History is an Exercise in Humility

Who do we think we are? We’re modern people, ticking off one achievement after the next: faster, higher, smarter, quicker, bigger, richer in an endless rising graph of ever-increasing progress. Then came COVID-19. We weren’t in control. We couldn’t instantly conquer disease. We couldn’t rely on pure reason to convince people of what’s best for everyone.

History reminds us that things don’t always get endlessly better. As a colleague of mine says, “It’s always fun until the historians show up.” When you hear people start sentences with phrases like, “For the first time in history …” or “Never before has …” — that’s when historians push the pause button. We bust myths. We pop balloons. We’re annoying, but humility is a virtue that history can teach. 

What we’re experiencing now is especially frightening for Americans. We were brought up with a certain narrative since the 1950s: America is the greatest superpower. Ever. Our children and grandchildren will always be a step above where we are. Except now they might not be. 

This is where historians can play a vital role in cultivating humility by offering examples from a larger canvas of place and time. I constantly hear that COVID-19 will change us forever. Will it? I don’t know. I’m an historian, not a prophet. But I do know that the horrors of the 1918 flu pandemic were followed by the Roaring Twenties, so people seemed to rebound just fine. Workers today look as if they’re in a better bargaining position than five years ago — which is exactly what happened in Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century after the Black Death. Workers were scarce because so many had died. They asked for better wages and working conditions; predictably, owners and overlords resisted. Over time, workers did well but with significant setbacks. We just can’t say what the long-term effects of COVID-19 will be now. We’ve got to be humble enough to let history tell us what might happen next.

It’s not like we’re suffering from a new disease. Many cultures have believed that theirs is the best and will last forever. Let’s call it the tyranny of chronology. We’re alive today, other cultures fell, and I have a smartphone that makes the world respond to my every touch, or voice command, like a divine right monarch. All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as Voltaire’s characters keep inanely declaring in his satirical novel Candide (1759). Candide, his tutor Pangloss, and their friend Cunégonde are battered by trials of slavery, rape, shipwreck, an earthquake, and cannibals. Nevertheless, Pangloss spins everything as proof that their world is the best of all possible worlds. The syphilis that took one of Pangloss’s eyes and ears was a result of encounters between Columbus’s men and the indigenous people they encountered, but the Europeans also brought chocolate back to Europe, so it was all for the best. 

A further check to this naïve and haughty attitude comes from the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt and his 1871 lecture “On the Fortune and Misfortune in History,” delivered at the Museum of Basle. In that address, Burckhardt considered the problem of self-obsession, which is what Pangloss displayed when he placed himself and his friends at the center of history. Burckhardt scoffed at this notion: “Just as if the world and its history had existed merely for our sakes! For everyone regards all times as fulfilled in his own, and cannot see his own as one of many passing waves.” In his memoir Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis reports that Owen Barfield, a fellow member of the Inklings writing circle, “made short work of what I have called my `chronological snobbery,’ the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” 

Was an idea just a fad or trend that lived its life and passed away to be replaced by the next shiny thing? Was it discredited by a better idea? Do we discount the Roman Empire’s achievements because it didn’t last more than 500 years and it is gone but we’re here? Deeply affected by his military service in the trenches of World War I, Lewis had learned the lesson Pangloss hadn’t: “From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also `a period,’ and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.”

Lewis had survived the First World War and was writing in the wake of the Second World War, a global tragedy that took place just a generation later. Between the wars, too many people grew too confident in their own powers. They relied on their technology and what they thought was progress — both technical and moral. Then they saw what happened when a monster like Adolf Hitler seduced millions of self-righteous followers into thinking they were so perfect that others who weren’t like them shouldn’t even be allowed to live. To try to end that war, the United States dropped onto Japanese cities two atomic bombs so powerful no country has dropped them again. Examples of frightening technological advancement, yes, but what about morality? Nuclear war is an effective way to kill many people at once. Should we be proud or humbled by that action? Just what is progress? 

History should build us up, yes. But sometimes it needs to humble us, too.