No historian will be surprised

I read regularly today that future historians will wonder about our times.

How could we let it happen?!

Didn’t we see it coming?

It was clear and plain to see. The sparrows were chirping it from the rooftops. The daughter of Priam wrote it on Belshazzar’s wall.

Ah, perhaps an unconscious instance of our mind did see it coming, but didn’t want to pass it on due to a set of rules imposed on the overall mind. (Our overall mind is not much different from a bureaucracy, where an internal set of rules not only demands the passing on of certain information, but also the suppression of less pleasant facts and predictions.)

We certainly did see how it approached. And we certainly saw that and when it was then there.

But will historians really wonder that we allowed it?

Oh, what hubris! What arrogance lies as a premise in this question. As if anyone will care what we did – what we didn’t do. What deficiencies in our knowledge (or, let’s always be honest: in our character) made us act so inadequately.

Firstly, history is notoriously and without exception written by the victors, so it’s half fiction and half irrelevant anyway. Secondly (and above all) our failure is too ordinary. Little that future generations will want to learn from us. A deaf-mute blind man runs in front of a car; do you ask him whether it might be better to hear and see?

No, future historians will care little about us, if history will still be practiced by humans at all.

You and I are the only historians of our cause. But this distinguishes us from those other historians: They alter and invent the reports about the events. We can still invent the events themselves, can change it – at least in our own, small matter.