The main attraction of such a canon is that it would convey to the young the atemporal and arrhythmic nature of Clio. The Muse of Time cannot, by definition, be held hostage to one's homemade chronology. It's quite possible that from time's own point of view the murder of Caesar and World War II occurred simultaneously, in reverse order, or not at all. By throwing many interpretations at any given event simultaneously, we may not hit the jackpot, but we will develop a better grasp of the slot machine itself. The cumulative effect of using such a canon may have peculiar consequences for our psyche; but it surely will improve our defenses, not to mention our metaphysics.
Every discourse on history's meaning, laws, principles, and whatnot is but an attempt to domesticate time, a quest for predictability. This is paradoxical, because history nearly always takes us by surprise. Come to think of it, predictability is precisely what precedes a shock. Given the toll it normally takes, a shock can be regarded as a sort of bill one pays for comforts. The benefit of hindsight waxing metaphysical will explain this preference as an echo of time's own tick-tock monotony. Regrettably, time also has a tendency to sound shrill, and all we've got to echo that with is mass graves.
In this sense, the more one learns history, the more liable one is to repeat its mistakes. It's not that many a Napoleon wants to emulate Alexander the Great; it's just that rationality of discourse implies the rationality of its subject. While the former may be possible, the latter is not. The net result of this sort of thing is self-deception, which is fine and absorbing for a historian but is often lethal for at least a part of his audience. The case of the German Jews is a good example, and perhaps I shoulddwell on it a bit. Above all, however, what tricks us into making mistakes by learning from history is our growing numbers. One man's meat may prove to be a thousand men's poison, or else it may prove not to be enough. The current discourse on the origins of black slavery is a good illustration.
For if you are black, unemployed, live in a ghetto, and shoot drugs, the precision with which your well-heeled religious leader or prominent writer apportions the blame for the origins ofblack slavery, or the vividness with which they depict the nightmare it was, does little to alter your plight. It may even cross your mind that were it not for that nightmare, neither they nor you would be here now. Perhaps this sounds preferable, but the genetic scramble in such a case would be unlikely to end in oneself. Anyhow, what you need now is a job, also some help to kick the habit. A historian won't help you with either. In fact, he dilutes your focus by supplanting your resolve with anger. In fact, it may cross your mind—well, it crosses mine—that the entire discourse on who's to blame might be simply a white man's ploy to prevent you from acting as radically as your condition requires. Which is to say, the more you learn from history, the less efficiently you are likely to act in the present.
As a data bank for human negative potential, history has no rival (save, perhaps, the doctrine of original sin, which is, come to think of it, that data's succinct summary). As a guide, history invariably suffers from numerical inferiority, since history, by definition, doesn't procreate. As a mental construct, it is also invariably subject to the unwitting fusion of its data with our perception of it. This leaves history as a naked force—an incoherent, nonetheless convincing, animistic notion; between a natural phenomenon and Divine Providence; an entity that leaves a trail. As we proceed, we better give up our high Cartesian pretenses and stick to this vague animistic notion for want of anything more clear-cut.
Let me-repeat: whenever history makes her move, she catches us unawares. And since the general purpose of every society is the safety of all its members, it must first postulate the total arbitrariness of history, and the limited value of any recorded negative experience. Second, it must postulate that, although all its institutions will strive to obtain the greatest measure of safety for all its members, this very quest for stability and security effectively turns society into a sitting duck. And third, that it would, therefore, be prudent for society as a whole, as for its members individually, to develop patterns of motional irregularity (ranging from erratic foreign policy to mobile habitats and shifting residences) to make it difficult for a physical enemy or a metaphysical enemy to take aim. If you don't wish to be a target, you've got to move. "Scatter," said the Almighty to His chosen people, and at least for a while they did.
One of the greater historical fallacies that I absorbed with my high-school ink was the idea that man evolved from a nomad to a settler. Such a notion, echoing rather nicely both the intent of the authoritarian state and the realm's own highly pronounced agrarian makeup, immobilizes one completely. For nailing one down, it is second only to the physical comforts of a city dweller, whose brainchild this notion actually is (and so is the bulk of historical, social, and political theories of the last two centuries: they are all the products of city boys, all are essentially urban constructs).
Let us not go overboard: it is obvious that, for a human animal, settled existence is preferable and, given our growing numbers, inevitable. Yet it is quite possible to imagine a settled man hitting the road when his settlement is sacked by invaders or destroyed by an earthquake, or when he hears the voice of his God promising him a different place. It is equally possible to imagine him doing so when he detects danger. (Isn't God's promise an articulation of a danger?) And so a settled man gets moving, becomes a nomad.
It is easier for him to do this if his mind is not stamped all over with evolutionary and historical taboos; and as far as we know, the ancient historians, to their great credit, produced none. Becoming a nomad again, a man could think of himself as imitating history, since history, in his eyes, was itself a nomad. With the advent of Christian monotheism, however, history had to get civilized, which it did. In fact, it became a branch of Christianity itself, which is, after all, a creed of community. It even allowed itself to be subdivided into B.C. and a.d., turning the chronology of the B.C. period into a countdown, from the fossils on, as though those who lived in that period were subtracting their age from birth.
I'd like to add here—because I may not have another opportunity—that one of the saddest things that ever transpired in the course of our civilization was the confrontation between Greco-Roman polytheism and Christian monotheism, and its known outcome. Neither intellectually nor spiritually was this confrontation really necessary. Man's metaphysical capacity is substantial enough to allow for the creeds' coexistence, not to mention fusion. The case ofjulian the Apostate is a good example, and so is the case of the Byzantine poets of the first five centuries a.d. Poets on the whole provide the best proof of the compatibility, because the centrifugal force of verse often takes them well beyond the confines of either doctrine, and sometimes beyond both. Were the polytheism of the Greeks and Romans and the monotheism of the Christians really that incompatible? Was it necessary to throw out of the window so much of B.c.'s intellectual achievement? (To facilitate the Renaissance later?) Why did what could have been an addition become an alternative? Could it be true that the God of Love could not stomach Euripides or Theocritus, and if He couldn't, then what kind of stomach did He have? Or was it really, to use the modern parlance, all about power, about taking over the pagan temples to show who was in charge?
Perhaps. But the pagans, though defeated, had in their pantheon a l\l use of History, thereby demonstrating a better grasp of its divinity than their victors. I am afraid that there is no similar figure, no comparable reach, in the entire well- charted passage from Sin to Redemption. I am afraid that the fate of the polytheistic notion of time at the hands of Christian monotheism was the first leg of humanity's flight from a sense of the arbitrariness of existence into the trap of historical determinism. And I am afraid that it is precisely this universalism in hindsight that reveals the reductive nature of monotheism—reductive by definition.