The Millennium's Most Intriguing People
Dear Dad,
I suspect some readers may be wondering what Kerensky, Kafka, and Prince
Lazar are doing at the Breakfast Table. I can only assure them that, in our
family, the breakfast table really is like this. OK, not always. In fact, not
often. But sometimes.
Your 1½-year-old grandson was sick and kept us up half the night (nothing
serious, luckily, and now he's tearing around the house like usual), so if this
were a real breakfast table, my conversation would not be rising very far above
occasional groans, grunts, and frantic gestures towards the coffee pot. This
being the case, I'm not sure how coherently I'll be able to respond to your
interesting thoughts about the living presence of history. But I'll try.
So: Speaking of the Defenestration of Prague (how's that for a conversation
opener?), one of the funniest things about it is that one of the surviving
victims--who fell on a dung-heap, not a haystack--was subsequently knighted,
and given the title Freiherr von Hohenfall, which translates roughly as "Lord
Highjump."
But more seriously, you suggest we talk about the Millennium. What has
interested me, as a professional historian, about the media's coverage of the
subject so far, has been how relatively little attention has been paid to the
history of the planet between 1000 and 2000. I expected far more in the way of
exhibitions, TV shows, special editions of magazines, polls commissioned on
"who were the most significant figures of the past 1,000 years," and so on,
particularly given the enormous interest in history that is demonstrated by
things like the success of the History Channel (history as a living presence,
in the living room). All right, there were the special issues of the New
York Times Magazine . But not as much else as I would have thought.
I suspect one reason is that a thousand years is just too long a period of
time. There is too much to consider. In one sense, the second millennium in
fact contains nearly everything we think of as "history," for even if we
arbitrarily define "history" as stopping in 1950, something like 99.9 percent
of all available historical source material dates from after the year 1000. I
would bet that all the extant written material from all human civilizations for
everything before A.D. 1000 could probably fit on a single DVD disk. It is
already possible to buy a single CD-ROM containing all the written material
available from classical Greece and Rome. This is the reason why the Times
Magazine series never really worked, and tended to veer off into
interesting digressions at best, and postmodern silliness at worst.
The difficulty of even generalizing about such a long period is probably the
same reason we are seeing very few predictions about what life is going to be
like in the year 3000. How can we even guess at such a thing? Making
predictions about the world in 2100 is a very uncertain business, as you
stressed on Tuesday, but it's fun, and you have at least a chance of being
right (and if some of your predictions involve the lengthening of the human
life span, and you hit the mark there, you may even still be around to see how
you did on the others). But the world in 3000? Even most science fiction is
still set within the next couple of centuries.
Another reason for the lack of attention, closer to my own concerns, is that
Western historians no longer have a simple story to tell about the history of
the second millennium--a single "meta-narrative," to use our jargon. A hundred
years ago, for most historians, and for the general public as well, the story
of the millennium was the story of the Triumph of the West. If you had taken a
poll of Americans in 1900 about the most important figures of the millennium,
I'm sure Columbus would have come at or close to the top, as an emblematic
figure of this triumph. But today, the picture is much more murky, the triumph
much more dubious. I suppose "political correctness" has some role in this loss
of focus. However, in my current grumpy and groggy state, I'm in absolutely no
mood to discuss political correctness. And anyway, more fundamental than
political correctness is surely the fact that the West has not exactly
distinguished itself in this last century of the millennium. Hitler was a child
of the West. So were Lenin and Stalin. The horror of World War I was a Western
horror. Mao and Pol Pot have a certain claim to being called honorary
Westerners, given who their teachers were. And now the century is coming to an
end with the Russian army leveling Grozny, as the paper reports this
morning.
Talk to you later,
Love,
David
