Greetings and Salutations, and welcome to Vesperisms: The Art of Thinking for Yourself. I’m here to help you recalibrate toward an artistic worldview. So grab your coffee, and have a seat in my studio, and let’s have a chat.
This is Season 3, Episode 3, Understanding Historical Rhymes.
It’s been a wild couple of years. You’ve heard me say that each of us, whether or not we are artists, has our particular “sense-making apparatus”. And that has been seriously messed with. Every time I watch the news or scroll through my Instagram, I see people making comparisons to other periods in history. We have a kind of instinct that this or that has happened before, and that if we can just wrap our arms around this particular iteration of it, we can avoid the mistakes of the past and reverse course.
In the last few years alone, it’s been like one whiplash-inducing accident after another: four years of panic over whether or not we were being governed by an authoritarian, with plenteous invocations of various dictators and evil political movements. Then we had a global medical event that essentially put the world under martial law, with a dizzying back-and-forth over treatments, allegations of unfathomable corruption, and the undeniable opportunism of the political machine.
We witnessed peaceful working class uprisings all over the world put down by rubber bullets and tear gas and citizens beaten by police and trampled by horses in their streets. We witnessed leaders of Western democracies freezing the bank accounts of their citizens because of their views, whether political or medical. We’ve seen inflation and supply chain issues so bad that “prepping” has left the domain of conspiracy nuts and become a mainstream topic of conversation. We see Cold War actors storming the borders of surrounding nations and speaking openly of nuclear war. And we see the psychological break of young men coming to fruition in a seeming chain of man shootings.
From talk of two-tiered societies and concentration camps and the confusion over what these terms even mean, to daily reports of explosive racism and antisemitism and what women are and what rights they may or may not be entitled to, not to mention the fact that we have freaking supreme court justices in hiding in anticipation of assassination—doesn’t it feel like we’ve taken an enormous step backwards into a past we thought had been overcome? Do you find yourself asking, how, with all that we know, are we repeating this? It’s like every day brings with it a string of catastrophic events, and try as we might to avoid getting sucked in, it’s very difficult to escape.
But what if it’s not escape that we’re looking for?
What if you have the sense that—much as you wish it were different—you were not only born, as the book of Esther says, “for such a time as this”—not only born at exactly the right time, but that you’ve actually been formed for this your whole life—that you may even have some part to play, and you don’t want to miss it?
I’d like to offer some perspective on how to think through these issues with a historical lens. I’m not a trained historian, but as a historical fiction author, my nose is constantly in the books on these matters, especially because, you could say, totalitarianism is my beat. My main topics of study and storytelling are mass movements, the roots and implementation of totalizing structures, and how everyday people live under these conditions, specifically two kinds of people: kids and artists.
Mark Twain is attributed with saying,
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
I think rhyme is a good way to think about it, because we talk a lot about history being cyclical, and it certainly does feel like that, but we truly do live in a different kind of world than anyone would have recognized even two hundred years ago. I conceive of history a bit differently than a series of cycles. I think of history in layers.
Imagine going to an archeological site that’s been host to multiple civilizations. It’s made up of several thousand years of layered stone and sediment, discarded pots and jewelry and even bones. Sometimes, if the site is well-maintained, they’ll have a window in the ground so you can see to the bottom where the first layer has been exposed. Or maybe they even have a vertical window that you can look through and see those layers stacked on top of each other. It’s a reminder that every historical event is predicated on the conditions that came before. Nothing happens in a vacuum.
Writer Leah Rose recently wrote in her Substack:
“History rhymes because underneath the changing contours of human events, human hearts and minds are a constant. Human cultures can develop, grow in their moral outlook and ethical practices, but human beings do not stop being susceptible to self-interest and contempt, to the impulse towards critical-mindedness and rationalizations, to the hard-wired need for tribe. In the grand sweep of history . . . ourstory . . . our universal human traits keep us vulnerable — individually and collectively — to the perverse and captivating madness of crowds.”
So even though historical events, technology, styles of government may change, human nature remains a constant. To understand history, we have to understand human nature, first by acknowledging that there is one. Whether you believe in the human being as a spiritual being or merely the product of evolutionary forces, the ways that humans act and react are relatively constant throughout history. This is why we can read Aeschylus or Marcus Aurelius or Athanasius or Lao Tzu and recognize their thought processes as though they are speaking to us contemporaneously.
We are individuals, deeply internal and prone to poeticism. We can see this from the earliest artifacts and cave paintings we know of. It’s possible to hold in your hand a carved figurine made countless thousands of years ago, and know that it was wrought by another person, just like you. It reminds us that people of the past not only made art, but needed warmth and food and kindness, just like you; that that person was once a baby and a child that needed its mother, just like you.
Humans are individuals, and we are also social beings. We are communally-minded, and to the good, this makes us capable of profound altruism and mercy. It means that we look out for each other. We have a concept of “the neighbor”: those to whom we are responsible, beyond those in our family unit alone. And we’re capable of extending that sense of mutuality out to pretty large scales, like our nations.
