BY BORDI JAEN
“History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” – Mark Twain
I REMEMBER back then a classmate who used to ask me why I was interested in History which he referred to as a “dead subject”.
I was still much younger back then and could not retort, but I often come back to that memory every time I read something about history.
When I was younger, I read history because it was interesting and because the things I read were true, it made it doubly interesting. In the words, once again, of Mark Twain, “Truth is stranger than fiction but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities but the truth isn’t.”
Whether it was Chrysippus dying from laughing at his own joke or of the World War 2 Japanese soldier who only surrendered in the 1970s because he wouldn’t believe the war was over, History is a subject that will never run out of the absurd and interesting because it is constantly being made, more so because we, the subjects of history, continue to be absurd and interesting.
However, as I’ve come to understand, History is a subject that should be learned not for the purpose that it is interesting to know who did what, or what was what and so on, but because it is only by the understanding of the past that we may come to understand the present and possibly the future.
Evidence of cyclical history is the fact that we continue to have tropes of what was in the past. Perhaps that is part of the reason why history fascinates us? Like the reading of a fantastic story or TV series, we see such tropes happening in the world around us. There continue to be freedom fighters from oppression, as Spartacus was. There continue to be the overly ambitious rich men, as the tragic Crassus was. There continue to be populists and anti-populists, as Julius Caesar and the Optimates were, respectively. If you’ve noticed, I use examples from ancient Rome. However, make no mistake that there are more timely examples from every period and place, only that by using the most far back examples, I make a point: there continues to be such people as we see in the present.
History, however, is linear in one way, and that is through technology. This is irrefutable. We continue to advance technologically. On another note, I will never understand people who want to live in earlier periods of history because “the times were better back then” or because “those were simpler times with fewer problems”.
Although seeing the Gardens of Babylon or being a knight during the period of chivalry does have an aesthetic quirk to it, I’d rather live in an era where the midlife crisis is in our 40s rather than 20s.
The technological variable of our civilization’s equation is ever changing but one thing that remains constant (and is the reason for history’s cyclical nature) is human nature. It is the same desire for freedom from oppression that inspires the people of Myanmar to protest the military as it did Spartacus against the Romans. It is that same human nature that inspired Crassus which inspires modern day billionaires who run for office (they are luckier, though, that the punishment for defeat nowadays is not molten gold down their throats). It is the same ambitious heart that Julius Caesar and modern-day populists have, as the same principled heart that their enemies do.
Because history is cyclical, it must be studied to understand the lessons that we need to heed. What is important for the layman to understand isn’t the aesthetic aspect of history but what is in history that we can apply not only to our society but to our lives as well.
The studying of history allows us to understand how modern concepts and events come to be. It allows us to have a deeper understanding of human nature and how events generally transpire because of it. It’s just one reason why Machiavelli’s The Prince continues to be mostly relevant. In that little booklet one can find lessons through history’s eyes.
History continues to rhyme because we humans continue to fall for the same things over and over again, despite our technological advancements. However, by studying history we can apply lessons to minimize such impacts. By spotting and understanding events as they unfold before our very eyes, we are afforded what was not afforded to our predecessors, the all-mighty eye of applicable knowledge.
After all, the incentive for understanding the past in the present is for the benefit of the future./PN
