What I would like to do now, to conclude our time together, is something of a course tradition: As I have done every year for the past 36, I would like to talk to you about what I think we’ve been trying to do here—about what I think this course means.
I think that our course is more urgent than ever. Look at what we are all facing right now: A still uncertain medical and economic future; a world and a nation in which nationalism and nativism, racism, sexism, sheer irrationality, and all sorts of fanaticisms and other prejudices seem to be making a comeback after they were seemingly discredited over the past century.
We see a world in environmental crisis because of our own ignorance and waste. We see a world in which many people reject the idea that we are our brother’s and sister’s keepers. And that is all very depressing.
But if you have paid attention to these lectures you know that we have been here before. We have faced far more virulent epidemics: The 1918 flu pandemic killed perhaps 15 times more people than the one we are living through now. And far worse economic crashes: the Great Depression threw 25% of the workers in the USA and 33% of Germany on the streets. And murderous wars—at one point in WWI, life expectancy on the Western Front was two weeks. And revolutions and genocide and enslavement and pogroms and lynchings.
One of the purposes of this course to simply learn about and acknowledge these tragedies and injustices—but also to remember that, however many died tragically and unjustly before their time, somehow, we, as a species, and as a civilization have survived and recovered and built the better world into which you were born and will live in again.
I believe that that experience—both the tragedies and the victories—are utterly relevant to the problems we face today, which is why I was forever trying to relate the history we were learning to the life you are living now.
A few years ago, a Phoenix article raised the question as to whether professors should or even have the right to express their opinions on the subjects they teach and, in particular as to whether history professors should raise current events and modern parallels in class.
I know that many of you get sick of professors using their podiums as pulpits from which to politicize and propagandize you. I know that some do it with extreme bias. I have tried to avoid that, but I know that some of you will feel that I have failed.
But I will not apologize for trying to help you to see that: the world you live in is a product of our past; that past is not dead and gone but still with us for good or ill. Since the past is a foreign country to most of us, I try to explain it by drawing on examples you know from the present.
I will not apologize because I believe that the job of being your professor is somewhat different from that of your high school or grammar school teacher. A professor is meant to “profess.”
A professor is someone who has devoted their entire life to one subject—in my case for 48 years — and who is expected to distill not only knowledge, but also wisdom from that study.
I believe that that experience—both the tragedies and the victories—are utterly relevant to the problems we face today, which is why I was forever trying to relate the history we were learning to the life you are living now.
— Professor Robert Bucholz, DPhil
Here at Loyola, we teach that knowledge does not exist in a vacuum; it has moral implications, which compel me—and you—to seek first truth, and then, once we know the truth of what actually happened, justice.
In drawing those connections, it may be that I have offended some of you. I have tried to be an equal opportunity offender, but I know that I have often failed.
I would argue that, given the nature of the times, given that we seem to be at a cultural turning point, it is imperative that professors, experts in their respective fields of knowledge, speak truth regardless of how or whom that might offend. Our civilization may depend on it.
So here goes: The meaning of civilization is, I believe, to be found in a few simple principles.
War is a terrible thing.
Note to my fellow citizens: You had better be sure you know what you are doing before you start one. Thirty Years War, WW I, WW II.
Certainty is a wonderful thing, when deployed in defense of the defenseless and downtrodden; at all other times it should be suspect European explorers and colonists who were certain they were superior to indigenous peoples. Communists who were certain that their beliefs, if enacted would make a better world.
Power does not last; even superpower. Remember the Spanish Empire? The British Empire?
Art and culture do survive—but only if we don’t bomb them (e.g., much of Europe in WW II).
So do cruelty and generosity—even if we do bomb them.
Most people never got to be kings or queens, members of Parliament or factory owners. Most people were underdogs, struggling to make ends meet, caught up in vast tidal movements of history that they could not control (just like you and me are right now). We should spare a thought for the underdog. We should resist the temptation to think that we are somehow better, smarter, or safer than them just because they sound funny in the documents reader.
We should not laugh at them. In 500 years, future college students will definitely find us equally ridiculous, stupid, probably bigoted. They will laugh at how we dressed and how we wore our hair (those of us with hair). And they will look back at our politics and not be real impressed. They will probably cancel us.
