Alan Jacobs’s new book, Breaking Bread with the Dead, looks like a good read for the winter months ahead. Kevin Holtsberry reviews the book that’s subtitled, “A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind,” calling it “sorely needed.”
Our polarized culture seems to offer two competing visions of engaging with the past. The defilement perspective views history as “at best a sewer of racism, sexism, homophobia, and general social injustice, at worst an abattoir which no reasonable person would even want to peak at.” Its vision is limited to the now. What matters in this moment is all that matters, and it judges the past accordingly, throwing most in the ash heap.
Another perspective approaches the past as a unifying, idealized, almost sanitized, source of universal values and character traits. This produces a reverence for the past that is also locked into the present: “To say ‘This text offends me, I will read no further’ may be shortsighted; but to read a ‘great book’ from the past with such reverence that you can’t see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better. Indeed, in foreclosing the possibility of real challenge it is worse.”
Rather than either of these views, we should read history expecting to be challenged. Heroes, leaders, and all manner of influential people were no less human than we are. Their sins may have been egregious, but would we have made the same ones had we lived in their day?