History

Daily Meditation 505–7/15/2023

Do you remember history in school?

How did it go?

“Which president did XYZ?”
“What year did slavery get abolished?”

History is largely focused on the who and the when.

But, talking about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust…

If it would’ve taken place in the year 1000 instead of the 1900s…
And it was a woman name Jezebel McCarthy instead of Hitler…

Would it really have mattered?

The who and the when of history is just factual.

The why of history is what we need to pay attention to.

The what we learned from the Holocaust.
The ethics and morals of the war.
The sacrifices made by families and countries.

The who and when really matters very little.

When we go back and review the ethics, morals, and lessons learned from WWII and the Holocaust, modern wars appear equally detestable (as they ought to), because it’s always the same players but in a different time with different names…But the results are the same.

When we review the “whys” of The Boston Tea Party, it isn’t the date or location that matters, it’s the lessons about taxation and freedom from tyranny.

As you go through history, I invite you to not worry overmuch about the years or the names of the heroes and villains as much as the lessons we need to glean.

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These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”