We suffer all the same but the Past is still better?

Among few merits of taking a largely unplanned gap year is a freedom to choose to be exempt from current affairs, as a student major in International Relations. Keeping abreast of the news is a deeply depressing endurance of atrocity and absurdity that I have long stopped relishing. At first I fly into rage, at the appalling absurdity, and dreadful deeds practiced as a matter of course for many, and I learnt to rebuke and argue. It then steps into disgust beyond disguise, when there is readily a group of people trying to defend these behaviors with a catalogue of illogical gibberish, which can be seen as tasteless jokes at best, or backward inhumanity at worst. A mixture of disgust, and vestiges of anger, was finally grinded down into a complete disappointment and depression, when it is repeated like tide, coated with morality, and there is little you can do about it. And it becomes a disdainful silence. That accounts for my deliberate withdrawal from watching what is going on in the world, when I am allowed such liberty, especially with regard to my hometown. (Umbrella Movement.)

So I take refuge in the past – at least this year. Not that I wish to propose an idea that the past was better and people were happier, on the contrary, I believe that every generation and age has its own frustration in the face of different form of crisis. In Medieval Europe it would be hard to imagine that I could travel across continents in my life, let alone a much lower life expectancy. The pulse of my life would be dictated by harvest, plague and all sort of strange reasons inconceivable at present and insolvable in past. There is little ground to argue the past was better in terms of material, health and hygiene between the past and present. Leo Tolstoy, in his great work Anna Karenina, said that “there are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him.” A continuity of human being and civilisation does rely hugely on such astonishing adaptability that serves as both blessings and curse. