Back to the Future

Some years ago one of my older friends remarked that as he aged and became more and more interested in history and the past, his reading tended to focus on historical and biographical writing. At the time I thought I knew what he meant, that greater experience of the world had made him realize the challenge of understanding the past and those who had experienced it, both for his own time and that of others who had gone before. But as I have grown older I've found another meaning in that turn toward history and biography. I've found a resonance in the past that reverberates into the present and future. It really is true that we continue to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

Perhaps I'm especially struck by this now because I've finally got around to reading Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club: The Story of Ideas in America. The book was published in 2001 and was a Pulitzer Prize winner. Of course, I read the reviews, but foolishly put off reading the book itself. Then this summer it seemed the right choice for my holiday reading, and I was rewarded with an education in American thought and values that was both comforting and troubling in its relevance to the present. The book requires patience and attention, even though Menand's prose is elegant and clear. It's a group biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey, but it's also to some extent a history of American philosophy and science, of Harvard and Johns Hopkins and the Universities of Chicago and Columbia, of the American reception of Darwin, of race and attitudes towards race, of business and politics, of unions and philanthropy. As Menand himself remarks in his acknowledgements, it's an amazing trek with a fascinating cast of characters, and I can understand why he would say when he finished writing it, he was sorry it was over.

Books like The Metaphysical Club remind us that our own times are far from unique, and also that we are always on a journey along a pathway that is constantly changing and, as Darwin has shown us, evolving through many chance variations. One mistake we seem to make over and over again is in thinking that what we call life or history or culture or experience will ever reach some definitive end or final state, something we could call a finished or completed or perfected product. Another is that there is some perfect or ideal state of existence that we are either striving to reach or that we have somehow fallen away from.

History is process, and the greatest achievement or contribution of what we often refer to as American history is that we have opened up that process to ever greater numbers of human participants. Perhaps that is why the present moment is so sad and frustrating. We seem to have lost sight of that achievement and its greatness. None of us knows what the future will bring, and certainly none of us, none of us, knows what it should be. All we know is that if we are to survive we will have to change and adapt to circumstances that we can only imperfectly imagine or predict. Darwin has shown us that organisms survive by random, chance variations that are constantly occurring.

Perhaps American democracy survives by a similar process, by allowing greater variety of participation to guide us and help us adapt to changing circumstances. Perhaps we appreciate that when we recall how we got to this somber point in our history, how we learned from our past mistakes and adapted and evolved. But nothing is certain or guaranteed. Many formerly successful species have become extinct, usually by failing to adapt. Many formerly great and powerful nations have fallen. History is full of such examples, and so will be the future. The trick of survival is not being among the fallen or the extinct.