'Fanaticisms and Factiousnesses Too'

“History is not some past from which we are cut off. We are merely at its forward edge as it unrolls. And only if one is without historical feeling at all can one think of the intellectual fads and fashions of one’s own time as a ‘habitation everlasting.’ We may feel that at last, unlike all previous generations, we have found certitude. They thought so too.” 

I heard it expressed by commencement speakers and others in more casual conversation that ours is an unprecedented age of uncertainty and worry. “We have never seen anything like what we’re experiencing now,” said an articulate and highly educated woman. I wanted to remind her of, say, April 1861 in the U.S. and September 1939 everywhere. The phenomenon of presentism is like a disease that causes blindness. We attribute a sort of proud uniqueness to ourselves and our era, an understanding fostered by narcissism and historical ignorance.

 

The speaker quoted at the top is Robert Conquest in “History, Humanity, and Truth,” the 1993 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities delivered at Stanford University. Conquest is the historian who gave us, among other revelatory works, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (1968) and The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986). He was not the first to note the moral parity of Hitler and Stalin, but, even before Solzhenitsyn, he documented it and published the results. Denying history and privileging oneself is a form of reality denial. In John Dryden’s “Secular Masque,” Janus says, “Tis well an old age is out, / And time to begin a new,” though the new is merely the old repackaged. Conquest says in his lecture:

 

“We spoke of fads and fashions. Fanaticisms and factiousnesses too, unfortunately. The Soviet experience was, of course, a terrible example of what can happen when an idea gets out of hand.”

 

Conquest was doubly blessed with gifts, being a poet as well as a historian. In 2009, already in his nineties, Conquest published Penultimata, a collection of new poems. Among them is “Last Hours,” nine stanzas of three lines each, including this:

 

“Dead in the water, the day is done

There’s nothing new under the sun,

Still less when it’s gone down.”

 

Presentism is more than a misguided focus. It is a prescription for disaster. “Without truth in history,” Conquest says in his lecture, “humanity is no longer humanity. It becomes prey to the mental distortions which have, in this century, already caused so many millions of deaths, and brought the world to the verge of ruin.”

 

[John Dryden died on this date, May 12, in 1700 at age sixty-eight.]