“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” – Ecclesiastes 1:9
There are basically two kinds of historians. Those who believe nothing ever changes, and those who believe things do nothing but. I exaggerate, of course, but I tend to find myself thinking more like the former than the latter. If you give them the chance, people seize the opportunity to be tediously boring when the instinct strikes them. Ironically, revolutionaries do this as much as anybody else. However innovative we might like to think ourselves, time and again we fall back on the old and tried even as we try to introduce the new.
As I write this, Americans are trying to right the wrongs of past by taking radical action in the present. The perennial debates about statues of Confederate generals and the memorialization of Christopher Columbus have boiled over into naked iconoclasm. Not even Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant can hide from the mob. Men who, while not openly abolitionist in the mold of Frederick Douglass or William Lloyd Garrison, but who nonetheless did more to end slavery in the United States than virtually any other individual, have been tried and found guilty of counterrevolutionary activity by the Tribunal of Progress. We know that the flowers of silly season are in full bloom now that statues of Hans Christian Heg and Frederick Douglass have come down.
Those who take such actions do so as a means to declare independence from the past. If you believe the past is racist, then nearly everything about it has to go. Being the spiritual successors of French Revolutionaries who burned the records of old seigniorial obligations, destroyed the likenesses of ancient kings, and reset the calendar to Year 1, our latter-day Jacobins wish to start the world anew. I struggle to think of ways you think the American past can be recovered if you cast aside Lincoln and Washington, and identify the national character with the year 1619. The past operates not as a stepping stool to something greater, but as a set of sins to be scourged. It is hard to see how, through that lens, one can see that past as having anything worth preserving.
But if erasing the legacy of the past might appear easy, replacing it with something new poses its own difficulties. I think about this a lot when I consider the history of nationalism. Nationalism, for those who don’t know, is a lab-created virus designed by Nazi scientists which has killed millions of people since it was first unleashed in 1848. In all seriousness, though, nationalism is not new, and the impulse to unify a political society around a common culture, real or imagined, is an old one. I often recall the work of the British sociologist Anthony D. Smith who wrote that while nationalism as we understand it may be relatively new, nationalists almost inevitably have to call upon cultural resources that are far, far older than their present moment.
This holds as true for revolutionaries as it does for nationalists, and it is no accident that the two are often the same kinds of people. France’s revolutionary calendar was not long for the world, and the ink on its republican instruments had scarcely dried when Napoleon resurrected the monarchy with himself as its Emperor. It was a monarchy dressed in republican clothes, to be sure, but a monarchy nonetheless. Soviet Russia’s disastrous experiment in revolutionizing family structures ended in the return of monogamous marriages, and even the church had to be re-instated in some form, albeit a limited one, during its Great Patriotic War. North Korea presents us with perhaps the most bizarrely syncretic blend of revolutionary socialism and paternalistic monarchy known to us, and Latin American societies have understood themselves as a complex mix of republican revolution, indigenous identitarianism, and a dose of traditionalist folk Catholicism of varying strengths depending on where you go.
In our own age, then, what happens after every statue has been toppled, every street and school renamed, every classical text left unread, and every work of art sent away to storage? What, exactly, is going to take their place? I have to admit I do not know the answer to this question. All I know is that revolutionaries, if you let them, will not disappoint you with their lack of imagination. A new past will be constructed out of the discarded refuse of the old. It may even have some of the same heroes, just rebranded to suit the times, but it will also have new ones. Like all pasts, it will have its foibles, its nuances, and its contradictions, and these we will be encouraged to overlook. They were, after all, people of a time and place different from our own. They will take their places on the vacant pedestals, and we will venerate them on the liturgically appropriate feast days.
At a certain level, the rage against the past is much more a rage against the present. The past has always been our plaything to be molded to the needs of our current priorities. If the past as you find it is inconvenient, just invent a new one. This, incidentally, underlay much of the impulse to cast Confederates as just a different flavor of American that remained strong well into the 20th century. This polite lie helped bring the Union back together after the Civil War, but at some really ugly costs we are still paying. No national narrative is perfectly clean, and once you start contextualizing past crimes, it is hard to get angry at others for doing the same thing and still be reasonable.
All of this poses some questions for our erstwhile cultural revolution that I do not think have been adequately answered. When you throw away the old story, what story will you replace it with? What polite fictions will we have to agree to? Which sacred cows must not be violated? Why are these fictions preferable to the old ones? Some of these questions are more uncomfortable than others, and they should make people uncomfortable. If the world as you encounter it, with its wealth gaps, its single-family home-ownership, its family and social norms, its usurious indebtedness, and its bourgeois protestant work ethic, is fundamentally unjust, how far are you willing to go to tear it down? What is it that you will not be willing to do? If conventional politics, as you claim, have failed to adjust these, what other means are necessary? And these answers may prompt even more uncomfortable questions. If you go far enough to get what you think you want, what stories do you expect us to tell about you to justify them? What context do you want us to appeal to? When you are dead and gone, what will make the history that justifies your actions better than the one you discarded?
There is no new thing under the sun. These words, written over 2,000 years ago, are as true now as they were then.