Does History Repeat Itself?
The idea that history repeats itself is nothing new. Many thinkers of old have conceptualized history with grand theories focusing on how it has an inherent repetitive nature — or of events themselves if you think of every historical event was once a present moment. Claude Henri de Rouvroy, a French socialist of the 18th century, characterized the past and future as period of organic growth followed by critical decay.[1] Oswald Spengler, a philosopher of the 19th and 20th century, saw history like the changing of seasons, inevitably repeating the same four seasons in a cyclical fashion.[2] The Ancient Roman poet Virgil, saw all events bound to repeat by some “deterministic fatality and in every particular, all those events that had followed that condition before”.[3] And last and most importantly, Thucydides — the man whom we owe as the founding father of Western history if there is such a thing — argued that history repeats itself.
All these thinkers, however beautiful formulations of their theories of history, are wrong. History does not repeat itself. If it would, then we would be reliving the same past events over and over again and would ultimately be reliving time itself perpetually — a Groundhog Day world. Humans would still in the ancient times fighting over the lands and gold of Babylon (or should I go further in time?) and prove Henry Ford right that “history is bunk”. Perhaps we would be homo erectus still foraging on the plains of the Africa. It all depends on where you think past starts and finishes which in a world that inevitably repeats itself would be arbitrary.
Of all those whom have attempted to theorize the cyclical nature of history, the most well-put and exact characterization was by Mark Twain when he famously said: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
All events do not sound off like broken records and Mark Twain said it best by proclaiming that they do rhyme, which he meant that there are similarly sounding situations that reoccur throughout history, but not the exact same sound — the definition of a rhyme. This is confirmed by most modern thinkers. As Will and Ariel Durant state in the Lessons of History, “history repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large”[4]. Carl Hempel, German writer and philosopher, thought of the rhymes of history as ‘covering laws’ in the sense that we can make general statements about events them repeat themselves throughout time. Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State, supported the idea of history rhyming with the proclamation that there is “no precise correspondence” but a “similarity of the problems being confronted” throughout the course of history.[5] There are a lot of rhymes to history. Wars are constant (although vary in nature, cause, and size), nations are created while others have failed (or go bankrupt), democracies fall into dictatorships, technological advances bring with them societal disruptions and — on a larger scale yet arguably also a grad scale — people still experience heartbreak. Joseph Schumpeter creative destruction still holds (just look of the S&P companies of today compared to 50 years ago). And the list goes on. In the details of events, history does not repeat itself but when taken in the ‘large’, they rhyme.
Despite this evidence, valid counterarguments can still be made — or if previous examples weren’t sufficient. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari himself an historian and professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, stated that we do deviate from the rhymes of history. For one, famine is no longer the widespread fear we have to contend with. Human population is now becoming mostly urbanized, where the urban population is now exceeding the rural count almost throughout the world and this gap is set to widen in the coming decades. The average living standard worldwide have greatly increased and extreme poverty is decreasing. Our technology’s computational power and possibility to connect humans is unprecedented — only the telegraph comes ‘remotely’ close for the former. However, these rebuttals can be debunked.
In the Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson explains the misguided belief by the founders of social media networks that their platforms — we can also include the computer and smartphone — were changing the world for the better. Niall proves the contrary. He observes the correspondence of problems with the creation of the printing press. Not only does the advent of the printing press and the personal computer follow the same price to quantity trajectories, as Niall details, they also had the same effect on humans. Armed with a fertile ground for the proliferation of ideas though the mass production of books, it was in the spirit of his fundamentalist interpretation of Catholicism, that Martin Luther went about printing books of his Ninety-five Theses in Germany to fellow Catholics wishing it would infect them with the same spirit, that of Lutheranism. What ensued was the warm embrace of new ideas in Germany (he became a saint there) while being proportionally hated by fellow Catholics where disputes and a deep rupture between the schools of thought emerged, sparking the Reformation and consequently, the Thirty Years Wars. Much like today, social media hasn’t created a worldwide harmonious community online but rather exacerbated tribalism and polarization — yet I am not insinuating wars will erupt other than Twitter beefs. Both the advent of the printing press and social media are both driven by the notion of birds of the same feather flock together, which literally does rhyme. Hence, it is not only apparent rhymes that repeat themselves, but the implicit ones only heard by the trained ear.
Thus, examples of rhymes throughout history are endless: we can affirm that history repeats itself ‘by and large’ which can be explicitly or implicitly observed. Most events will always be of the same nature, but to understand why and not just demonstrate it through the cherry-picking of examples, we need to once again to return to the great historians and philosophers.
Why History Repeats Itself
Thucydides, the father of history and author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, formulated it concisely: “events of future history will be of the same nature — or nearly so — as the history of the past, so long as men are men.” Will Durant echoed Thucydides’ thoughts in the Lessons of History by observing that: “society is founded not on ideals but on the nature of man, and the constitution of man rewrites the constitutions of states” for where he then proceeds to question if man’s constitution (human nature which are our fundamental instincts) dictating much of history has changed or not.[6] Will and Ariel Durant, a prolific historian couple who have dedicated their lives to the deep study of history, remarked that Greeks in Plato’s time behaved much like the modern French, and the Romans were no more different in natural tendencies than those of the British for then they put it:
“Means and instrumentalities change; motives and ends remain the same: to act or rest, to acquire or give, to fight or retreat, to seek association or privacy, to mate or reject, to offer or resent parental care.” [7]
These are the true constants of life and no matter how much technological advances or different instrumentalities through which they are expressed, it will only serve to reinforce our nature. We haven’t evolved biological, but they carefully observed that our evolution has been rather social.[8] We pass things on not by biological mutations but by economic, political, intellectual and moral innovation transmitted from generation to generation by “imitation, custom or education”.[9] Yet I argue that even then, our social innovations reflect our nature, for better or for worse. Even though we had strong regulations, sound institutions, highly networked central banks, a massive financial crisis still took place and wreaked havoc throughout the world in 2008 — history’s rhymes aren’t always pleasant to hear. We have developed modern welfare states and universal education for all and a government capable of immense economic redistributive capabilities yet economic inequality persists and populism still sprouts like weeds in a garden, as was such in the age of Plutarch in Ancient Athens when rampant inequality drove up populism to the brink revolutionary appeals. Plutarch wrote that it took a courageous politician to go against the established elites seeking to preserve their riches by redistributing the wealth. Populism was then vanquished. We have much more advanced economic, political and social institutions than those of the Ancient Athenians but we are still plagued by the corresponding problems.
References
[1] Durant, Will & Ariel. The Lessons of History
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Page 88
[5] Ferguson, Niall. Henry Kissinger: The Idealist
[6] Durant, Will & Ariel. The Lessons of History
[7] Ibid. 34
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
