And people’s actions could show that better future. The future could be different from the past, they believed, and better. The saints saw themselves as divine instruments and theirs was the politics of wreckers, architects, and builders-hard at work upon the political world. But they were committed after that to the literal reforming of human society, to the creation of a Holy Commonwealth in which conscientious activity would be encouraged and even required. Was the destruction of traditional order. As a result, the political theorist Michael Walzer has written, the primary task of the Calvinists Your fate in the next world might be predetermined, they argued, but it could nevertheless be perceived by your actions and circumstances here on earth-so you might as well reveal your predestined election through your behavior and accomplishments. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the medieval worldview broke down as Protestants challenged the Catholic Church and brought the heavenly future forward. The stable human microcosm mirrored the stable celestial macrocosm nothing changed because the order was eternal. Life was lived in a seamless web of interconnected authority: family, village, and feudal lord a distant king above that a more distant pope beyond and God in heaven ruling over all. For a thousand years after the fall of Rome, the Christian view ruled the West, building around itself an elaborate civilization. This life might be a constant round of suffering, it said, but there was a better one to come afterwards-where the damned would get their due, as would the blessed. Would you really see anything new?Ĭhristianity gave the human play a second act but located it offstage, in another sphere.
Which is why observing life for forty years is as good as a thousand. Look at the past-empire succeeding empire-and from that, extrapolate the future. As the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius put it in his Meditations, There was no progress nothing ever got better. The ancients thought history was static or cyclical. The skein of time has broken in our hands we can no longer read the future because the old world of stable grand narratives has given way to unpredictable human chaos. Today we are like the Norns at the beginning of Gotterdammerung. History with a capital “H” may indeed have ended, but if so, it is in Wagner’s sense rather than Hegel’s. And the United States itself, supposedly leading the caravan of progress forward, has swerved off the road and barely escaped crashing. The European Union, the world’s great experiment in transnational federalism, has splintered rather than consolidated. Instead of accepting its defeat and getting with the times, Russia has returned to its old tricks-although the past it is currently replaying is Imperial rather than Soviet.
China has gone from strength to strength, not bothering to liberalize much along the way as it was supposed to. The failure of communism and the success of liberal democratic capitalism, the argument ran, showed that certain systems were better suited to human nature than others, and so in the long run, the world would trend in that direction.īut three decades later, the future seems harder to predict. A generation ago, some thought the end of the Cold War signaled the end of History. But it turns out that not only is the past itself in dispute, the whole notion of historical patterns is a mirage. With all the changes happening, it is only natural to look for historical patterns and seek guidance from the past on where the country will go next. Racial identities used to be seen as constructed while gender identities were fixed. Abortion used to be legal, while same sex marriage and marijuana were not. Everybody can find compelling evidence for their views, meanwhile, because the country is going in several directions simultaneously. They increasingly loathe and fear one another, and an astonishing three-quarters of them think the United States is on the wrong track. As Americans gathered to celebrate their country’s 246th birthday this year, they were in a foul mood.
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