History never ends.

Also, it starts late, some is lost, and much of it, we hallucinate.

History is a funny thing.

As I wrote about previously, in one sense, we can’t be sure it even happened — at least not exactly the way it is told to us. History is a narrative given to us by people who came before, as interpreted by people who came later that we don’t know.

And history also “starts late”. It would be very useful to know what happened to humans before we learned to write things down in a permanent way.

Also, history is extremely spotty. What written records we have tend to be those of victors and those of the noble, kingly, or priestly class. We don’t see a lot of “Dear Diary…” entries from the peasant class in the long-long-ago.

And history sometimes just… disappears. How much is permanently lost due to disasters like the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria? How much is just lost due to neglect, or accident, or the destructive elements of time itself? Entropy swallows up everything, eventually.

And then there’s all the hallucinating we do about our history. Again, as I wrote about previously, how can we trust history from long ago when we know the history we are “making” right now is riddled with errors and bias?

And speaking of hallucinating and history, often we do it ourselves, right now! We stretch and bend the importance of history by our perceived needs and attitudes as we read it in the present.

A demonstration: A subscriber shared with me the following, which came from a 2019 speech by Wilford M. McClay at Hillsdale College:

"....Written by John Dos Passos, a man of the radical left in his youth who later moved to the sensible right, it is from a 1941 essay, “The Use of the Past,” and it is uncannily relevant to the present: 'Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today. We need to know what kind of firm ground other men, belonging to generations before us, have found to stand on. In spite of changing conditions of life they were not very different from ourselves, their thoughts were the grandfathers of our thoughts, they managed to meet situations as difficult as those we have to face, to meet them sometimes lightheartedly, and in some measure to make their hopes prevail. We need to know how they did it. In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking. That is why, in times like ours, when old institutions are caving in and being replaced by new institutions not necessarily in accord with most men’s preconceived hopes, political thought has to look backwards as well as forwards'...."

“…that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.” Very very nice. I wish I’d written that. It is a natural human tendency to believe that the history we are living through is somehow exceptional.

Of course, in a personal sense, that’s true. What could be more important to a person than the time they themselves are alive? But it’s an easy bit of foolishness to mistake our current moment as somehow more exceptional than the moments that came before — or will come later.

It reminds me of the “This is the most important election of our lifetimes!” trope. The “idiot delusion of the exceptional Now” indeed. It also reminds me of the foolish modern notion of the “end of history” famously promoted by Francis Fukuyama and other fools.

So, like I said, history is a funny thing. It’s something that’s incredibly important and useful, while also being something we have to take with a grain of salt. History is warped by the biases of those who wrote it down — and also by the biases within ourselves now as we study it.

It’s endlessly fascinating.

If you want to dive in to some great history yourself, check out Liberty Classroom. There is a whole lot of great stuff there for you to immerse yourself in — and be suspicious of!

Naturally,

Adam

PS: Follow me on Twitter(X): “@rerazer”