What I Think Happened: An Underresearched History of the Western World

INTRODUCTION:

WHAT IS THIS BOOK, AND WHY IS IT A BOOK?

The student of history is like a man going into a warehouse to buy clothes or carpets.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

History repeats itself is, itself, an unnecessarily oft-repeated phrase. We’ve all heard it said, and have probably all said it ourselves at some point; almost always when we didn’t have anything better to say. The original aphorism is generally attributed to Spanish-American pragmatist George Santayana, who more specifically said, Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. And I, for one, have always found this to be a terribly flawed, if not also poorly worded, idea. Because frankly, if remembering the past really does teach us anything, it’s that historically speaking, the one thing we can always be counted on to do is to constantly and unabashedly repeat all of our mistakes. And so far, remembering that we constantly do that hasn’t ever stopped us from doing it some more.

Or at the very least, we have to repeat these mistakes an embarrassing number of times before we finally go, Hey, actually, what if slavery really is a terrible idea though? or You know what? I think now is as good a time as any to stop assuming that odd women are in league with the devil and setting them on fire. I liked it for the first 700 years, but now it just seems rude. And even then, even when we do learn, we still have to have at least one war about it, or take things way too far before we sheepishly pump the brakes.¹ Or, as often as not, learning just means we’ve found sleeker, more acceptable ways to exert the same cruelties and prejudices we’ve been carrying around since it was okay to own a human being or drown women who understood medicine. Which is all to say—and with no disrespect to everyone’s favourite turn of-the-century metaphysical naturalist—until we can enroll all of humanity in group analysis and collectively learn how to stop behaving exactly like we always have, Santayana’s point is well-taken (not really), but a tad moot.

Now, before you get upset with me, know that I am not suggesting that we just sit back and let ourselves destroy each other because, well, what can you do? And I’m certainly not saying that while knowing full well that I am a privileged person, who lives in a safe place, and who can afford to be hilariously philosophical about terrible things. I point it out only because I believe that we do have plenty to learn from history, but I don’t know that it always has to be so academic. There is something to be said for looking at it psychologically, philosophically, and frankly, a bit more casually.

Of course, this is a very convenient argument for me to be making in the introduction to my humour book about history, which very clearly states on the cover how overwhelmingly under-qualified I am to write about it in any kind of authoritative way. But this brings me ever so smoothly to some ever-repeating, mistake-riddled history of my own—though, unlike all of the rest of all of humanity from forever, this time I am going to learn, and this time it will be different. So it’s fine.

In 2005, I graduated from high school on the High Honour Roll, with enthusiastic praise from my history, English, and other similarly subjected teachers (math and science are clearly the devil’s work, because I am very bad at them). I had entry into whatever university I wanted to attend.² I had glowing letters of recommendation from my mother’s most powerful friends, all therapists.³ I was the bloody valedictorian, for pete’s sake!⁴ So naturally, I believed that I was desperately smart and quite simply destined for towering heights of academic greatness.

I wasn’t. I just had access to ADD medication and was at a very attentive private school—the classes were small, the teachers wanted to be there, and I am easily one of the best bullshitters I know⁵—at worst I was going to fail upwards. And I mean, sure, I was still smart enough to take advantage of my situation and succeed upwards, but that’s like I-mostly-understood-someof-Mullholand-Drive smart, not I-have-a-PhD-in-Early-Modern-History smart. Or a Masters. Or, in my case, almost not even an undergrad. Of course, my extreme seventeen-year-old confidence—braces-free and already partway through reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for FUN⁶—did not lead me to question myself in any way whatsoever. This will be a recurring problem for me. It’s also why I picked the most esoteric school I could find with the most academic curriculum I could think of: the Foundation Year Program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Rather than take four or five different courses in the first year, students in the program embark on a comprehensive and chronological course of study that covers essentially the entire history of Western philosophy in one school year (starting in September with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first ever written text, and going all the way to 1990’s realist masterpiece The Buddha of Suburbia by late April). Now, anyone’s attentions are bound to wax and wane when they are taking in this volume of information. But by the Renaissance, which we didn’t even reach until after Christmas, I should have realized that I was waning a lot more than everyone else was waxing. By this point in my academic career (less than six months in), I was devoting most lectures to scribbling notes on a play I was writing, which I would go on to direct and produce later that year in the university’s student theatre dungeon. It was called The Blacks, the Gays and the Jews, and that’s not a lie. That was the title.⁷ The fact that by the time the syllabus in my first year reached the sixteenth century, I was already deeply checked out and busy with a farcical play, should have been an indication that I was in the wrong line of unpaid work. But of course, I don’t learn.

