George Santayana was wrong — remembering the past won’t always protect us
In these dark times, historians have one deceptively simple and immensely difficult job to perform
A makeshift gallows with a noose is seen at the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021. Photo by Getty Images
Robert Zaretsky November 4, 2024
Soon after I got my doctorate in history, an aunt surprised me with a marble name plate the size of a toaster oven. Engraved across the front was “Dr. Robert Zaretsky.” When my aunt subsequently learned that I had hidden her gift in a closet, I tried to make light of it. In case of a medical emergency that called for a real doctor, I blurted, I could always pretend I was an anesthesiologist who knocked out patients by lecturing on economic policy under the French Fourth Republic. (For the historical record, my aunt didn’t laugh.)
But a funny thing has happened over the past few years. With a different but equally existential emergency posed by Donald Trump to our collective well-being, historians find themselves increasingly on call to share their expertise. We appear on television and radio interviews, podcasts, and op-ed pages, convinced that by helping others to remember the past we will not repeat it.
But experience has repeatedly given the lie to George Santayana’s famous quote. If we do remember the past, it most often helps us to make new mistakes. Because history is an interpretation of past events that, by their very nature, are unique, the drawing of lessons or the making of historical comparisons is, at best, a wobbly enterprise. Think of it as less a true science than it as informed speculation.
But if history does not have lessons to teach — especially at such critical moments like now — do we really need teachers (and writers) of history? When I ask myself this question, I often come up with Tony Judt as an answer.
Next year will mark 15 years since this admirable historian passed away in 2010 after a courageous struggle against ALS. Born in London to Jewish parents whose families had fled the pogroms in East Europe, Judt trained as a historian in Great Britain and France. He eventually became one of the 20th century’s most influential specialists in modern French and European history, ending his career as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European History at New York University,
What set Judt apart from most of his peers, however, was that while he was of the academy, he did not remain in the academy. He believed that historians who wrote for one another were derelict in the duty towards the public. While a medievalist, he allowed, might not have a civic obligation to speak on current events as an historian — though given the repeated claims by a former president that he is a victim of “witch hunts,” perhaps the medievalists need to speak up — this was not the case for modern historians.
In the epilogue to Postwar, his best-selling and prize-winning account of Europe since 1945, Judt insisted upon the critical role that future assigns to historians. Since the past is impossible to remember as it truly was, he writes, “it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn’t.” While this hardly matter for many events, it dearly matters for many others — especially, Judt notes, events like the Shoah. Hence the critical importance of the historian. “Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. Most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive.”
The duty of discomforting and disrupting a society that ignores history is burdensome. In his aptly titled The Burden of Responsibility, Judt reflects on the lives of three French intellectuals — Léon Blum, Albert Camus and Raymond Aron — who assumed this largely thankless task. Borrowing a phrase from Hannah Arendt, Judt describes them as “men in dark times.” Though they differed on questions of policies and politics, they were joined by a “shared quality of moral (and, as it happens, physical) courage and a willingness to take a stand not against their political or intellectual opponents — everyone did that, all too often — but against their own side.”
We applaud such courage and clarity in the actions of Never Trumpers. Applause comes less easily, though, when some on our side nevertheless describe the actions of the Israeli military in Gaza as tantamount to war crimes. (Last week, the headline to the lead editorial in Haaretz, devoted to this same subject, declared: “If It Looks Like Ethnic Cleansing, It Probably Is.”) Yet the chances are excellent that Judt, who occasionally contributed to Haaretz, would rightly be among those who insist upon this.
One need not agree with Judt’s controversial argument for a single binational state for Jews and Palestinians to accept his prescient analysis of Israel’s policies in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. When asked about these policies in an interview in the Atlantic just one month before his death, Judt replied, “Israel was always very good at presenting the argument from ‘self-defense’s even when it was absurd. I think that Israel’s successful defiance of international law for so long has made Jerusalem blind and deaf to the seriousness with which the rest of the world takes the matter.”
A slight tweaking of Judt’s observation captures the situation we now confront in our own country. Trump’s successful defiance of our laws and norms for so long has made too many of us numb or indifferent to the seriousness with which we need to take the matter. It is the duty of historians, Judt believed, to explain why the moment is so serious. Not by theorizing, not by polemicizing, not by hyperventilating, but by simply describing. In his book-length conversation with the historian Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, Judt distills the historian’s job: It is to “make clear that a certain event happened. We do this as effectively as we can, for the purpose of conveying what it was like for something to have happened to those people when it did, where it did, and with what consequences.”
This is a bracingly unfashionable view of historiography, or the writing of history. Though fluent in modern and post-modern schools of thought, Judt had no truck with historians who, rather than describing the past and then describing it again — Judt rightly spoke of the historian’s task as Sisyphean — instead spent their days theorizing about describing the past. “A scholar of the past who is not interested in the first instance in getting the story right,” he warned, “may be many virtuous things but a historian is not among them.”
In the lead-up to the Second Iraq War, Judt was one of the rare public intellectuals to question the justifications forwarded by the Bush administration. It takes a historian to recreate not just the flimsy basis for these justifications, but also the fears and frenzy stirred by these claims, creating an atmosphere that transformed principled opposition into treasonous anti-Americanism. It was no easy task to persist in the face of such hostility. Yet, as Judt declares, “each time a fool declares that a Saddam Hussein is Hitler reincarnate, it is our job to enter the fray and complicate such simple rubbish. An accurate mess is far truer to life than elegant untruths.”
It will always be the historian’s duty to get the story of Jan. 6, 2021 right. For now, it is easy to tell this story, one that accurately describes how then-President Trump urged thousands of followers to march to the Capitol and overthrow the election results. If this week’s election returns Trump to office, it may become less easy to tell this story. Not necessarily because one would face imprisonment, but because one would face indifference and lassitude. Why relive these events if all we wish to do is simply live our lives?
One response — a powerful one, to my mind — is that life would be terribly impoverished by ignorance of the past. It is not that we risk making the same mistakes if we forget the past, but instead that we risk making our lives thinner and shallower by doing so. But a different kind of response is no less compelling. As Judt claims in his conversation with Snyder, a “well-organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves. Historians have a special role in this, probably a more important role than moralists.”
Claiming Camus as one his influences, Judt might have embraced as his own the professional credo pronounced by Doctor Rieux, the narrator in Camus’s novel The Plague. In his battle against the bubonic plague that had struck his city, Rieux reminds himself that “what he had to do was to clearly recognize what had to be recognized.” This, he continues, is where “certainty lay, there in the daily work…The main thing was to do his job well.” What Rieux says about medical doctors also applies to historical doctors. Regardless of what occurs on election day, the historian will still be duty-bound to do their job well by recognizing what had to be recognized.
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