Some New Year Musings (and Wishes)

Every year, as the old year draws to a close and the New Year begins, I think about what has been and what is yet to be. I generally agree with John Oliver about New Year, that “New Year’s Eve is like the death of a pet. You know it’s going to happen but somehow you’re never really prepared for how truly awful it is.” You would think simple common sense would tell us to stay home and ride it out. If not common sense, then shared experience.

Oliver provided excuses for people to escape New Year’s Eve, but we can’t escape the passage of time, as regulated by the human species. We’re all taking that train whether we want to or not. Yesterday was 2014. Today is 2015. And in two days, whether we like it or not, the 114th Congress will take over from the 113th. If one was bad, the other is likely to be worse. Republicans can find a reason not to show up, ad not to do any actual work, but we will suffer the consequences either way.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” is how Alphonse Karr put it in his journal, Les Guêpes (The Wasps), in 1849 . Literally, that’s “The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.” Definitely less catchy in English. Or maybe it just sounds less catchy because we haven’t been saying it that way for 34 years short of two centuries.

Wiktionary tell us that what Karr meant when he said this is that, “turbulent changes do not affect reality on a deeper level other than to cement the status quo.” Is this the same thing as Ecclesiastes 1:9’s, “there is nothing new under the sun?” or George Santayana’s “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it?” Actually, what Santayana (The Life of Reason, 1905) said was, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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Aldous Huxley had another way of putting it, that “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” Cosmopolitan man of the world Lawrence Durrell said that “history is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.”

Often, this can be applied to our own lives and our failure to learn from past mistakes, or the mistakes of others. This is a lesson our parents often try, futilely, to drive home. I will never forget my own father droning on and on with his (often cynical) advice, “I’m just trying to give you the benefit of my vast experience.”

I was bored with hearing that then. It seemed, at the least, controlling, and often (because this is now and that was then), irrelevant. Now, because the more things change the more they stay the same, I understand, and I try to do the same thing with my son. Less cynically, I hope, because I find cynics to be dreary, uninspiring people. Which is probably one of the reasons I am not the conservative I was raised to be by my parents.

I started reading. Questioning. Examining. Challenging all my assumptions. And I found the world to be quite a different place than I had imagined.

Of course, this sort of advice is most usually applied to world events, and the inability of our leaders to heed the lessons of the past. Fighting the next war with the last war’s weapons is often the least of their offenses.

Churchill, who had a way with words, told the House of Commons in 1935, when confronted with Hitler’s insatiable demands:

When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong-these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

A cynical view perhaps, that mankind cannot be taught, but there seems to be more than mere Republican “truthiness” behind such a statement. As Churchill said, we can look to history for examples. That is not to say we cannot learn the wrong lessons from history as well. Just because something was done does not mean it should be done again. What worked before might not work now. “The times they are a changin’,” as Bob Dylan put it in 1964, right on the cusp of some very big change indeed.

The times are still a changin’ of course. They always do. But when the wrong lessons are applied, or the right lessons misapplied, it is as bad as not learning anything at all, isn’t it? As when Republicans compare every enemy (even unions) to Hitler and warn against the dangers of “appeasement” – you know, because wars are so much better for mankind.

Yes, the leaders of France and Britain and others could have stopped Hitler and prevented the Second World War and saved millions of lives, if they had been able to see into the future. But they couldn’t then and can’t now. And we can’t. We can’t know what might have happened if Hitler had been stopped in 1935, when Churchill made that speech.

Perhaps Germany would have dissolved into chaos if the Nazi party had been thwarted, and Hitler toppled from power. Perhaps a worse war would have resulted. Hitler wasn’t the only dictator in Europe, after all. Keeping Hitler from devouring the Rhineland, and then Austria, and then the Sudetenland, etc, would not have kept Stalin from devouring and Finland’s Karelia (1939) and Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (1940), or Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (also in 1940).

You can read in Wikipedia that, “On August 27, 1928, both Romania and the Soviet Union signed and ratified the Kellogg-Briand Pact, renouncing war as an instrument of national policy.” Finland and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact in 1932, and did it again in 1934, to last ten years this time. It lasted half that.

We can see how well this sort of thing has worked. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now. Parents learn this lesson early on: never give an order you can’t enforce, never make a promise you can’t keep, and never threaten a punishment you can’t (or won’t) inflict. Appeasement by parents? Sure. All the time. Parents, like national leaders, are not above bribing their children. We learn to pick our fights early on, too. World leaders, particularly Republicans, could learn from parents.

I don’t expect the 114th Congress to reflect on these matters much, if at all. Where ideology and religion loom, reasons finds itself under the bus, because learning new things becomes a betrayal of all that stuff “I already know,” and if kids don’t want advice, politicians want it even less. The difference is, of course, that we might screw up our own lives, but people who run countries can screw up everyone’s lives.

I’m not given to New Year’s wishes or resolutions, but I do hope, as we start down the last two years of the Obama presidency to Election Day 2016, with, to paraphrase Tennyson, “Republicans to right of them, Republicans to left of them, Republicans in front of them, Volley’d and thunder’d,” that we might learn enough from the past to remember what happened last time the Republicans were in charge. Because our future, and the future of the world, could do with a lot less volleying and thundering.

And if I have a wish for 2015, it would be that. It is not appeasement to stop and think a little before we start shooting.

Photo from CQ Roll Call