Does History Repeat Itself?

I, too, occasionally find myself disagreeing with GKC, especially on his inordinate love for democracy and the Satanic French Revolution.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

It’s not often that I find myself disagreeing with G. K. Chesterton. This is just as well. One who often finds himself disagreeing with G. K. Chesterton will, more often than not, find himself proven wrong. And yet one who sometimes disagrees with him might sometimes be right. In the immortal words of Pliny the Elder, Nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit. No mere mortal is at all hours wise. Even Chesterton sometimes gets things wrong!

The assertion by Chesterton which has caused me to raise my eyebrows and, more to the point, raise an objection is his claim that history doesn’t repeat itself.

In his essay, “A Much Repeated Repetition,” published in the Daily News in 1904, Chesterton suggested that the person who first said that history repeats itself “must have been a man with a very dim and strange mind.” Although he conceded “a grain of veracity” in the phrase, he argued that “the correct way of stating the matter would be, ‘The Universe repeats itself, with the possible exception of history’.” He continues:

Of all earthly studies history is the only one that doesn’t repeat itself. This is the very definition of the divinity of man. Astronomy repeats itself; botany repeats itself: trigonometry repeats itself; mechanics repeats itself; compound long division repeats itself. Every sum if worked out in the same way at any time will bring out the same answer. But it is the peculiarity and fascination of the sums of history that with the most perfect calculation the sum comes out with a slight mysterious difference every time.

The point that Chesterton is making is that man has free will, the mark of what he calls “the divinity of man.” This means that men throughout history have the freedom to act in one way or the other. Their choices are not predetermined and, therefore, history is not a determinist science. This sems sensible enough but the problem is that men are not free to act in one way or the other after the event. It is simply not true to say that men throughout history “have freedom.” They do not have it; they had it. Once a decision has been made and acted upon, it has happened and has consequences. Having chosen to act in one way, we can’t turn back time and act in the other way instead. The past is an objective reality. It has happened in one particular way and can no longer happen in any other way. It is set in stone, which is why we learn objective lessons by the studying of it.

It is true that we can’t say with certainty what will happen in the future because it will depend on the choices we make. But we can be almost certain what will happen in the future based upon what we know about the past. We can know this because history does repeat itself. It is true, for instance, that history shows prideful choices preceding a fall. If this is true throughout history, we can be relatively certain that it will continue to be true in the future. It is equally true that, throughout history, selfishness, or what theologians call sin, has destructive consequences, whereas selflessness, what theologians call virtue, has positive consequences. The seven deadly sins are as deadly today and tomorrow as they were yesterday. The seven virtues – faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude – are as life-giving and life-affirming today and tomorrow as they were yesterday. These are moral laws governing the life of man in society which are as objectively real as are the laws of physics or mathematics.

Philosophically speaking, we can say that sin and virtue are the very substance of history, the perennial and essential “stuff” of which it is made, whereas the technological trappings of every age, which do indeed change, are merely accidental. Take, for instance, Napoleon’s march on Moscow in 1812 and the German march on Moscow in 1941. The weapons that were used had changed, technology having provided weapons of mass destruction to the Nazis which were beyond Napoleon’s wildest dreams, but the pride of both Napoleon and Hitler was essentially the same. Militarism is still militarism, irrespective of the weapons being used, and imperialism still rides roughshod over the territorial rights of peoples, irrespective of whether it is pursued with swords or drones. These political philosophies, rooted in pride, neglect the dignity of the human person with destructive consequences.

All sin neglects the dignity of the human person, which is why history is decidedly undignified! Insofar as we perceive authentic dignity in human history, it is because we are perceiving authentic sanctity. It is the saints who add the dignified element to history. This is true of the past. It is true of the present. And it will be true of the future. The reason is that history does indeed repeat itself.