History lessons

Lewis said we needed the perspective of other eras and other cultures in order to see the problems in our own. Things we find self-evident might be quite hard to argue to a Spartan or even to someone as recent as George Washington. Just imagine trying to explain the US political system and debates to Socrates. I'd love to see that tried; I suspect the result would resemble Weston's address to Oyarsa. Who else remembers Steve Allen's "Meeting of Minds?"

Not knowing much history to begin with makes this rather hard, and viewing it all through deconstructionist glasses makes it worse--if I understand Cicero better than his fellow Romans, I have nothing to learn from him.

Sometimes what we learn from the past is that we're not doing anything new. Most people know enough about kings to know that the US president is, by now, a king in all but name; complete with royal tasters. If you've read much about the Louis the Sun King, you understand that Washington DC is full of courtiers jockeying for attention and access. And you can recognize aspects of sumptuary laws in debates about guns and nature preserves and the proper price of energy. Sequestering the royal lands from the lower classes has a similar shape to trying to sequester parks from mere middle-class tourists. (Similar in more ways than one; both can be persuasively argued on the basis of preservation and good stewardship.)

There are plenty of useful old lessons: price controls make things worse, trying to buy off an opponent doesn't work for long, cultures matter, and so on.

But even when we know these things, we also know that we're sui generis: nobody else has ever had a Federal Reserve managing the interest rates to deal with monetary problems so we can safely do things that destroyed other nations. Give the old tool a new name ("fairness") and we forget that confiscation doesn't play out well in the end.

The old rules don't have to apply to me; I'm unique. Some say I am not the center of the universe, but wherever I go, there I am.

We're doomed to repeat history not just because we don't know history, but because we refuse to recognize ourselves there. Which is just human "nature;" we detest vices in others that we cultivate in ourselves.