So naturally, at the end of the school year (well after The Blacks, the Gays and the Jews had played to reviews), when it came time to pick my major, instead of selecting something casual and silly, like English, I again played into my own hands and chose the most rigorous Combined Honours double major that it was possible to take. Oh, and I chose it based on a single Goethe lecture that I had remembered sort of enjoying, possibly because it was one of the only lectures I truly listened to out of roughly 170. So, thanks to the always methodical and incredibly well-thought-out decisions I am so famous for, I—along with literally only twelve other people in my class of 350—chose Kings’ most special and least popular Honours program: Early Modern Studies in a combined major with History. Eat your heart out, Icarus—I coasted through high school so now I must fly directly into the sun.

The program was (and still is) excellent. And, in spite of myself, I did manage to retain a few things here and there. All in all, however, I was an unequivocally atrocious student—charming, chatty, and well-liked by my professors, but also lazy, undisciplined, and quite possibly unable to complete a single reading, or turn in a single paper on time in five full years of post-secondary study. Yes, I said five. Oh, it was a four-year program, but not for old, fake it till it magically transforms into a coherent fifteen-page dissertation differentiating ‘Empirical and Transcendental Understandings of the Self in Response to the Critique of Pure Reason and the German Enlightenment’ Rosen. No, upon discovering that there really are no Coles Notes to get you through all 600 pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I finally began to acknowledge that I might possibly be slightly in over my head.⁸ But I then immediately ignored this intuition and continued on with the fallout from my unachievable decision.

Did I mention that when you do a Combined Honours Program in Early Modern Studies and History that you have to write an Honours thesis? Because you do. In fact, it was one of the only undergrad programs in the entire university in which you had to write an Honours thesis, because it was entirely designed to prepare you for the graduate program you were certainly intending to pursue if you had decided to do, of all the options available to you, a Combined Honours Program in Early Modern Studies and History. Otherwise, why on earth would you be doing it? Surely not merely on an overconfident whim.

When I began my final year of study (the first time) and it came time to choose a subject for my thesis, I did the only logical thing I could do at this point. I remained fixated on that one lecture I had fixated on in my freshman year and boldly declared that my dissertation would cover "The Dramaturgical Implications of Goethe’s Faust. When I pitched this insanely humourless and hastily thought-out topic to my thesis adviser (who was also the chair of the German department and a globally celebrated Goethean scholar), she described it as certainly a very niche read of Faust, but not necessarily in a good way." She then, somewhat desperately, asked me if I at least intended to study the text in its original German.⁹

After a grueling year of realizing that I had somehow managed to get through the previous three years without ever setting foot in the campus library, I turned in a 50,000 word thesis entitled "The Play’s the Thing: An Analysis of Goethe’s Faust as Theatre."¹⁰ At my thesis defense, where I was supposed to justify my academic arguments to my advisor—as well as the head of the Early Modern Studies program, and a professor emeritus of German Romanticism—I was gently informed that what I had turned in was, among other things, an odd choice of subject matter, 30,000 words too short, and quite literally riddled with typos. In other words, since it could simply not be graded in its current state, I’d have to either fail the program or stay behind and do it again.

