"Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages," said Samuel Johnson in The Idler, in 1758.
The war in question was the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), beginning first with England declaring war on France over Spanish colonies in North America, and soon enough Prussia taking up arms against Austria, France, Russia and Sweden -- what Winston Churchill referred to as "the first world war," because it spanned five continents.
Although Johnson's proposition is a late-comer to a species that has known war since time immemorial, its utterance has allowed us to consider war's more abstracted consequences, not just fallen buildings and piled up bodies, but a change in how we relate to each other in that increasing utopian state known as peacetime.
Today, Truth is out the window. Too many of us no longer believe in what is shaped by reason and politics, but what is drawn and quartered by emotion and quantified "likes". Unless it serves our opinions, History is a stumbling block in need of removal. (A recent example came while reading pop cultural analyst Roxanne Gay's 2014 collection of essays Bad Feminist, where she has lots to say about feminism, despite admitting that "I am not being terribly well versed in feminist history" and "not as well read in key feminist texts as I would like to be."[xiii]) That we expect to have it both way is a further indication of our troubled times.
So what's next? What's next when everything thus far is History? The Future? (Gay has said little to prepare us for this Future, and that's why I have set aside her book for a second edition of Octavia Butler's 2005 speculative short fiction collection, Blood Child.)
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