The End of History

The way history is taught, everything is simply presented as fact. Every event inevitable. The steady march of time takes on a heavy sense of fate. The course was never in doubt. The ending written in advance.

Of course, that is definitely not the case. No one would have predicted the rise of Rome during the Hellenic era. While later writers wrote that Rome was the successor of the great Greek civilizations that came before it, that was more of a tacked on fiction than anything else. Yet its legacy lives on today, immortalized by their marks on modern European language and culture. Every great nation on the continent claimed bits of Rome's glory as their own.

In 1770, none of the British American colonists would have guessed that just 6 years later, they would be declaring independence from their overseas rulers. Even fewer would dare gamble that the new government would take representational democracy to a whole new level and forgo a monarch, unlike almost every other nation in Europe. Yet by 1790, independence was won, a constitution was written, and the world was changed.

However, despite the great uncertainty surrounding any event in history, all that has come to pass is usually taught as a series of immutable events. The rough spots are smoothed over, giving a false veneer of perfection.

Since everything seems to have wrapped up so perfectly, some may even forgo thinking about current events. The cold war is over! The good guys won! McDonald's and KFC for everyone! Just a few small issues like malaria and global warming will be fixed shortly, and then there's nothing more to worry about! Of course, anyone paying attention will realize there are still more problems to be had.

Even then, by the time it comes to think about continuing history, there is always a disjunction between the pretend perfection of the past and the messiness of the present. What we had been taught were the perfect solutions to past problems are applied with disastrous results to new issues. It seems like the living are less competent and all knowing than our wise predecessors. After all, they solved everything perfectly! The fact that everything seems so uncertain and dire to us must mean that everything will come crashing down. We have arrived at the end of history.

This perspective does no one any good. Glossing over the faults and uncertainty of the past just leaves us scared and confused when confronting the future. Not everything that has happened was meant to happen. Not all the issues that confront us are unsolvable, even if no one has ever solved them before. We must brush away the illusion that history was perfect, embrace the fragility of fate's path, and fight to harness it into a better future.