You Are Actors In History

As a younger person, I struggled to absorb and process history, and thus didn’t appreciate it—not as a student, not as a sightseer. At least not for the reasons people devote their lives to history as a vocation¹. My preferences ran to puzzles with correct solutions, and history, in those days, struck me as a discipline that mostly required students to commit factoids to memory.

College classmates flipping through flashcards all seemed to be studying for organic chemistry or history exams, and I wanted no part of that kind of learning. When I’d travel, my goal was to hoover up experiences and check famous places off lists in my mind, but without necessarily learning why those things mattered, or what systems and people produced them.

In part I was just a stereotypically arrogant STEM-type, but I also want to plead to a kind of perspective blindness.

I couldn’t really situate myself in bygone circumstances—at least, not the kinds that we memorialize in books and engravings. Asking me to inhabit distant lives, to feel what it must have been like to experience madness and danger all the time—you might as well have taken me to a natural history museum, then quizzed me on the interior lives of dinosaurs. These were artifacts from a world that didn’t exist anymore, from back when History still happened. The age of dinosaurs ended with an asteroid impact. History ended with…the surrender of the Axis powers? Globalization? My own birth? In any event, it doesn’t happen anymore, so why take more than cursory interest?

I of course had many peers who weren’t nearly this shallow, who became intellectually mature much faster than I did. But my story isn’t so unusual. It’s what happens to people who are born or raised in stable circumstances in stable places, in the world’s only superpower, where it’s easy to take permanence for granted. Particularly if you look and act a certain way.

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Working as a reporter covering news of historical significance shook me out of all that. It exposed me to aspects of human nature that helped me grasp why powerful people do seemingly inexplicable things. Why regular people react the way they do. How an uneasy truces or fragile consensus, of necessity in a given moment, can burden future generations.

Age and self-knowledge helped, too.

But the scales really fell when the illusion of certainty went poof. That’s mostly a story about Donald Trump.

I was seven when the Berlin wall fell, and for the next 30 years, shocks and traumas and atrocities seemed to simply wash over the United States. It isn’t that 9/11 or the wars it inspired or the great financial crisis or even COVID-19 were insignificant. But the country’s wealth and power and relative enlightenment gave it immense margin for error. We could endure traumas that’d cripple smaller nations and be back on trend within months or maybe a few years at most.

At an individual level, life could be cruel, but the social scaffolding seemed durable in ways that people who lived through world war or civil war or famine or plague couldn’t have fathomed. People in circumstances like those would give anything for the kind of stability people like me took for granted. Which is why so many of them put themselves through hell to live here.

The kind of myopia I confessed above is endemic among people who come of age in an empire, and a perverse consequence of such immense privilege is it leaves the population unprepared to snap into survival mode. Good times, weak men.

Taking prosperity for granted, believing history had ended because that’s how it felt in our blasé hearts—this attitude didn’t just afflict bourgeois nobodies like me, but people with real power and influence. Their critics have derided them as managers of imperial decline. But I think they feel or felt more like superintendents, tasked with being on site in case shit happened. To patch and paint over holes, knowing most systems would chug along on their own, in perpetuity. The bones are good, and it’s mostly up to responsible people like us not to fuck things up too much.

Legislators, civil society leaders, journalists—their jobs became routine. They slotted themselves into their roles, hit autopilot, and left it on long after it began to malfunction.