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jenny_islanderThis is my final post on my read-through of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. After this I am going to take some time to deal with events in my personal life before beginning another book.
Snyder's epilogue is an essay titled "History and Liberty." Now that I have read it, I suggest that anybody who is planning to read this book start at the end. Snyder gives names to the baffling currents in which I have been tossed for much of my life.
I remember laughing with joy when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union followed not long after. Suddenly the prospect of dying in a fireball had receded beyond the horizon. I still lived within sight of a military base, but the world had changed. I used to turn the radio up when I heard that single by Jesus Jones, just to get a rush of that feeling again: "Right here, right now/Watching the world wake up from history."
Snyder calls this fallacy the politics of inevitability. The assumption that tyranny is over and that the world can only get better, he says, leads to the failure to learn from history and the failure to teach history. It leads to a tendency to do nothing, because eternal good times are on the way regardless. Snyder calls this "a self-induced intellectual coma." He also calls it childish, noting that the political buzzwords of the previous decade--neoliberalism, disruption--describe minor tremors or adjustments in a great and perfect system in which all mess is tidied away as if by magic. We acknowledge that bad things happen, but we repose in the confidence that it will all turn out all right after the present unpleasantness is fixed by a fundraiser or something. But adults know that making something work actually requires work. "We own this mess," says Snyder.
The contrasting fallacy is the politics of eternity. Instead of a fake future, the politics of eternity dwells on a fake past. This past consists of only two things: national glory, and its enemies. It is "a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood." Eternity politicians are very good at getting people to do things their ancestors refused to do, in an attempt to regain a past condition that never existed. And of course, doing the work of solving problems that actually exist is not a concern of this kind of thinking--it can even get you targeted as an enemy of the people--because the pure, perfect, and powerful state has no internal problems, just enemies.
Fear can be used to induce people to submit to the politics of eternity: "the enemy is always at the gate." I think that a desire for things to be simple is much more powerful because of what that desire can get you to do. The number of real events and people and objects and places and so on and so on that you have to deny in order to believe in the simplified world of eternity politics is so vast that doing so unmoors you from reality. Snyder notes, "We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance--and then we do something shocking at someone else's orders."
Of course, most people don't put on the uniforms or pick up the guns. The habit of inaction is the same in the grip of both fallacies, says Snyder, and that's why we ended up where we are now after the politics of inevitability faltered. People tend to run on habit, after all.
"The only thing that stands between [these two fallacies] is history itself. History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another...History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have."
Snyder calls on young people to study history in order to make history. I expand his call to anyone reading this. What to read next? Something by the authors cited in this work might be a place to start. Read a little at a time, and stop and think about what you read. Like the people who came before you, read, learn, reflect, and act.
Knowledge is power.
Thanks for reading.
Snyder's epilogue is an essay titled "History and Liberty." Now that I have read it, I suggest that anybody who is planning to read this book start at the end. Snyder gives names to the baffling currents in which I have been tossed for much of my life.
I remember laughing with joy when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union followed not long after. Suddenly the prospect of dying in a fireball had receded beyond the horizon. I still lived within sight of a military base, but the world had changed. I used to turn the radio up when I heard that single by Jesus Jones, just to get a rush of that feeling again: "Right here, right now/Watching the world wake up from history."
Snyder calls this fallacy the politics of inevitability. The assumption that tyranny is over and that the world can only get better, he says, leads to the failure to learn from history and the failure to teach history. It leads to a tendency to do nothing, because eternal good times are on the way regardless. Snyder calls this "a self-induced intellectual coma." He also calls it childish, noting that the political buzzwords of the previous decade--neoliberalism, disruption--describe minor tremors or adjustments in a great and perfect system in which all mess is tidied away as if by magic. We acknowledge that bad things happen, but we repose in the confidence that it will all turn out all right after the present unpleasantness is fixed by a fundraiser or something. But adults know that making something work actually requires work. "We own this mess," says Snyder.
The contrasting fallacy is the politics of eternity. Instead of a fake future, the politics of eternity dwells on a fake past. This past consists of only two things: national glory, and its enemies. It is "a vast misty courtyard of illegible monuments to national victimhood." Eternity politicians are very good at getting people to do things their ancestors refused to do, in an attempt to regain a past condition that never existed. And of course, doing the work of solving problems that actually exist is not a concern of this kind of thinking--it can even get you targeted as an enemy of the people--because the pure, perfect, and powerful state has no internal problems, just enemies.
Fear can be used to induce people to submit to the politics of eternity: "the enemy is always at the gate." I think that a desire for things to be simple is much more powerful because of what that desire can get you to do. The number of real events and people and objects and places and so on and so on that you have to deny in order to believe in the simplified world of eternity politics is so vast that doing so unmoors you from reality. Snyder notes, "We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance--and then we do something shocking at someone else's orders."
Of course, most people don't put on the uniforms or pick up the guns. The habit of inaction is the same in the grip of both fallacies, says Snyder, and that's why we ended up where we are now after the politics of inevitability faltered. People tend to run on habit, after all.
"The only thing that stands between [these two fallacies] is history itself. History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being the cocreator of another...History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have."
Snyder calls on young people to study history in order to make history. I expand his call to anyone reading this. What to read next? Something by the authors cited in this work might be a place to start. Read a little at a time, and stop and think about what you read. Like the people who came before you, read, learn, reflect, and act.
Knowledge is power.
Thanks for reading.
