JULY 11, 2020 – After a week at the Red Cabin I’m feeling safe from humanity. I rarely even skim “the news” and rely on my wife, who reads it, to inform me if the world has in fact gone over the ever-threatening proverbial falls.
I must confess, however, that yesterday I glanced at headlines. CNN reported, “THE SKY IS FALLING!” For a second opinion, I checked The New York Times home page, which reported, “Sky in Falling Mode.” Then, just for kicks, I looked at FoxGoebbels online. As sure as shootin’ (as long as you can still own a gun in this fabulous country of ours), Fox reported, “Radical Socialist Democrats Say Sky is ‘falling.’”
I quickly retreated to the quietude of our . . . retreat . . . and my current study of the Renaissance. From the comfort and safety of the dock, the porch, or the bench swing on the berm overlooking the lake, I read the history of the city-states of Italy between 1304 (the birth of Petrarch) and 1576 (the death of Titian). A leading headline: “The Sky Fell.” Another headline: “Historical Paradox: Humanity Survives; Individuals Don’t.”
One report tells that one of the greatest painters of all time, Tiziano Vecelli Titian, lived to be 99. (According to the curmudgeonly Michelangelo, Titian would have been an even greater painter if only he’d “learned to draw.”) Titian was actively painting well into his 90s. He died in Venice in the year of . . . The Plague, which killed 200 people a day and ultimately, wiped out a quarter of the population. The government lifted a ban on public gatherings so that the master who was lauded in his own times could be afforded a state funeral.
I’m hardly suggesting here that as citizens of the present, we shouldn’t take the present—as well as the future—seriously. I do urge, however, that in viewing present and future, we do so through the perspective afforded by a study of history.
The more history I read, the more I’m a proponent of it—reading it, that is. But all history, or more precisely, all reading of history, is problematic. Depending on whose version you read, you’re apt to draw very different lessons from it. Very wrong is how people with an opposing interpretation will assess your view, particularly if one of you has been devouring the “victor’s” version while the other has been consuming the “victim’s” account.
It seems to me, however, that most Americans are appallingly ignorant even of history’s reference points. Case in point: yanking down statues of honest-to-goodness abolitionists with the same rope that’s used to dethrone heroes of white racist women of the 1890s. Another: calling “socialist” anything that involves government funding or influence.
But along with an ignorance of history is a disturbing ignorance of science, and most particularly, the scientific method. In apparent equal proportion to this ignorance is a susceptibility to rhetorical devices, conspiracy theories, and tortuous rationalizations based on religious zealotry.
Humanity will survive, but will America?
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
