Big Lessons From History

It's been said that the best cure for seasickness is to sit under a large tree. Might that remedy apply to an entire culture? America today is so chaotically hyped, its air so thick with kinetic information, that it seems what we really need to combat our cultural motion sickness is a time-out. Good luck with that. History teaches us the future offers no off-ramp.

Yet history also provides enduring lessons that we ignore to our detriment. Our very uprootedness now reflects the hubris that we are somehow a unique people, not like those of generations past, you know like the ones back in the 1930s as that generation pinwheeled onto the rocks of the Great Depression, or the 1970s scarred by the imperial overreach called Vietnam, or even just back to what already seems to be that Pleistocene epoch before the advent of our god-given iPhones.

Perhaps our time-out might best be spent by tapping into what they have to teach us. View our upcoming session as a handshake with those past generations, perhaps moving us towards the more steady gaze we need in order to catch our collective breath. We'll avail ourselves of five such tried and true lessons that are so easily overlooked amidst the crap du jour of the social media that sometimes passes for wisdom today.

View the synopsis of the five lessons described below as a mere teaser, not a substitute, for the focus article, a relatively short read considering the scope of the topic (click, The Big Lessons From History):

Calm plants the seeds of crazy: we'd been so lulled to sleep over the past century or so by our past successes taming the horrors of pandemics that we're now in societal shock over this perceived "unnatural act"; silly us; apply that same theme of our collective shortsightedness to the looming threat of drug-resistant antibiotics or, outside the medical field, to our ill-conceived forest management or, for that matter, to the stock market;

Time and place for optimism/pessimism: to the question whether one is better off being an optimist or pessimist, the answer is yes; history teaches the long run is usually pretty good and the short run can be pretty tough; when it comes to finance, for example, manage that apparent paradox lest you end up either a bitter pessimist or a bankrupt optimist;

People believe/see/hear what they project: understand, appreciate, and ignore at your peril the power of the model that's embedded in your own head (Henry Luce: "show me a man who thinks he's objective and I'll show you a man who's deceiving himself") or into the soul of society; especially poignant is the example of those surviving D-Day German soldiers absolutely dumbfounded to think at the time they were anything but the "good guys" per the powerful propaganda of the time -- think of that next time you hear those messages about our own country as invariably being on the right side of the evil axis; watch out for the power of incentives before judging or rationalizing your own actions or those of others;

Avoid the temptation of the easy story/explanation for the good/bad: we all like stories, the simpler the better, our heroes and villains to be clearly defined; the reality is that important events rarely have one cause, so it was with the Great Depression, so it is with Covid; enjoy the wonderful chain-of-events explanation for the '08 financial crisis;

Risk is what you don't see: when you want to hear the gods laugh you tell them of your future plans; such applies to the individual and a nation alike -- think 9-11, Pearl Harbor, the Great Depression -- then think about what each spawned.

Thomas Merton: Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real

(For access to previous Member Monday introductions, click TOC).