Facing Our Past

Perhaps the one unmistakable truth of the human condition is that we all live in the past. We are born in a place to inhabitants of that place, and we learn the things we are meant to learn. We may love or hate our past or be indifferent to it, but it never changes, ceaselessly shaping who we are and how we think. Even when we reject our past we are still living in it. We can be repelled only by the things we know, and the things we know define our passions. To paraphrase Andre Malraux, we despise our nation’s past in very national ways. A German hates his nation’s past as only a German can. So too a Russian or a Nigerian. We all live with what the past created, but when we take issue or arms against our past, that is perhaps when the past has its strongest hold on us. The problem with our past is that it is us, and that it is thus flawed. That doesn’t mean we don’t change; humanity is dynamic that way. But there is no generation that does not see the past differently from those who lived it, nor is […]