Over and over again, we hear from old school moderates, conservatives, even some liberals, that we can't judge the past by the standards of the present. Well, here's an unreformed liberal thinker, one of the very greatest of the twentieth century, who says we very much can judge the past, in fact we must, and that if we don't judge, history is utterly meaningless. He might have some quibbles with how we judge it, but while he'd insist on his right to critique, he would look on things like the 1619 Project and recognize that such projects to reclaim past identity in the present is the only way that history means anything at all. .
Beacuse according to the magical Italian thinker, Benedetto Croce, it's the human spirit, or human perception, which organizes information into stories and creates meaning. It's a thought which ultimately comes from Giambattista Vico, an Italian philosopher operating in the 1720’s who could be considered the real originator of modern thought. Vico’s primary idea is the ‘Verum Factum:' which states that the truth is not something observed, as Descartes or Plato believed, but formed. Nothing of this world, not even mathematics or science, is grounded in eternal truths but only in human perceptions of the eternal truths. Knowledge is therefore something to be understood, analyzed, and abstracted, but never something you can never know in its totality. So therefore, all knowledge is constantly reevaluated in light of new discoveries. There is always some new bit of data or context to learn about any subject at all.
To me, and I'd imagine three other people, this is a more seminal insight in human development than anything in German philosophy or the Enlightenment. It makes the entire Enlightenment possible, it makes modern liberalism and education possible, it makes possible modern humanism itself. What matters is not the truth, what matters is our perception of it. Some today would call it 'our' truth. Does that mean that 'my truth' is true? No. It does, however, mean that 'my truth' is always valid, it is always part of the truth, perhaps even an enormous part. We and all our associates owe 'my truth' proper hearing, dignity, inquiry and study so that our perception of the truth constantly accumulates new perspectives and new meanings. The meaning of life is not the truth within it, but the struggle over a lifetime to understand the truth and every bit of context that went into making it. And therefore, the meaning of 'my truth' is not what happened to me, but what I made happen because of the things which happened to me.
Let's go to Croce now:
'Document and criticism, life and thought, are the true sources of history--that is to say, the two elements of historical synthesis,' --perhaps that means, in our parlance, the confluence between lived experience and ideas.'
Here is a major liberal thinker 100 years ago saying that lived experience is something distinct from rationalism and empiricism, and that no amount of thought or observable truth is a replacement for experience every nerve twitch of our limbic system and hippocampus, experiences that we all have to organize into a meaningful life story if our experiences matter at all.
The point of this project is to create what I hope will be a bunch of useful thumbnails of mostly 20th century books that can help guide people through how to understand this 21st century crisis.The 20th century is the nearest century to our own, with world crises that most resemble our own, and would therefore probably require the least amount of mental leap to see how one century's problems would relate to another. Perhaps if I do enough of these I'll leap over more centuries, but let's get through one thumbnail first...
From the standpoint of a grad school dropout like me, most thinkers are more worth reading because of how they're wrong then how they're right. Benedetto Croce is in that rarefied class worth reading because he's right. Is he completely right? Well... is anybody? What is unique about certain thinkers, the very rarefied class in my never humble opinion, is that they come to the ultimate realization for what lets us all live on: that we all disagree with billions of people we have to live around to a point well past irreconcilable, but that we can find ways to live with each other even so, maybe even respect each other for our strenuous differences. To come to that realization involves the hardest thing the human brain is ever asked to do:hold two contradictory thoughts in their head and realize they're both true. No one wants to do that, particularly today, but if you think it's hard for us, imagine what it must have been to write a book like this in 1938, in the darkest crucible of fascist Europe, knowing that so many people you know are doomed. The temptation to write off fascists as irredeemably evil must have been overwhelming.
Most people think that acknowledging there might be a certain validity to views which inspire some disgust in you means relinquishing your point of view, when in fact it's the ultimate declaration of your view's security. It demonstrates that the truth of your view is so solid that you can acknowledge the validity of the exact opposite view without conceding that the opposite view is true, and in the ability to do that, we can gain enormously in hope and self-security.
