By Gary Topping–
At cocktail parties, lawyers like Mike O’Brien typically get hit up for legal advice (I do it to him myself), while medical doctors get asked medical questions. And historians like me get asked what I might call meta-historical questions like the one at the top of this page. Sometimes people expect me to be able to foretell the future (I tell them that the graduate program at the University of Utah only gave me a Ph.D., not a crystal ball, and that I have my hands full trying to explain the past without worrying about the future). Or once in a while people ask me what “lessons” history teaches. To that one, I’m tempted to respond that we’ve learned that genocide is a bad thing—but did we really need history to figure that out?
Do things get better or worse? Mike’s examination of those “balanced year” examples turns up a highly ambiguous record which speaks eloquently for my own reading of history. That ambiguity turns up even in my own life. Advances in medical practice like the invention of antibiotics and anesthetic surgery have kept me alive when I certainly would have succumbed only one hundred years ago—and I consider myself to have been blessed with generally very good health. At a more mundane level, I appreciate the technological advances in computers and dependable automobiles. On the other hand, my lifetime has seen the practice of war go from the ability to kill thousands to the easy execution of millions: I was not quite four years old when the atomic bombs eradicated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it’s a mixed record at best.
I give wholehearted assent to Gandalf’s admonition that we can only live in the time in which we find ourselves. I once knew a history buff who told me that he was living his life in the 1880s (this was during the 1980s). I didn’t press him on the impossibility of such a thing: did he ever ride in an automobile or an airplane or eat a Big Mac or watch a television program? I guess he could have avoided all those, but he certainly could not escape the moral responsibility of dealing with the issues of his own time. The people of the 1880s had their own issues that they dealt with as effectively or ineffectively as people of any era do, and even though their failures still plague us, we have our own issues to deal with and trying to retreat to an earlier time is a moral cop-out.
At the other end of the spectrum, I have evangelical Christian friends who seem to spend most of their time anticipating the Rapture or the Millennium or some such thing and pore over Biblical passages like the books of Daniel or Revelation looking for signs that the End Time is upon us. Similar to my other friend who was turning his back on the present to live in the past, these friends are turning their backs on the present to live in the future. I see both as morally irresponsible.
“You know the time in which we are living,” St. Paul reminds us (Romans 13:11). I take that as a mandate that we need to be informed and engaged with the issues of our own day. Every era of history had its good aspects and its bad ones and we need to understand both as parts of the evolutionary process that has resulted in our own historical situation. But that situation is the only one we can deal with; we can’t live either in the past or the future.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
