There is a passage in Milan Kundera’s novelisitic essay ‘Testaments Betrayed’ where he writes about the nature of history. Man walks in a fog, Kundera observes. He stumbles along a path and creates the path as he walks it. When he looks back, he can see the path, he may see the man, but he cannot see the fog. Everything looks inevitable after it has happened.
So we have the ‘sleepwalkers’ explanation of how Europe stumbled into the first world war. We have the ‘inevitability’ of the slide into the second world war. It is perhaps the greatest of all idiotic modern presumptions that so many people imagine while looking back that they would have known better or acted differently.
Which brings me to the present. Because the only thing you can do if you are going to try to tread a path well is to use what senses you have to work out what the next step might be. In the past week there have been two events, one on each side of the Atlantic, which have revealed a very interesting sense of the path we are on.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Spectator (paywall)
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Douglas Murray is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal.
Photo by MELISSA MAJCHRZAK/AFP via Getty Images