Hapsburgs at Lepanto in the mid-16^th century.  There was still conflict between Europeans and Muslims, to be sure—the final siege of Vienna took place in the late 17^th century, after all:  but Lepanto secured the homeland sufficiently so that the Hapsburgs could look to the "New World" and exploit what Columbus had "discovered" at the end of the 15^thcentury.  So the expansion of Europe into the rest of the planet, to which the English came a bit late, was a Mediterranean phenomenon in the first place.  So was the expansion of Islam in the previous period, and so was the rule of Rome, and so was the Persian and the Egyptian dominations.

 

The rest of the world had its own imperial gives and takes.  In the Americas the Incas succeeded the Chimors, who succeeded the Cuscos, who succeeded the Aymara, who succeeded the . . . .  And the Olmecs gave way to the Mayans who gave way to the Toltecs who gave way to the Aztecs who gave way to the Spaniards who gave way to the Mexicans.  And in Eurasia—the complicated history of the Mongols—invading Europe, India, China, Japan—is too convoluted to outline.  Africa, immense continent as it is, has various rises and falls in various areas, from the rise and fall of the Empires of Mali, Ghana, Songhai, Kanem in the west to the Caliphates and Sultanates of the east to the Kingdoms of Kongo, Luba, and Lunda in the center and the Empire of Zimbabwe in the southeast.

 

To be sure, the rise-and-fall of colonial empires produces different modes of command and control, some more horrific than others.  And in that horror the Europeans of the last four hundred years are up there in the panoply of devastation.  But then the Aztecs and the Incas were no gift to their predecessors, nor were the Persians nor the Mongols . . .  you get the picture.

 

From all this I, at least, derive two principles.  First, judge the present ruthlessly, to be sure, but keep in mind that the present is a continuation of a horrible horrible past.  Second, don't assume that the folks who represent the present horror will be replaced by more humane, kinder, gentler successors.  Humanity, it seems, has never ever been humane, and probably never will be.

 

One final observation.  The culprit in all human-caused misery is the relationship of power to weakness.  In different historical modes that relationship has different modes of expression.  Currently it's a straightforward matter of monetary wealth, but in the past it could have been something different.  Medieval lords had little monetary wealth, but they had a great deal of power nonetheless bea

Desert

One of my least favorite things in the modern world—or the world for the last many years, anyway—is the idea that we all deserve.  What do we deserve?  Well, obviously, the best.  We deserve a break today, for one thing.  And, it seems, we deserve every inch of happiness in our lives.  We deserve a car.  We deserve a good job.  We deserve a beautiful home.  We deserve a beautiful wife.

 

You may wonder, well, how did we get here?  I don't know.  I tend to attribute it to the consequences of WW 2, when America was greater than the average destroyed economy of the rest of the world.  But I have no real reason to do so.  Maybe it's just a convenient approach to selling things.  Ads tell us that we deserve not just a car, but a car that thrills us, and ad after ad makes sure we write that idea of desert deep in our minds.  Like Arragon in Merchant of Venice, we all assume desert.

 

There's a countervailing set of ideas that we all hear, to be sure.  We're told, for instance, that you don't get what you deserve; you get what you earn.  Employers and teachers tend to present that point of view.  But even so, it really can't combat the notion that we all deserve better.  That we all deserve to be happy.  That we all deserve to be loved.

 

The Beatles were a bit wiser.  All you need is love really means that all you lack is love.  I've always thought that song to be far smarter than people generally think of it.

 

With such wisdom in mind, then, for me desert is not so positive a thing.  I think of that passage in Hamlet, when the Players arrive and Polonius says that he will treat them "according to their desert."  "God's bodykins, man," Hamlet responds, "much better:  use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?"  I know, the 420-year-old language gets in the way.  But the idea, rooted in a biblical understanding of the human condition suggested in Hamlet's reference to God's body, is simple enough.  All humans, regardless of how apparently good they may seem to be, deserve nothing more than suffering.  After all, even Jimmy Carter lusted in his heart.

 

I don't have a biblical take on the idea.  I know what we all know, that only two things are certain, death and taxes.  In the Shakespearean mode, as Prince Hal says to Falstaff, we all owe God a death.  To be sure, Falstaff responds that at least for him the debt is not due yet.  Being a human invention, taxes maybe one could avoid.  But the inevitability of death is the only thing that nature says we deserve.  If nature is nice to us, when it comes, death will be relatively painless and quick.  But even that we don't deserve.