Croce wrote eighty books. I'm not going to read more than one and fractions of a few others. He wrote a lot about subjects that don't particularly interest me: like the tensions between rationalism and empiricism. This is stuff mostly beyond my intelligence level, but what's important is that he uses 2026's prize concept: lived experience, as a middle ground between the two. He doesn't call it lived experience, he calls it 'immanentism.' To Croce, lived experience, or 'immanentism', is the true perception because it is the only form of experience that happens within a definite time and place, and is therefore provably valid to an extent past even empirical study.
But Croce's lived experience has much more definite use than simply acknowledging the feelings and dignity of the person who experienced something traumatic. To Croce, lived experience is when we take our experience, not just our feelings but our perceptions, encounters, events, confrontations, suffering, activities, commitments, skills, thoughts, pleasures and pains, interactions, reflections, and yes, feelings too, and turn it all from mere perceptions to a worldview, a narrative, to something that shows we are claiming our lives as something with dignity, meaning and purpose.
It's not a perfect formulation. Surely demagogues can exploit this by constructing destructive narratives of people's lives that robs them of dignity even as people think they're claiming dignity. But there are a few things which make Croce's point of view particularly useful.
1. Unlike more pessimistic points of view, the very optimism and hope of Croce's ideas are their own gauntlet thrown to us to refine the view so that we can find a narrative that means something more constructive for us. Will we? Well, maybe not, but the search for meaning always goes on.
2. For Croce, lived experience is not what happens to us but what we make happen. It's an active process It encourages us to think of ourselves not as participants in our lives, or as victims of them, but as the determiners of our own life course. Even if that's not always true, is it not important to have a conception of ourselves that readies for those moments when we can determine our own life path?
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"For dead history revives, and past history again becomes present, as the development of life demands them. The Romans and the Greeks lay in their sepulchres, until awakened at the Renaissance by the new maturity of the European spirit. The primitive forms of civilization, so gross and so barbaric, lay forgotten, or but little regarded, or misunderstood, until that new phase of the European spirit, which was known as Romanticism or Restoration, 'sympathized' with them--that is to say, recognized them as its own proper present interest. Thus great tracts of history which are now chronicle for us, many documents now mute, will in their turn be traversed with new flashes of life and will speak again."
Perhaps the problem we're experiencing, and why our age is so very dangerous, is that we do not have a previous era we approve of. The very nature of today's intersectionality is that there is no previous era sufficient to the needs of human rights, and its just a stonethrow of reason away from the idea that we must overthrow all the notions of the past and start anew. What can starting anew constitute but a massive expenditure of life? Obama tried to wrap us in the symbolic shrouds of Lincoln and the Civil Rights struggle, Biden in Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society, but none of these went far enough to inspire today's movements. There is no historical precedent far enough for them, and therefore, they don't see the value in history to begin with. But without the careful study of history, we are awash in a sea of present, and if we're only in the present, we are susceptible to all the same propaganda people fell for in the past.
When we do incorporate models from the past, these models are testimonies of victimhood: the 1619 Project, The Native Landmap and Dawnland Voices, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the Bracero Archive, the Transgender Archives, The Making Gay History Podcast. These are all noble projects, necessary projects, but they're not enough. If all we can learn from history is how to honor victims, the only thing we're learning is how to be victims ourselves.
Furthermore, it causes those who defend traditional notions of history to remain intractable and not permit any thoughts their natural evolution. If so many traditional notions are under attack at once from Columbus to 1776 to the pioneer spirit to the 1950s to the American dream, people will think everything they've done and believed in their entire life is being attacked and called meaningless. OF COURSE they're going to fight back from that. How could anyone think they wouldn't?
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The natural world is perhaps the best historical symbol we could emulate, not just primitive man living in a kind of 'offensive harmony' with his surroundings, but the birds and the bees and the trees and all the natural species of earth who have lived together for billions of years in a state of perpetual war where basically nobody has eliminated one another. The more technology we have, the more danger we are of elminating nature, and the important it is to find a way to incorporate science and technology into the world as it already is. Perhaps we all need to be more like the hippies: live outdoors, grow our own crops, hunt our own animals, dress as animals on holidays. Like the Catholics, we could make some animal the patron saint of every day of the year and pray to that animal depending on our birthdays and confirmation days.
