Essay: In his last lecture, a professor urges students to heed the call of history

A veteran Loyola University Chicago professor shares his thoughts on the relevance of history, excerpted from his final lecture in Loyola’s Core Western Civilization course.

As we bring our course to a close, I would like to talk to you about what we have been doing here, what I think studying history means.

Look at what we face right now: a world and a nation in which nationalism, nativism, racism, sexism, and other fanaticisms and prejudices are making a comeback after they were seemingly discredited over the past century; a world in environmental crisis because of our own ignorance and waste; a world in which many reject the idea that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.

That is all very depressing.

But if you have paid attention to our history as presented in this course, you know that we have been here before. We have faced far more virulent epidemics. The 1918 flu pandemic killed perhaps seven times more people than COVID-19. And we’ve faced far worse economic crashes. The Great Depression threw 25% of the workers in the U.S. and 30% of those in Germany onto the streets. And we’ve faced murderous wars: Life expectancy on the Western Front at one point in WWI was two weeks. And we’ve faced revolutions and genocide and enslavement and pogroms and lynchings.

Multitudes have died tragically, unjustly, and too soon, but we, as a species, and a civilization have survived, recovered, and built the better world into which you were born and will live in again.

I believe that these experiences—both the tragedies and the victories—are utterly relevant to the problems we face today, which is why in this course—and, indeed, throughout my 40 years of teaching—I have been forever trying to relate the history we were learning to the life we are living now.

I know that students sometimes get sick of professors using their podiums as pulpits from which to politicize and propagandize. I have tried to avoid that, but I know that some of you will feel that I have failed. I will not apologize for trying to help you to see that your world is a product of our past. That past is not dead and gone but still with us. 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, then justice.

During the time period we studied in this course, humankind has developed the ability to wreck the entire planet, and so the fragile edifice of civilization. Should that ever happen, it will be due to a failure of sympathy, a failure of empathy. 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 person who shames another over their body, or gender, or class, or ethnicity 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 we are all, each, human beings, with someone who loved and reared us, with hopes and dreams and troubles and pain.

In other words, if you learn anything at all from history, it should be empathy for all who have come before us. The study of his-tory should give you a strong sense of empathy and its corollary, a thirst for justice, if only by exposing you to all the best and worst that human beings have done for and to each other. I don’t see how anyone who truly understood that human story could ever push the button, pull the trigger, or speak or act with hate in any way.

Finally, remember that civilization is fragile because it is not a building or a book or a law. It is a daily and conscious act by each of us that grows out of what we learn; it will, in turn, inform what we teach our children. As you try to do better than past generations, as you contemplate all the madnesses that afflict your world, you could do worse than to recall our course together and ask yourself:

How can I use what I learned in History 101 and 102 to make our world a better place?

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. Read his full lecture here.