Historic yawns and sighs

I wonder if Francis Fukuyama realized how historically ridiculous he was being when he argued that history had ended, that liberal democracy had effectively won out over other political ideologies. He claimed that while there would be differences among nations based on regional and traditional particularities, in the future we will see essentially only variations on a theme: the global acceptance of capitalist markets and liberal principles. He made a strong case which developed from other theories of a similar kind so it's not as though Fukuyama was pulling something out of the blue. It might be said that The End of History theories had a history of their own.

What is most stupid about proclaiming, with all the fanfare of a Michael Jackson sighting, the end of history is that it violates a central pillar of historical reasoning: history is told after the fact, not during it. Whether something - an idea, event or person - lingers in the public consciousness cannot be determined by those contemporary with it. The best that people living in any given present can do is to document through various media what's going on, and if those of an unborn future notice what we've left them or not is not for those in the present to determine. There's simply no getting around it. We can hold up events and individuals as high as we're able, but whether or not those after us get around to picking them up cannot be foreseen for certain.

This criticism cuts both ways, just as any claim of an end to history is mockery-deserving, so is the growing preponderance of the use of "historic" to describe everything from cricket matches and editorial mission statements to the reopening of a library in Colorado and relations between Australia and Indonesia. It seems that everything under the sun might be described as historic without anybody raising the slightest murmur of doubt. This tendency is even more bizarre considering the prevailing indifference and apathy towards history in general. We certainly like to describe things as historic, somehow this strikes us as meaningful, but we couldn't care less about historic ideas, events and people of the past, you know, historic history. "Historic" as an adjective is at its most powerful only when used in the breathless present, the word alights in our ears like an insect, squeaks for a few seconds before flying away into a forgotten oblivion. Somehow we rest assured that what we've seen, where we live, what we do, will somehow parade through the ages, a fabled apex of humanity amidst generations of mediocrity and sleepiness.

With the incoming helm-taking of Barack Obama we are probably in the calm before the storm where pronouncements of historic this and that are concerned. Few commentators have failed to describe Obama's election as the most profound and powerful - historic - event in recent years. To claim otherwise is to court scorn and alienation. But strictly speaking, Obama's presidency has yet to make the slightest imprint in the pages of history. And we ignore the yawning, abysmal silence of so much of the human past to presume that somehow Obama will be an exception to the general rule that the enormous present withers to a minute footnote for all but a few people. The past is like a shipwreck, most sinks to the bottom, only a few scraps remain afloat on the surface, and in our age of immediate information, people are (at present) much more likely to inquire about celebrity relationships than what happened in this world before they arrived. No one and nothing is immune to this historical law of diminishing returns. For all Napoleon's greatness, is he anything more than a cliche today? My wish is that we stop using the term "historic" so stupidly and think a little harder about what we mean when we use it.