Remembering the Past

I’ve been doing a deep dive into the past recently, binge-listening to the podcast The Rest Is History. Two brilliant, entertaining historians, one whose focus is ancient history, the other’s modern history take turns presenting a subject or moment in time and grill each other, discussing the ins and outs of the event. Their passion and insight are totally mesmerizing. History for me was what I remember of it from school, an endless list of disembodied dates and names but very little about the actual stories. 

A few episodes on the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 put the present-day actions of the USA in the Middle East into context—just the latest in a long line of ill-fated and poorly considered interventions. Their series on the rise of the Nazis is a bracing reflection of what is going on in America and elsewhere right now. The whittling away of democracy, the vilification of other, the scapegoating of a people when times get rough, the emergence of a strongman leader who panders to and reassures a populace that is feeling increasingly powerless and disenfranchised. All of it couched in the rhetoric of reclaiming one’s former glory, of making a nation great again. The echoes are chilling.

On Our Relationship Wit Earth

On the advice of Daniel Laguitton, I listened to The Dream of the Earth, a book written and read by Thomas Berry, a scholar, priest and cultural historian born in 1914. Published in 1988, he reflects on how ridiculous it is that we are taught, as humans, that we are somehow separate from the universe we inhabit. Depleting and despoiling the resources of the planet and imagining that we will nonetheless survive because we are somehow above it all. 

He and others were sounding the alarm almost fifty years ago as to where we would end up if we stayed on the path of plundering, blind to the fact that we are merely a guest of nature. To put it in context, in 1988, acid rain was seen as the big threat. Listening to his holistic approach, his urging us to find our real place, read aloud in his mid-Atlantic accent, felt like a meditation. It subtly but fundamentally shifted how I feel when I walk through the woods, when I watch the birds, when I dig my hands in the soil.h

Historians Are The Therapists

The more I learn, the more I realize just how much having a good memory and putting it to use in guiding one’s actions are important. Historians are like the therapists of a society. Keeping track of what happened and why it happened. We are such a product of our times, our actions can only be understood in the context of what was going on in the day; environmental upheaval, financial crises, religious fervour, industrial revolutions, anxieties and hardships, they all have a decisive impact on who we are, how we are and what we do.

What will they say about us in a hundred years’ time?

Sarah Cobb