The Giants are Still with Us

Are we letting our taste for the "current" lead us away from mountain springs?

The journal Foreign Affairs reprints an insightful article about the Paris Peace Conference by Arnold Toynbee. It is relevant to the present. We still struggle to achieve “lasting peace.” Toynbee’s concerns are not altogether new to me. Much of what was written in the past is involuntarily part of our own writing today. That does not, however, mean that we should ignore the source.

To put the best face on such “plagiarism,” it shows that we do not have to be original in order to say things that will be useful in the present world.  However, if our success comes at the expense of people not reading or rereading what was actually written by true giants, it may be less helpful than we think.

We don't so much stand on the shoulders of giants, as sit at their feet.  Shouldn’t we be offering others a place next to us?

Our biases are too often to pick from past writing, the clever sentences, the wordplays that fill our modern-day short attention spans.  True value lies in actually reading at some length and depth the whole of what they wrote.

That is a cautionary insight, because what was said in the past did not have sufficiently improved (in our lights) their future, our present. 

However, it might be a greater aid in improving our future.  And we may listen more carefully.