The Tritest Expression

Proverbs through history, history through proverbs.

Lucid Thucydides minding Austrian parliament.

My grandmother is long gone now. She was born in 1904. She had a way with words similar to others her age: many expressions of old-timey wisdom that are passed down within families. Some of them were picked up from life on farms. Others circulated widely despite the diminishing agricultural culture in the West. Today they continue to work their contagion through mass media. Most of these are well-worn yet still very common in English-speaking communities. And still very true.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away.

Old wisdom that remains relevant to this day. This one my have begun in Wales in the 1860s as: "Eat an apple on going to bed, and you'll keep the doctor from earning his bread." Modern dietary science has repeatedly confirmed what the 19^th Century Welsh already knew: fruits and veggies are good for us.

Make hay while the sun shines.

Once again, the farm provides sound advice. It warns us away from wet, rotting straw and reminds us to take good advantage of our opportunities when they arise. This one can be found in Latin (Cum sol lucet, lucerna utendum est), suggesting that it may have been common knowledge in Europe as far back as medieval times.

Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

This one epitomizes the practicalities of modest farm living: not all eggs produce chicks, so let’s be measured in our expectations, shall we. This theme can be traced as far back as the 6^th Century BCE when it was articulated via a different barnyard allegory. In “The Milkmaid and Her Pail” – one of Aesop’s famed fables – we discover a girl who daydreams about becoming rich by selling her milk to buy chickens. Sadly, she spills her milk and loses everything.

Of course, most of us in North America no longer live in agrarian communities. All of us reside in a highly interconnected world where we are at once bound by our devices yet have access to a seemingly infinite volume of digital information. Folk wisdom still circulates, but we express it in terms of today’s hardware.

GIGO – Garbage in, garbage out.

This one has been around since the earliest days of computing in the 1960s. Programming slipups and data entry errors invariably lead to undesired results. Back on the farm, this might be expressed as: if you plant rotting seeds, you cannot expect a good crop.

It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

An ironic way of suggesting that one’s unintended results were intentional all along. Making the most of a bad harvest, as it were.

Whether they originated on the farm or in the computer lab, these particular proverbs appear to be as relevant to us today as they always have been. Other expressions have not fared as well. The most meaningless of these non-axioms simply do not encapsulate truth the way they may once have.

One such expression in particular is dusted off and dragged out every time the nightly news begins to overwhelm us.

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Like clockwork, this one is resurrected in the hopes that it might be just the advice humanity needs to save us from ourselves. Unfortunately, it appears to miss the mark. We continually recognize similarities between the bad actors of the current US administration and those leading the rise of fascism in the mid-20^th Century. But who are “we,” dear reader? How is it that we are endowed with such knowledge of history and are capable of such keen observations and insight? Well, we are not historians (although I suppose some of you may actually be historians). A mere high school education in North America (or the equivalent in many other places, I assume), along with a half-decent long-term memory gives the average human being enough tools to see what is going on in the world today and to place it within an historical perspective.

So we have learned from history? Then why do we appear to be re-living the worst of our past? Surely humanity can progress without repetition, if our proverb is correct. Unfortunately, our non-axiomatic proverb requires that we append it:

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who learn from history are also doomed to repeat it.

It’s a bit long now, and a bit repetitive. I think we can boil it down to just:

History repeats itself.

* * * * *

Unlike anthropologists who may unintentionally alter the very behaviour they wish to observe, simply by observing it, we accidental historians have no such problem. History is done. We can’t change it even if we wanted to. We can understand the forces of history. We can recognize the patterns as they re-occur. We might even predict their occurrence before they occur. Yet none of our observations, none of our knowledge, have any effect on our past or our future.

My conclusion is simply that historical forces persevere regardless of our understanding of them. I am not saying that America will fall into absolute Naziism or that Europe will adopt a “final solution” to deal with its immigration issues.

In his Histories, Herodotus – the so-called “father of history,” no less – noted the cyclical nature of the rise and fall of empires. Thucydides spent half his life documenting the long and brutal Peloponnesian War. His conclusion was that human nature is the one true constant throughout history. When historical conditions repeat themselves – and they do – events inevitably unfold in similar ways.