Читать книгу Keeping the Republic - Christine Barbour - Страница 74

“If you’ve never run out of gas, you may not understand why filling your gas tank matters. And if you’ve never had your brakes fail, you may not care about having your brakes checked. And if you’ve never slid on an icy road, you may not understand why learning to drive on ice really matters. For citizens, if you haven’t lived in a bombed-out city like Beirut or Baghdad, if you haven’t seen a genocidal massacre like Rwanda, if you haven’t been in a situation where people were starving to death, like Calcutta, you may not understand why you ought to study history. Because your life is good and it’s easy and it’s soft.

But for most of the history of the human race, most people, most of the time, have lived as slaves or as subjects to other people. And they lived lives that were short and desperate and where they had very little hope. And the primary breakthroughs have all been historic. It was the Greeks discovering the concept of self-governance, it was the Romans creating the objective sense of law, it was the Jewish tradition of being endowed by God—those came together and fused in Britain with the Magna Carta, and created a sense of rights that we take for granted every day. Because we have several hundred years of history protecting us. And the morning that history disappears, there’s no reason to believe we’ll be any better than Beirut or Baghdad.”