Like most young boys in the 1990s, I was obsessed with catastrophe.
I don’t mean to suggest that’s somehow unique to 90s kids. I’m sure every generation grows up obsessed with the violent, dismal failures of the previous ones. But I was becoming aware in a time that (I was told) represented the end of history. The Cold War was over, the United States of America was the only superpower left standing. Everything would go the way that Americans wanted it to, and we were a cultural monolith in lockstep on visions of progress and equality.
I wish I could go back and shake those people. Did they not pay attention in school? Was there no one smart enough to point out that unity never lasts? That things only look like monoliths if you’re far enough away, or if your vision is too blurry to see the messy details?
But this isn’t about generalizing a whole generation, it’s about me. In this “post-history” world, I was obsessed with looking back at all the ways things had gone wrong. I was most enamored with short, dramatic events: the sinking of the Titanic, the many wars of the last few centuries. I devoured stories like Godzilla and Star Wars and Animorphs, where single moments changed everything. All of that preoccupation, though, covered up a deep fear.
I was afraid of history.
Not those quick moments of drama and passion, but the ones that followed. Adjusting to a new, usually more terrible reality. I read about the Great Depression and the Holocaust, and all of my fascination was tinged with horror. Because how could anyone survive that? That slow, wasting drag across the desert of time, when those people must have watched the events that consumed them in a mixture of denial and dreadful certainty. Denial that they would be consumed by history, and certain that it would destroy them. I was afraid because I understood, subconsciously, that I was not one of those Great Men who would rise up and persevere. I was one of the nameless millions elided over by pretty words in a textbook. If history happened to me, I would be among those who starved to death or lay gasping in clouds of poison gas, powerless to help myself or the people I loved.
And, judging by what’s happened over the last five, ten, even twenty years, I think a lot of people felt the same way I did.
Obviously I didn’t manage to escape history. Here I am, an adult with a family and a career, living through a period in the story of humanity that is undeniably exceptional compared with all the others. Our world is more connected than it has ever been, and that’s the cause of our problems right now: fear is driving people into authoritarianism and hate, in the face of an ongoing pandemic made possible because you can fly from any city on Earth to any other in less time than it takes for you to develop a sniffle. All the while, the bill on about two centuries of environmental damage is coming due, and it’s being paid for by the people least equipped to do anything about it.
History is happening right now. It’s already eaten the foundation, and while civilization collapses around us we’re all falling into its hungry maw, and the people living on the top floor don’t seem bothered by it.
The conditions that brought us here are unprecedented in the planet’s entire history, but our reaction is almost comically obvious. It was there all along in the history books, but just like me, everyone who could have stopped this from happening was afraid of what they saw. So they ignored it and told themselves they would be different, and they ended up walking the exact same path that led to the exact same horrors. Their new ideas were just the same old ideas everyone else had, but they didn’t pick up a book or listen closely enough to realize it.
So now here I am, and here we are, and I’m asking myself the same question I did when I was sitting in school, learning about the Dust Bowl: how does anyone survive this?
No one bothers to spell it out. To go by the history I read, you become some Great Man (because it’s almost always a man) whose name gets written down, and that’s how you survive. If you want an actual answer, you need to learn to read between the lines, or you need to find the unwritten histories that are passed down by people who suffered the most under history. You need to learn to listen and not speak, to act without bragging about it, to reach out and help, first one person, and then another.
You have to accept that no one is going to help anyone if you don’t do it first, that no change will happen unless you’re willing to make that change yourself. You must have a perceptive eye for the hidden pain of others and compassionate hands to draw those people up and carry them forward. And you can’t do that if you’re also holding on to hate or regret or fear.
You have to take it one day at a time, and you need the resolve to forgive yourself when you mess it up and to try again tomorrow. You need to be willing to do right by the people you’ve wronged and to move past the wrongs that have been done to you. Guard your forgiveness of others, but mean it when you give it. Be willing to risk failure and rejection.
If all this sounds hard, it’s because it is. Life is hard, and that’s why no one survives. But if you can accept the fact that we only have a certain amount of time to live, you can find the strength to make sure your life now doesn’t make someone else’s life harder later.
At least, that’s what I learned from my fear about surviving history.
Maybe there was a moment where the world could have chosen to be post-historical. If it ever existed in my lifetime, it probably happened when I was small, before I learned to be afraid of history. But that time is past, and no matter what we choose to do now, we’ll never be able to go back and make a different choice.
That’s what makes living through history so terrible. Everyone always wants to go back. Politicians talk about a vague golden age of wealth and values and how we can get back there, but it’s not possible. You can’t walk backwards through history. You can only move forwards.
But moving forward without knowing what’s behind you is dangerous, too. You’ll end up seeing familiar tracks on the path and, thinking that they’ll assuage your fear, you follow them right back to the thing that made you afraid in the first place.
The only way to survive history is to walk forward, to make progress even if you and the people around you disagree over what that progress looks like. But do it with compassion for other people, and make sure to glance over your shoulder every once in a while to make sure that history is still behind you. Because the only way it can really hurt you is if you go back into it.
