Over at the Atlantic, there's an interesting interview with Cullen Murphy, the author of Are We Rome?, about the past, present, and future of America. I haven't read the book, so I won't offer any comment on his thesis, but the interview did get me thinking about a point I try to make in many of my history lectures.
Far too often we tend to think of history as a discrete set of events, moments of great importance that "changed everything" separated by long periods with little or no important change. That view of the past certainly makes it easier to study - and perhaps, more importantly, to teach - but it does a grave injustice to the people who lived through the events we are trying to understand. Human history is, for the most part, the story of average people doing their best to get by in the face of varying degrees of hardship and difficulty. Some of those people had more influence on the general course of events, others less. But even those who we hold up as supremely important were for the most part simply making things up as they went along.
Life isn't a series of events; it is a process. And because none of us can predict the future, all of us are in some sense just muddling through, doing our best to guess which direction to head when we hit a fork in the road. Down the road our decisions might or might not make sense, but at the time they really are just our best guess. Educated guesses, of course, but guesses nonetheless.
When we study history, we know how things turned out for the people we are studying. But at the time that history was being lived, no one knew how things would end. The Founders of the Roman Republic, just like the Founders of the American one, didn't know if they would succeed or fail. The Roman leaders in the third century, just like the American leaders in the twenty-first century, were convinced that their republic would last forever. And as the dominance of their Republic came to an end, no doubt there were many who were convinced that their present was filled with nothing more than a series of momentary difficulties. As Murphy explains, no matter how it might appear in hindsight, the fall of Rome was a long, slow process, one that was lived on a day to day basis by millions of people across the empire. To us it appears to have passed in the blink of an eye, but to them it was lived in the slow motion experience of day to day life.
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