End History

It is a fresh night in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where strangers are kind and beauty is overflowing.

“It doesn’t matter where you’re coming from — it matters where you’re going to” is a common refrain in America. Arnold Schwarzenegger embraced it on the campaign trail in 2003. Then he won.

History does not define who one is. One is neither responsible for the sins of one’s ancestors nor is entitled to credit for their achievements.

History is a weapon of mass destruction. History is propaganda deployed to convince others to do A or to feel B because this is what their ancestors supposedly did or felt. History is a pretext to withhold reasons from persons.

A future in service of history is a future in service of an ideology at the expense of people, present, future, and past. A future that commands people to worship the state is a future that sacrifices people on the altar of the state. The struggle to ensure the historic continuity of a state is at odds with the maximisation of the well-being of its denizens. The pursuit of survival is generally at odds with the pursuit of well-being. This is true for cash-strapped firms that contemplate bankruptcy. This is true for individuals terminally ill. This is also true for states.

“There’s a future in the past” is the motto of Vince Giordano’s jazz band. The past that matters for the future is the past that has been filtered and compressed, and lives on through art or science. A constitution that engenders a polity whose denizens flourish is a scientific discovery. History serves as it refutes or confirms hypotheses, helps discover regularities in nature and guiding principles in societies, and inspires the axioms of social contract that are believed to be conducive to prosperity. These axioms are of value not because they hail from the past but because they are products of the scientific method. The sanctity of individual freedoms and the sanctity of property rights are examples of such axioms today.

There is no future in the past that calls for scores to be settled or restitution to be collected on behalf of the dead. These are backward-looking policies that redistribute some, destroy some, and create nothing. They can’t even improve the lot of the dead. To future generations, their ancestors’ culture of victimhood or of identity politics would be of little import.

So, end history already, for it may not end itself.

History may not end itself, because a state that prioritises its historic continuity, inevitably at the expense of its denizens’ well-being, has a decent chance of outlasting a state that prioritises its denizens’ well-being at the expense of its own survival. History can be ended by persuading people that they matter, and nothing else does. One would think this would be an easy sell.

Thank you kindly.