That fail option tempted me, I won’t lie to you. But in the end, I decided that if I was going to fail, it wasn’t going to be because I’d half-assed it—it was going to be because I openly tried for once in my life and still fell spectacularly short in a very embarrassing and public way. So, after watching literally all of my classmates graduate on time,¹¹ I alone returned in the fall for a fifth year to re-enroll in my thesis course.¹² It was at the end of this second final year that I finally managed to turn in and defend a fully completed, ninety-eight-page, 80,000-word, mostly typo-free dissertation.¹³ It was, to this day, the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, and what happened next was very anti-climactic. Thanks to my technically passable thesis—which this time was described as still a bit hard to follow and for which I earned a reluctant but generous B- —I was able to graduate, with a fanfare-less departure and a quiet promise to my professors that I would stick with comedy and never pursue a graduate degree.

And I kept that promise. For almost a decade I enjoyed history only recreationally, I avoided anything that might be construed as mainstream academia, and I haven’t read a word of Goethe since. This worked out really great for me, to be honest—I found a vocation I was good at, I didn’t drive anyone in the collegiate world to self-harm. Win/win. But then… you know history. It loves to repeat itself. Or, more accurately, we love to repeat it. So when the opportunity arose to write a book of humourous essays,¹⁴ I realized this was finally a means for me to double down on the mistakes of my past in a fun new way, and with a lot of unfounded confidence. And so here we are.

Because the truth is, I love history. I love learning about it, and talking about it, and visiting the places where it has occurred. I always have. And in this way, outside of the harsh light of scholarly integrity, I am a huge, very real history nerd. And at this point, it’s not because I’m still trying to seem smart, or even because a few of my history classes in school did manage to squeeze through my delinquency and forcibly make an impact on me.¹⁵ It’s ultimately because I’ve found—almost exclusively on weird road trips with my dad—that the past, and its hideously cyclical predictability, has proven time and again to be a delightful and often hilarious coping mechanism for digesting the horrors of the present.

Which, true to form, brings us all the way back to Santayana’s tired old aphorism and Emerson’s much more fun quote that I haven’t yet explained: The student of history is like a man going into a warehouse to buy clothes or carpets. Not only is it very funny out of context, in context it’s actually oddly comforting, and certainly makes a lot more sense. So why, pray tell, is the student of history like a man in what seems to be Emerson’s description of a textile factory? Well… He fancies he has a new article. [But] if he goes to the factory, he shall find that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and rosettes which are found on the interior walls of the pyramids of Thebes. Now Emerson is mostly talking about how man created God in his own image (as opposed to the other way around), but the overall sentiment applies just as well to historical recurrence. In other, less Thebes-based words, history is solely the product of humanity, and humanity is nothing more than the sum of its history.

Inasmuch as every new piece of art is derivative of some other, formerly new piece of art, it turns out what feels politically apocalyptic now (and it does), isn’t a fresh, uncharted hell cooked up exclusively by the present, it’s just cut from the same fabric of fundamental evils that humanity has always (bizarrely) prided itself on—just dressed up anew with sexier and much more dangerous technology. And, in all fairness, the one thing in our evolution that isn’t cyclical is progress, so we may nevertheless be careening ever closer to our untimely demise. But in the meantime, we can at least take brief, momentary solace in knowing that reckoning with our present does not mean searching backwards for the moment we went wrong. Because history is nothing if not a feedback loop of those moments, with different styles of hats and varying degrees of science.

This may not seem comforting at first. It may seem nihilistic and terrible. And… it is. But it’s also more liberating than Santayana’s empty warning that we must remember. Once we accept that, for better and worse, this is always how we are and this is always who we’ve been, we can relax somewhat, and maybe even try to understand ourselves a bit better. Which, ultimately, is our best chance of moving forward.

So to that end, let us then move forward, both with this book and with my self-acceptance as the author responsible for this book. Based on what I’ve told you, you could say that this is an insane subject for me to choose to write a book about, given the very obvious pattern of errors in my own not-at-all-distant past. But what if this is finally my moment of reckoning with my past and, with it, the past in general? The moment I’m meant to break free of the shackles that forever tether me to my academic failures and prove that history belongs not to the professors, but to the people? That our collective past can be as digestible to read about as it is horrifying to learn about? That this book will be a way for me to let everyone know that, unlike all of humanity before me, I have learned from all of my mistakes once and for all, no problem? That