As I suggested when we discussed the Atlantic Slave System and the Holocaust, we should above all always remember that what they left us—civilization—is fragile. It has broken repeatedly: In this course, the Inquisition, the Thirty Year’s War, the Atlantic Slave Trade, the treatment of workers in the Industrial Revolution, the mass exploitation of indigenous peoples in colonial empires, WW I, the Armenian Genocide and Stalin’s purges and the Holocaust, WW II. Today, people engaging in a myriad of inhumanities and incivilities towards each other—in and about Ukraine and the Middle East, but lots of other places too—and if you think no one on your side does so, you are deluded.
As I argued the other day, civilization is fragile because it is not a building or a book or a law. It is not a theorem or an opera. It is a daily and conscious act of respect and consideration for each other; of veneration for what people in the past can tell us; of critical thinking and skepticism towards what we are told; but also of openness to new ideas and other cultures, a quest to make of ourselves something better than we are.
That act grows out of what we learn. It will, in turn, inform what we teach our children.
Another way of putting this goes back to something a great teacher used to say at my alma mater, Cornell. If you have enjoyed these lectures, one of the things you may have enjoyed about them was my enthusiasm, for history and for the academic life. I love being a professor. The classroom is my happy place.
I first felt that when I was you, sitting in my own university’s classrooms in the 1970s. Like you, I was lucky enough to attend a great university. Quite frankly, I loved the life that you are getting to live today.
I never wanted it to stop…that’s why I became a professor, so that I could still hang around.
If you have ever visited my alma mater, you know that it is pretty much the university from central casting: Lovely, leafy quads, imposing towers, “reared against the arch of heaven” as the alma mater has it, ivy everywhere. And, tucked away in all sorts of nooks and crannies, lots of statues, plaques and benches.
Every Cornellian knows what I am going to say next.
The Bench: If you were to visit my alma mater, you might find yourselves drawn to a particularly beautiful spot, facing west, under the library bell tower.
There, you would find a bench:
That bench is very important to all Cornellians. This is the bench where I proposed to the love of my life. This is the bench I sat on—on a very cold April night junior year—after receiving the news that my father had died suddenly, tragically.
On that bench, there an inscription:
To those who shall sit here rejoicing,
To those who shall sit here in mourning,
Sympathy and Greeting;
So have we done in our time.
A great teacher at Cornell, now deceased, named M. H. Abrams, used to say that here is the meaning of all art. I will do him one better: I think here is the meaning of the entire inheritance bequeathed to us by civilization; here is the meaning of history itself:
Greeting, because civilization is the means by which generations widely separated in time communicate with each other.
I hope you noticed: All those people we studied may be dead, but they are still talking to us—do you remember her, this little girl at Auschwitz?
When this photograph was taken, she had just minutes to live.
But, you know what? She’s still talking to us.
History is a sort of greeting card from past generations to the present. That card says: We lived and died, we loved and hated, we made terrible mistakes, we struggled and won and lost, as you do now.
Remember us: Remember that little girl in the Auschwitz album. NEVER FORGET HER! Remember that she could be Jewish or Palestinian or African or Asian or Native American.
Just remember her…and remember what they did to her out of irrational fear, prejudice, and hatred. When we judge a whole group of people, when we use a racial or ethnic or gender slur, we murder her again by perpetuating and spreading the venom that killed her.
And yet, for me, she, and all the people who’ve come before us in this course aren’t really dead. No one ever really completely dies. They are all still talking to us.
They’re saying: Listen to us. You might learn something.
What happens when people think that their religion, their political system, their culture is the superior or only way? (Nazis and Communists, but also European imperialists in the 19th century, Protestants, Catholics in the 16th and 17th centuries.)
What happens when people pursue material wealth at the expense of all else? (17th and 18th century slave owners; 19th century factory owners)
What happens when people think only of the interest of their group and not all people? (Protestant Irish landowners who passed the Penal Laws; middle class voters who did not want to give workers the vote)
What happens when leaders forget the common good; when winning matters more than truth or justice? (Bismarck)
What happens when people embrace a charismatic demagogue who promises them the world – if only they forget the laws and give him complete control. (Hitler, obviously, but also Napoleon, Cromwell)
What happens when leaders become drunk with confidence in their power and wealth and over-extend their country’s resources? (Philip II of Spain; Louis XIV; Hitler again)
What happens when they become drunk with nationalism, like those crowds marching off to WWI?
