Who Makes History?

 There is a zeitgeist willy-nilly for good or ill abroad on this planet. Now, there are several aspects of that phenomenon that may be considered. One interesting literary and political giant that had much to say on the subject was the good Reverend Jonathan Swift. In particular, he brought to consciousness the battle of the books as an example of “modernity” versus classicism. Brahms once remarked when the coterie around Wagner pompously proclaimed that his leitmotif compositions were the “music of the future,” that his music must be the music of the moment. 

Which is to say, that the spirit of the age acted to divide seemingly automatically art itself into camps. Thus Shelley’s dictum that the true poet necessarily reflects in many cases almost involuntarily that self same spirit. But as Swift pointed out in Gulliver, most of the true actors that effected historical change are unknown to the stories we get passed down as “the truth.” And this brings me back to the question of the character of the direction of society molded by the superiority of epistemology at any point along the vector of time for human civilization. 

For example, take the extant plays of Aeschylus that use the chorus to aesthetically better humanity versus say Euripides who can only bring a tragic sort of forever war bias upon the stage. These alternate worldviews were of the age in Greece. But the audience that set the standard of performance must not be kept in the shadows. And there were of course a myriad of manners to embrue the city states’ inhabitants with that question of epistemology in subtler ways.

The world today is at a great crossroads. Much as in Dante’s Commedia, the alternate pathways for society are distinctly hellish or quite literally heavenly. A war to truly, this time, end all wars or a reordering of the  mission for humanity to venture forth into that hitherto great unknown. Thus the universality of the aforementioned zeitgeist.