GETTING OUR HISTORICAL BEARINGS

Historians, philosophers and poets, thinkers of various schools, try to determine, define, their own generation’s historical bearings. This is particularly true, says Toynbee, in a Dark Age¹ that is pregnant with a new civilization. The speculating mind is both stirred by the quickening of its social environment and cramped by the cribbedness of its historical horizon, the lowness in the degree of historical visibility and the limitation of historical outlook. -Ron Price with thanks to ¹ Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol.8, 1954, p.664.

Some men today, like Hesiod the eighth century BC poet in ancient Greece, mistake the darkness before the dawn as an eternal night of unrelieved gloom. Their mental vision plays a trick on them. Of course, who is to say? How can one be pretentious to predict the future? All the tools of the social sciences are unable to predict the future.

-idem

Schools of history,

of historical inevitability

are passe these days.

But just ask any man,

Mr Everyman,

and you get your share

of what you might call

the inevitablists:

the pessimists,

the optimists,

the doomsdayers,

the utopians,

and, then, there are the Baha’is

who see all this as the darkness

before the dawn,

no dark night of unrelieved gloom.

Ron Price

27 May 2000