We are predictable creatures because fundamentally we are forever driven by the same crude impulses, whatever scattered data in whatever era or circumstance bears upon them. History doesn’t rhyme, the human mind does. And, as Koholet said in the register of 4 and 50 learned men, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Whoever … is overrun with suspicion, and detects artifice and stratagem in every proposal, must either have learned by experience or observation the wickedness of mankind, and been taught to avoid fraud by having often suffered or seen treachery; or he must derive his judgment from the consciousness of his own disposition, and impute to others the same inclinations which he feels predominant in himself. — Johnson, Rambler N° 79, 18 December 1750
One studies history, its events, its people, its arts, its ruling passions, not because one is randy for antique, but because it is the clearest and most illuminating view into who we still are. Evolution mixed us up, made us foolishly believe in a kind of moral and intellectual progression, nevermind that its mutations work much more slowly than recorded history… Our most meaningful advances are the work of culture, but culture must always submit to the barely changed mechanics of clever grease which we’ve been deploying for several hundred thousand years.
Strip away the gilding and the rhetoric of progress, and the same grubby hand is always revealed underneath. We flatter ourselves with constitutions, with declarations of rights, with lofty preambles to charters and treaties; but beneath every proud inscription lurks the same hunger for dominance, the same terror of loss, the same appetite for pleasure, the same cowardly desire to avoid pain. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Stalin, Trump — it is one continuous procession of the same lizard-brained urges adorned in different regalia.
Our technologies and fashions persuade us that novelty has arrived, that some rupture has occurred in the old fabric of things. Yet the wars of Twitter differ little in kind from the wars of pamphlets, and the self-righteous mobs that doxx and destroy with hashtags are no more refined than the crowds that once jeered outside pillories. The same hot bile of envy and cruelty courses through us; we merely press it through more efficient vessels. The soul has not kept pace with the machine.
If there is any true advancement in our condition, it lies not in the chimera of evolutionary leaps or political slogans about being “on the right side of history,” but in the handful of fragile institutions and customs that restrain us from becoming wholly bestial. And these, like any architecture, are forever in danger of collapse, because they rest on the quivering foundation of human self-discipline and maintenance. The span of civility is always one careless generation away from ruin.
What history teaches, then, is not the smug consolation that things improve, but the sharper, more humbling lesson that things repeat. Each new outbreak of zealotry, each fashionable tyranny, each eruption of violence is only the old human stock rehearsing its familiar rôle. The wheel spins; the players change costumes. The plot is the same because we are the same.