History and contemporary life often present reflective persons with terrible ethical and political choices. One current American presidential candidate repeatedly tells audiences of the importance of “what can be” and of being “unburdened by what has been.” Her opponent also eschews history and is unconstrained by inherited norms of conduct, lawful behavior, minimal honesty, and sequential reasoning.
It may indeed make good sense for a poor person or an immigrant desirous of improving his or her life to believe in and emphasize “what can be” and to diminish awareness of “what has been,” which is often painful, discouraging, or even humiliating. Mobility may mean leaving behind a poor or unusable past—geographically, economically, psychologically—for prospects of a better future. Millions of people in the United States and elsewhere have done and continue to do so. (My own father, a European orphan, got off a boat in New York harbor in 1924.)
But no mature, wise political leader in today’s world should claim the desirability of being “unburdened by what has been,” which entails rejection of any lessons of the past and knowledge of its achievements and disasters. The world since 1914, and even since the sun rose this morning, has been—is—too full of tragedy and injustice to eschew history in this way. Yet, alas, as has been said, “experience beats in vain on the breast of the congenital progressive.”
Hope should, indeed, spring eternal—Dum spiro spero (“While I breathe, I hope”)—and it is a Christian virtue; but ostrich-like ignorance and ingénue credulity are surely vices and deficiencies.
Looking out on the Pacific Ocean from northern California, the poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) meditated on a “perishing republic.” Gratefully resident in the same area years later, the great Polish refugee poet Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) worried with much greater justification whether modern states, cultures, and persons could survive the many-featured modern nihilism that had been so spectacularly destructive throughout the world in the intervening period of Jeffers’s life and his own. Rancid, libertine, dead-end “Beat” writers in San Francisco’s City Lights bookshop, savoring the flowers of evil, the euphoria of drugs, and the joys of madness, and grim, murderous despots in faraway Peking and Moscow, were equally illiterate ethically and culturally barren and destructive.
Jeffers gave into despair—“Cut humanity out of my being, / That is the wound that festers in me.” The residual momentum of Christian civilization, and American generosity to a refugee, saved Milosz from a despair far more warranted than Jeffers’s—World War II in Poland and Lithuania, Nazis, communists, and ostracism in his lonely refugee exile by the culturally dominant French Stalinists. His prose and poetry comprise one of the great bodies of writing of the last one hundred years, well meriting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.
Milosz was “burdened by what has been,” and considering his life and work might help free us from the confusion and gloom of modern history and give us chaste hope. In this, his witness resembles and augments the heroic, world-historical actions and words of Solzhenitsyn and Milosz’s fellow Poles Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II.
Due to other obligations, I was unable to attend the well-advertised commemoration, on Sunday, September 8, 2024, in Florence, of “the life and work of Mao Tse-Tung” on the occasion of the forty-eighth anniversary of his death. It was staged in his honor—and advertised with a smiling portrait of him against a bright red background—by the Italian Marxist-Leninist Party, a small sect that shares the residual communist legacy today in Italy. These parties together comprise a tiny shadow of the formerly vast power of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which along with the French PCF was the largest Communist Party in the West for decades.
But the posters of Mao could not help but remind me of the numerous, immense banners that festooned Florence in March 1983 on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Stalin’s death. His smiling face, also against a bright red background, beamed above the proclamation, “Stalin will live forever in the hearts of the oppressed of the world!”
Similar banners or posters of the faces of Mussolini and Hitler were of course frequently found throughout Italy and Germany less than a century ago.
In 2015, the witty, polymathic scholar David Berlinski published a profound, ironic, eloquent essay called “The Best of Times” (reprinted in his book Human Nature). In it he wrote: The “twentieth century, having introduced into human history crimes never before imagined, or if imagined, never before undertaken, is immortal, and will, like the crucifixion, remain a permanent part of the human present. . . . It is simply there, an obelisk in human history: black, forbidding, irremovable.”
No responsible leader today can be “unburdened” of this knowledge; but neither of our presidential candidates gives any evidence of understanding this minimum condition of decent leadership.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, almost eighty years ago, the great Italian priest-scholar—statesman, sociologist, and refugee (“fuoruscito”) in the U.S.—Don Luigi Sturzo (1871–1959) wrote that “Philosophy and history will always remain two branches of one knowledge and speculation” of human persons. “If their convergence and reciprocal influence ceases, philosophy becomes sterile tautology and history an incoherent succession of meaningless facts.”
To teach, write, or even think about human history is inevitably to take a philosophical and moral view of reality, of what is important, valuable, just, and culpable or praiseworthy. Even to live at all with any degree of mature, conscious awareness is also to take such a view, whether speculative and explicit, or latent and assumed.
Yet this rational, religious, humanistic consciousness has grown increasingly weak, feeble, obscure, and opaque in Western cultures. This is partly due to narcotic commercial entertainment and reductive scientific specialization and vulgarization. But it is also due to the sheer horror of modern and contemporary history—Berlinski’s irremovable obelisk—and its complete contradiction and disconfirmation of “enlightened,” “progressive” secular optimism. As T. S. Eliot put it in his poem “Gerontion,” “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”
Yet however guided “by vanities” through “cunning passages” and “contrived corridors,” however deceived “with whispering ambitions,” we cannot afford to shirk the burden of knowing what has actually been done, especially since 1914. The morning headlines never give us rest from “such knowledge.”
Neither of America’s presidential candidates shows any awareness of this range and realm of reality, though one is perhaps still young enough to grow and learn. We must hope so. Otherwise, our hope must be in impersonal law and a Constitutional tradition that divides, limits, and constrains all human powers—a precious, unique, philosophical-historical legacy, the fruit of ages of faith, work, and grief, of trial and error: a humanizing weight, a civilizing “burden” not to be cast away.
M. D. Aeschliman has edited paperback editions of novels by Charles Dickens and Malcolm Muggeridge. The updated edition of his The Restoration of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism was published in English in 2019 and in French in 2020.
Photo by Frank Schulenburg via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.
Click here to make a donation.
Click here to subscribe to First Things.
