Read History as Though Reading of Yourself

It is a common illusion to believe that the people of history were somehow harder, more disciplined, more resilient, or perhaps more cruel, more indifferent, more superstitious. We observe their lives from a distance, marveling at their privations, their strange moral codes, their unthinking acceptance of suffering, and we imagine them creatures of a different nature. Yet this belief, though common, is mistaken. The men and women of past ages were not other than we are; they were merely responding to different conditions. Their apparent strangeness is circumstantial, not intrinsic.

Human nature has not meaningfully changed over recorded history. The same drives that animate us—fear, ambition, curiosity, love—also animated them. What we call ‘progress’ is not the refinement of human nature itself but merely the alteration of the structures that shape its expression. Where life is harsh, people become hard. Where life is uncertain, they become superstitious. Where authority is absolute, they become obedient. And where comfort is plentiful, they become soft. But these are not transformations of what man is, only of how he manifests under different conditions. The Vikings, whom we recognize as strong and enduring, rowed their ships from necessity, not from some innate love of hardship. If offered an outboard motor, they would have taken it without hesitation. Their strength, so unusual to our eyes, was not a trait unique to their nature but a response to their circumstances.

If one doubts this, let them perform a simple thought experiment. Take an infant from the Roman Empire, from medieval France, from Edo-period Japan, and raise him in the modern world. He will grow into a person indistinguishable in nature from his contemporaries, inheriting none of the instincts or attitudes we attribute to his time of birth. Likewise, deposit a child of today into those past societies and watch him become as rigid, as pious, as warlike as those circumstances demand. The distance between us and the people of history is no greater than the distance between those shaped by wealth and those shaped by hardship today. The differences are real, but they are imposed from without, not expressed from within.

The past often seems distant because its customs and values no longer resemble our own. The moral codes feel unfamiliar, the sensibilities unrecognizable, the way of life remote. We imagine its people as belonging to another world. But history is not the study of a vanished species; it is the study of ourselves under different pressures. The man who burned heretics at the stake, the woman who wept for the death of a tyrant, the soldier who killed without stutter—these were not alien beings but men and women like us, shaped by the world they knew.

This understanding changes how history ought to be read. It is not the chronicle of strange, unreachable minds, but the unfolding of our own nature within ever-changing circumstances. When we read of history, we should not do so with detached curiosity. We should read as though exploring the actions of our own past selves.