Giving Thanks in Light of History
Musings of things to be thankful for
It’s Thanksgiving in the United States this week. There’s a lot I think about to be thankful for. One thing on that list is the good books I’ve read that have built up my imagination, but as I think through history, there’s a lot more to be thankful for.
I enjoy history. I write about it a lot because it fascinates me so much to read about, to talk about, to write about, and to just imagine. But - all the same, there’s a lot about it that I’m thankful I’m not actually living through.
From one angle, “may you live in interesting times” is proverbially a curse. That’s quite true. But beyond that, there’re a lot of specific things that come to mind. There’re a lot more too, - this’s just what comes to my mind while writing - and we can dig deeper into any one of these.
But to start with, several material things come to mind: food, housekeeping, and medicine.
To start with - I recently read a book about cooking, and as I’m writing this, it’s right after I ate dinner. I cooked it for myself, in an electric oven that I could turn on by turning a knob without needing to chop firewood and nurse the fire to an even heat. In that oven, I roasted meat and vegetables I’d bought from the store, preserved over long distances and times by modern technology.
Most people throughout history didn’t have these things. Without them, storing and cooking food can easily be a full-time job. When premodern women are stereotyped as spending so much time with food, that’s because they needed to. When kings’ great feasts were talked of, that’s because they were on a scale most people simply couldn’t do. There was a reason - or, several reasons - most premodern city-dwellers didn’t cook their own food. Even aside from how it would be too expensive to fire up an oven or hearth, it would also simply take too long. Going out to eat every day has a long history. But, I’m happy to live in an age where I can cook for myself.
What’s more, I’m happy for all the delicious ingredients our modern globalized culture has made available to me. Even several decades ago, the United States wouldn’t have had the variety of foods and sauces I enjoy. A lot of people have grumbled about how cultural interchange can’t be reduced to food - but that’s one part of the interchange that I very much enjoy.
Beyond food and housekeeping, there’re many other modern conveniences such as electric lights and necessities such as medicine. At Worldcon earlier this year, I half-seriously asked my friend whether my glasses made me transhuman! On one level, that exposed the fuzziness of the Worldcon speaker’s definition, but on another level, that shows how wondrous modern medical devices are.
I might not even be alive today without it - premodern childhood mortality statistics are nightmarish, and even in the 1930’s with modern sanitation, the lack of antibiotics made it still high. I can’t point to any specific childhood infection that would’ve killed me... but because modern medicine nipped them in the bud, I wouldn’t be able to.
There’re many other material conveniences I could list; I haven’t even mentioned telephones, cars, the Internet, or so much more. “I’m thankful to live with all these things” is a very good conclusion, but it’s also an easy conclusion to come to from history. And that feels to me like a challenge; I want to dig deeper into history and come to more complicated conclusions.
About on the same level is being thankful to live at a time and place when your religion is known, and you’re free to practice it. I’ve heard this frequently from my fellow Christians. It’s also very true - but also easy to think of.
One step beyond it is “I’m thankful to live at a time where inventing things that dramatically change people’s lives is something we can imagine.” There were many times when that wasn’t the case. I am thankful for that - but as I dig into history, there’s more to realize.
On this same level, it’s very true for someone to say they’re thankful to live at a time when they don’t suffer from such severe racial or gender or religious discrimination. That’s also true - less true than some people might think (because the past wasn’t as uniformly discriminatory as many people think), but in many places true. But it’s also a quick conclusion to come to.
I’m thankful to live at a time when the world is visible. In the Middle Ages, travelers’ tales and legends were valued because there was often nothing else known about far-off lands. Sir John Mandeville could’ve been lying - we in the modern age know he often was - but people then couldn’t know it and often couldn’t know anything else about the far-off reaches of Asia without looking at him. Even in the early modern age, Marco Polo’s Travels was a bestseller because there was no other account of contemporary China or Asia anywhere near as detailed.
Just the other day, I was curious about the politics of New Zealand. I looked it up online and had an answer in a few minutes (much of which was skimming through the relevant articles to get to the part I was interested in). Six hundred years ago, that would’ve been impossible.
Even fifty years ago, it would’ve been much more difficult. Phone operators and research librarians were trained to answer many questions... but many other questions would’ve required digging up physical books and keeping track of references and hoping you had the right titles. Researchers haunted university libraries because that was where their material was... or, at least, they could inter-library loan it from other institutions across the country if you knew the right titles to ask.
I’m not saying it would’ve been impossible, a hundred years ago, for me to study history and write this blog like I’m doing. (Of course, it would’ve been something like a magazine column.) But it would’ve been much more difficult. I probably would’ve had to spend many evenings at the local university library and limited my scope to what they had on the shelves.
What’s more, I’m thankful to live in an era where people value kindness and charity more than many eras.
Someone might object, pointing to all the ways people still fall short - whether in politics, in general social relations, in personal relationships, or any number of other places. That’s quite true. But when I think of how bearbaiting and other animal fights were commonplace three hundred years ago, or how charity was barely practiced at all in many places, I’m reminded of how far we’ve come. In ancient Rome, for instance, people would sometimes give gifts to fellow-citizens of a particular city or members of a society, but charity to foreign strangers was almost unheard of until the rise of Christianity. Or, two hundred fifty years ago, charity had declined in many countries to almost that same point. I’m picking random eras of history here, but when I think about history in this context, they’re some of the examples that come to mind.
From another angle - in 1826, prominent abolitionist William Wilberforce resigned from Parliament saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. Nowadays, that would be instantly seen as pablum; it’s something every politician says because everyone agrees that in theory it would be a legitimate reason. But at the time, nobody had said it before Wilberforce. Everyone was shocked that he could actually value his family life so highly.
This shows up many places, including in our government. People may rightly point to all the ways in which we fall short, or people might argue over whether the government is truly valuing it in the right way. But when I think of how the Romans quite openly ran their empire to profit themselves, or when historians sum up tax policy as squeezing as much from the peasants as wouldn’t outright kill them... I conclude we’ve come a long way.
Talking about government, finally, makes me think of war and peace.
As an American man, I was legally obligated to submit my name and address to the Selective Service when I turned 18. They sent me back a confirmation postcard, and that was that. We haven’t had any other system since 1973. Relatedly, we haven’t had any invasions of the United States since at least 1942 (and that was only the Aleutian Islands).
That feels normal to us, but when we compare to expectations throughout history, that’s an aberration.
In most of history, a country would’ve been expected to be invaded multiple times over someone’s lifetime. A young man probably would’ve been called out for the military in one way or another, and quite possibly died in battle. When the Greek poets talk about the horrors of cities stormed by the invader, they’re talking about things much of their audience would’ve personally seen.
When Europe circa 1880 was avidly reading invasion literature talking about the horrors of war coming upon you unprepared, and the urgent need to prepare for war - that feels unusual to us now, but it was very usual throughout history.
And I’m thankful to not be in that sort of world.
There are downsides, of course. For example, having more material conveniences means we don’t need to depend on each other so much, but that also means we’re not forced to be as close to each other so we often aren’t as close to each other. Having the world more visible almost certainly helped fragment the common culture of America and other countries to a real extent. But despite the downsides - I wouldn’t give up any of these benefits.
When I dig into history, there’s a lot I admire there. There’re many things I wish I could’ve seen, or wish I could’ve somehow been part of. But there’s much else that makes me thankful I am where and when I am.
And then I remember I’m part of the same grand story of the history of the world.