Have you ever noticed that some of your more profound trails of thought so often occur in the shower?
As is my want, I was considering the relentless nature of Trump’s assaults on the media in the United States, thoughts triggered by the news that Putin’s approval rating has dropped from 80% to 64% following his unpopular attempts at pension reform. I was thinking of how difficult it is for a government to achieve such stratospheric ratings when the nation in question has freedom of press.
I then somehow ended up musing about the great empires past – from the Egypt, to Greece, Rome, the Habsburg, Ottoman, Portugese, Mongolian – before arriving at the one upon which the sun never set: the British Empire.
There’s an understandable if not natural tendency to judge historical events through a contemporary lens, which is, I feel, an interesting phenomenon. The British Empire, for example, powerful though it was, engaged frequently in conduct that would have been considered less than exemplary to many even back then I imagine, but we often take our condemnation to debatable extremes.
Take Captain Cook for instance. Did you know that in 1768, Cook set sail for 8 months towards Tahiti, in order to observe the passage of Venus? He was a prolific, daring scientist – just read this passage on a NASA website chronicling the event:
“The surviving crew of the Endeavor had circumnavigated the globe, catalogued thousands of species of plants, insects and animals, encountered new (to them) races of people, and hunted for giant continents. It was an epic adventure.”
Today, Cook is a somewhat controversial figure in Australia – a statue of his was recently vandalised in Melbourne, as his association with British imperialism and colonialism threatens to overshadow his scientific legacy.
This got me thinking – is there anything occurring today that our descendants will look back on in the future as backward and barbaric? And I was immediately struck – gun reform in the US.
Surely, if there is anything bafflingly awful enough to go down in history as a shameful facet of human existence, it will be the inability of American lawmakers to adequately – hell, even inadequately – address the prevalence of gun violence.
We are exposed today to more forms of media, across more platforms and in more abundance, than ever before – particularly in the West. We are bombarded with text, images, videos, soundbites, memes and gifs, all transmitted from source to screen in seconds – and yet with all of this information, there is total inaction on this issue.
That and Trump’s tweets, of course. I imagine his will be a dark legacy.
But the point is, we can look back on history and judge all we want – but when the situation is actually amongst us, it never seems so easy. It makes the early advocates for the abolition of slavery look like omniscient paragons, delivered to Earth through some act of divine providence.
All we can do is think critically – and imagine how history will judge us, when the time comes.
TJDempsey 