But there’s a negative aspect to that as well. Just as we have an individual sense of fight or flight when we feel threatened, we can also have a collective response to threat. Like a herd of gazelles when they sense a cheetah, we’re capable of snapping into collective action and moving as one when we perceive a threat to our safety, or when we are told by authority figures that a threat exists. And of course, that instinct can be protective; I mean, thank God we have that fight-or-flight response to protect us.
But the problem is that that instinct not always accurate. For people who have suffered real trauma, the brain and body “keep the score”, as the famous book by Bessel Van Der Kolk says, but if that trauma isn’t dealt with, it can keep the person—or the community—in a state of reactivity long after the threat is past. And the threat doesn’t have to be physical. It can very much be psychological. As we scale out from the small spheres we’ve lived in for most of human history, and externalize out from our own bodies into some disembodied network of ones and zeros that resemble neighbors but really aren’t, that reactivity can be messed with. We are more susceptible than ever to outside influences who would goad us into groups fit for their purposes instead of our own or our communities. It’s easy to play off of that threat reaction simply by invoking the the word “safety”. We want to be safe more than we want to be free. So we hear the trigger word, “safe”, and we nestle a little deeper into our fear.
But at some point, re-emergence has to happen, because no threat remains forever, and we humans only find our resilience by learning to live with and integrate risk. A culture without risk is by nature totalitarian. People appeal to ever-emerging threats that seem never to resolve, and to the justification of harsh measures in the name of collective safety. Opportunistic leaders know how to capitalize on crisis and fear, and to keep crisis and fear going in order to instantiate their own power. The thing is, though, those regimes can never last long. They collapse under their own weight. This is the story of every empire, every dictatorship whether big or small, whether the tyranny stays at a point of potential, or becomes actualized. At the point where leadership collects and collects at the top, it hardens and calcifies and ceases to become leadership. This makes the culture poised for revolution or collapse from within, or destruction from outside. And at the root of all of this is fear. As the saying goes: “Oderint dum metuant: Let them hate, so long as they fear.” And fear is one of the most powerful drivers of the historical machine.
I’d like to look at a specific example of historical rhyme, and that is comparisons to the Holocaust.
There’s something called “Godwin’s Law”, which states that the first person to invoke the Holocaust loses an argument. This is because the Holocaust is such a singular event in history: the purposeful, State-run, industrial murder of an entire population, namely, European Jews. We rightly learn about this in schools, because not only is it one of the most thoroughly documented events in history, but it is in the living memory of its survivors, men and women who can still tell us their personal stories. When this last generation of survivors passes away, as they will soon, that living witness will be relegated to recordings and books and films, and those of us who have been charged with the responsibility of keeping this history in the public consciousness feel the urgency of it.
As valuable as the Internet has been for getting Holocaust education resources out there, it’s obviously also meant that denial or minimization of the Holocaust is also easy to find, sometimes masquerading as legitimate information. Atlantic journalist Yair Rosenberg wrote this week about Twitter allowing full-throated Holocaust denial on its platform, spouted without fear by the supreme leader of Iran. For example:
Since antisemitism itself is based in conspiracy theories, it’s by nature self-reinforcing. Throw social media algorithms in there, which are designed to keep people spiraling deeper into their own interests and echo chambers, and you have a polarization along these lines as well: those of us who ground ourselves in historical facts, and those who ground themselves in an alternate universe of conspiracy.
But Holocaust comparisons are a little different than denial or minimization. When someone compares, let’s say, this or that leader to Hitler, or a law passed in 2022 America to the Enabling act of 1933, or express concern about vaccine passports creating a two-tiered society, we can bring up Godwin’s Law if we want to, but I’ve come to see it a little differently. These people are not denying the Holocaust at all. You could make an argument that, by comparing the freest society in history to Nazi Germany, it’s minimizing the unique evil of National Socialism, and you’d have a point. But I think you could also say that Holocaust comparisons actually show that people have integrated the message of “never again”. They’ve learned enough about the Holocaust to know that we want to do everything in our power to avoid repeating it, and they suspect that, given the right circumstances, they could become perpetrators. They’re responding to history’s rhymes.
We know that the Holocaust was wrong. We hate the murder—we get sad that Anne Frank was killed, for example—but what we don’t understand are the roots of the conspiracy theories that caused the murder, and so they continue to perpetuate, like zombies that refuse to die, and so what we’re seeing is a cyclical resurgence of antisemitism in the form of daylight beatings on the street, harassment on campuses, the movement of “antizionism”, which is just veiled hatred of Jews, and outright murder in shootings at synagogues in the United States, Europe and Israel. Because the conspiracy theories are not dealt with, we get historical rhymes.
What is it that we learn from the Holocaust? There are so, so many lessons, but at a base level, we see how fear can be wielded to cause us to dehumanize those we see as “other”, even if a short time ago we saw the same people as “us”. In my research for What the Night Sings, some of the most haunting photographs were of Jews being deported in broad daylight and marched down the streets of their cities, but looking one level deeper, there was a different horror—neighbors looking out their windows and watching dispassionately, none coming to their aid, some even cheering it on. Dehumanization is a gradual process that begins with a perceived threat to safety or stability, and the more out of control a society gets, the less likely we are to look inward at our contribution to it, and the more likely we are to externalize and displace the blame.