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"Thus philosophy, when it inquires and interprets, knowing well that the man who enslaves another wakes in him awareness of himself and enlivens him to seek for liberty, observes with serenity how periods of increased or reduced liberty follow upon each other and how a liberal order, the more it is established and undisputed, the more surely it decays into habit, and thereby its vigilant self-awareness and readiness for defense is weakened, which opens the way for a "recourse" as Vico termed it, to all of those things which seem to have vanished from the world, and which themselves, in their turn, open a new "course." Philosophy considered, for example, the democracies and the republics like those of Greece in the fourth century, or of Rome in the first, in which liberty was still preserved in the institutional forms but no longer in the soul and customs of the people, and then lost even those forms, much as a man who has not known how to help himself but has in vain received for a time received ministrations of good advice is finally abandoned to the hard school of life. (copy all of page 61)
...He sees this and he sees so many other things and he draws the conclusion that if history is not an idyll, neither is it a "tragedy of horrors" but a drama in which all the actions, all the actors, and all of the members of the chorus are, in the Aristotelean sense, "middling," guilty-non-guilty, a mixture of good and bad, yet ruled always by a governing thought which is good and to which evil ends by acting as a stimulus and that this achievement is the work of liberty which always strives to re-establish and does re-establish the social and political conditions of a more intense liberty."
It is truly extraordinary how quickly the meaning of words changes, or at least the aura surrounding the words. Liberty was a word so abused by the Bush administration and the Supreme Court that no American can hear it without their eyes glazing over with the assumption it's about to be exploited. Thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan, thanks to economic libertarianism and campaign finance laws, thanks to the religious right's insistence that legalizing abortion and gay marriage infringes on their religious liberty, 'liberty' and 'freedom' are words that seem contorted to mean their opposite. The American 'right', the non-racist right (which exists, believe it or not, even if they sometimes make it hard to tell...) has always heard the left talk of 'equality' and 'justice.' Believe it or not, the vast majority of the Right believes in equality and justice, they just define it a bit differently and have overwhelming differences of opinion about how to go about procuring it. But even if they believed in equality and justice with all their hearts, they assume that these words on the left are code for 'retribution.' Similarly the non-classist left hears conservatives invoke 'freedom' and 'liberty', and the overwhelming majority of them believes in those notions, but they hear 'freedom' and 'liberty' and hear code for 'exploitation.' Both sides of current American discourse believe in the causes closest to the other side's hearts, what they don't believe is that is stating their true beliefs out loud. If either conspiracy of silence were true in 2026 or twenty years previously, it would be impossible to hide on the internet. Short of the Trump Administration and the more violent wings of Antifa, even the most powerful or extreme among them don't truly believe that what they do is exploitation or retribution, not because it isn't, but because it is so much more convenient to believe the propaganda you yourselves disseminate.
Croce gives the answer to this too near the very beginning of the book:
By liberty we do not mean a fixed condition once achieved and then preserved unchanged. Liberty is not a possession. It is a continual activity of the spirit. It is the effort through which human beings free themselves from what constrains them—whether these constraints arise from nature, from social structures, from inherited beliefs, or from the passions and illusions of the mind... Seen in this way, the history of liberty is not merely the story of political freedoms or constitutional institutions, though these are among its expressions. It is the story of the human spirit gradually becoming conscious of itself and asserting its power to shape the world in accordance with reason and moral purpose.
By liberty we do not mean a fixed condition once achieved and then preserved unchanged. Liberty is not a possession. It is a continual activity of the spirit. It is the effort through which human beings free themselves from what constrains them—whether these constraints arise from nature, from social structures, from inherited beliefs, or from the passions and illusions of the mind... Seen in this way, the history of liberty is not merely the story of political freedoms or constitutional institutions, though these are among its expressions. It is the story of the human spirit gradually becoming conscious of itself and asserting its power to shape the world in accordance with reason and moral purpose.
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