But also what happens when they embrace new knowledge, like Galileo, remain open to new ideas, like John Stuart Mill, fight for justice, like Mary Wollstonecraft, the Sadler Commission on Child Labour?
…And what happens when they don’t. But also sympathy, because if you learn anything at all from history, it should be a kind of sympathy—or, perhaps, better, empathy—for the situations of all those human beings who have gone before.
You cannot listen very long to that greeting without developing empathy for those who struggled against injustice or great odds or whose death came unjustly or too soon.
History should, in particular give you a strong sense of justice and injustice, if only by exposing you to all the best and worst that human beings have done for and to each other.
But let me get more specific than that: As you know, in the second half of this course (102), humankind has developed the power to wreck the entire planet, and so the fragile edifice of civilization: quickly, through nuclear and germ warfare; less quickly by simply trashing the planet.
Should that ever happen, it will be due to a failure of sympathy, a failure of empathy.
This is the necessary toolkit that you will take into the voting booth so as to make better decisions than past generations—including mine—have done.
— Professor Robert Bucholz, DPhil
The politician who presses the button; the businessman or woman who pollutes the planet; the gunman who takes one life; the terrorist who takes many; the military commander who knows that the building he is targeting houses civilians, children, babies, yet gives the order anyway; the powerful man or woman who uses that power to create fear or secure sexual gratification; the person who won’t wear a mask or restrain their social life at a time when everyone’s health depends on everyone else, because that person “feels fine”; the person who shames another over his or her body; the person who ridicules a disabled person; can only do so by a failure of human sympathy and empathy, a failure to heed the greeting of history, a failure to learn the lesson of civilization which is, at the simplest level, that his or her victims, we, are all human beings with someone who loved and reared us with hopes and dreams and troubles and pain just as they have. I don’t see how anyone who truly understood human history, the teachings of civilization, the class assignment of sympathy and greeting could ever push the button, pull the trigger, or speak with or act upon hate in any way.
So, you see, I am arguing that this course is far more than a way to pass the time on a Monday or Wednesday at mid-day, far more than some stupid requirement in the Core Curriculum that you have to take before you can get to the good stuff of your major, your job. This is the good stuff.
This is the necessary toolkit that you will take into the voting booth so as to make better decisions than past generations—including mine—have done.
As you try to do better than them, as you contemplate all the madnesses that afflict your world, you could do worse than to sit down on the bench with your old history professor and ask: What does what I learned in History 101 and 102 say about all this? Where is the sympathy, the empathy in this situation?
So, think of this course and what you remember from it as a map that you will use to chart a better, richer, more fulfilling and compassionate life. In these 14 weeks, I’ve tried—in person and electronically—to draw you the best map I could, tried to give you as many tools as I could, tried to teach you the hard lessons of civilization, at least its Western incarnation. What you do with them is now up to you.
So, go forth from this classroom into the big, wide world. Continue to educate yourselves, as the Renaissance humanists would have wanted. Be good citizens of your community, your country, your world. Treat each other with civility: Be neither a victim, nor a victimizer. Be of stout heart; don’t let your fears turn into resentment and anger. Teach your children that the essential activity of human life is not competition—it’s cooperation. Teach them that the most essential attribute of a good person, a successful human being is not: wealth, or fame, or power, or popularity. It is empathy—and the courage to act upon it.
Of all the things we ran short of during the pandemic—from vaccines to toilet paper—our greatest lack—the greatest shortage in our politics and our culture—was and is empathy for each other.
Try to ensure that when future students of civilization look back on your actions, they see you as fighting on the side of the angels.
Or as the English poet Matthew Arnold wrote: “When the forts of folly fall/Let them find thy body by the wall!” Advance all that is best in civilization; be civilized.
My time to do so is nearly done. This course is just about history. Yesterday is gone. Today is nearly half over. But tomorrow belongs to you…make the most of it.
Thank you for the privilege and the honor of being your professor.
Robert Bucholz is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago, where he teaches courses on the history of early modern Great Britain, the city of London and Western Civilization.