As Leah Rose says, dehumanization of our neighbor first obscures and then erases. We obscure by making a caricature of the person who either questions a given orthodoxy or makes a different choice, and make them identify themselves in some way so that they can be othered even further. Then the erasure can be expressed not only by rage—physical threats, getting in people’s faces—but by indifference. We excuse ourselves for calling for that person’s erasure, either by the restriction of their civil rights or the outright prevention of their full participation as citizens.
I’m going to read a short excerpt from evolutionary biologist Heather Heying’s Substack, Natural Selections, earlier this year:
“Atrocities don’t start with the visibly atrocious. If they started with what was visible and horrible, people wouldn’t let them happen. If they began in an obvious way, they would not, by and large, result in atrocities. No, all too often, atrocity starts by offering treats to some part of the population and withholding them from another. People who receive the treats are grateful for them, because who doesn’t like treats? People thus sated can then more easily ignore the fact that not everyone is getting treats.
Then, once the asymmetrical distribution of treats begins, it is easier to maintain the asymmetry by blaming those who don’t receive treats. Those people don’t deserve treats. Those people are dirty. They are sources of disease. They are non-compliant. They are, in the end, the other. They are not us. If they were us, they too would get treats. Ipso facto.”
That is what we’re responding to when we make—sometimes clumsy, sometimes mistaken—comparisons to historical atrocities. Far from minimizing, we’re showing that we’ve internalized the message, at least enough to let it unsettle us. We’re responding what we recognize as a step on the road to atrocity—how slippery the slope is from “obscuring" to “erasing”. We saw it in the Armenian Genocide. The Amritsar Massacre in India. The passage of Jim Crow laws in the American South. The up-close genocide of neighbors in Rwanda. The appalling massacre in 1989 in China in Tiananmen Square, not to mention the Chinese Communist Party’s current genocide of Uighurs and the suppression of citizens in Shanghai.
It is a perverse form of American exceptionalism, or you could say “western exceptionalism” or “modern exceptionalism” or even “religious or moral exceptionalism” to say that we, our group, our tribe, could not be capable of atrocity, or even of the kind of discrimination we judge in others. But let a particular kind of threat come our way, and I promise you, we will snap into that instinctive response that will suspend our morality in a moment. You actually have to fight for humanization, because it’s not natural. Loving your neighbor—let alone your enemy—is not natural.
Here’s Heather Heying again:
“We are living in a landscape of division, othering, and dehumanization. Some are offered treats, and not only do they readily accept those treats, they too often cannot be made to see that the treats themselves are being used to divide. Resistance is necessary. Whatever else you believe to be true, there is no version of reality in which acquiescence to the dehumanization of some part of society is okay. We must resist, in the ways that we can. To that end, let’s give them all a giant game of Whack-a-Mole to contend with.”
I often say that history is just the story of individuals making choices, and how those choices intersect. And so often, those choices are not conscious but based in instinctual reactions, both individual and collective. But once we become aware of what lies before us, we do have a conscious choice in how we move forward and what we participate in.
There is really no such thing as “the right side of history.” History doesn’t have sides. It is a record of past human choices. But we can observe the layers of choices and note the point at which they shift, the point at which the former becomes unstable and changes. We can judge those shifts by a few values:
Is this shift genuinely rising from the populace, or is it coming from institutional power, be it governmental, cultural or corporate?
At its core, does this movement or protest promote nonviolence or violence?
Do the institutions in power (governments, media, etc.) react to nonviolence with violence in any form—whether rhetorical, financial, reputational, judicial or physical?
So I’d encourage us all to go back and examine the through-line of fear that we’ve experienced in recent years. Notice when something feels familiar to you, and say: This feels like one of history’s rhymes. What is behind it? Begin to unpack it, and begin with yourself, and begin with today, in this moment. What makes you nervous or anxious? What do you keep checking your phone to find an answer for? Where did that come from? What’s the last bad thing that happened to you? Did it happen to you or to some abstract collective? Was it you that got attacked by a lion, someone you loved, or just someone you heard about? Go back a bit further. Go back before the pandemic. What was already causing you anxiety? What was your sphere talking about amongst themselves? What was making us fight each other? Go another layer deeper. And another. See what was making you afraid, who was lighting up the fear pathway in your brain, and in all of us together. That is where you will find the historical rhyme.
For the artist, history matters to us, whether we’re working in the field of historical considerations or current events, or whether we’re doing surface design for textiles or writing love songs. This is because the artist’s role is to stand on the margin and use his or her inborn sense-making apparatus, which is making art. In other words, we make art to make sense. Through that process, we bear witness to our own life in our own time, and build bridges for others to understand theirs. This is why institutions seeks to either co-opt the artist’s voice to make propaganda, or to suppression the artist’s voice through censorship. If the artist can recognize her own fear and resist it, she can push back against it and be a true witness and bridge.
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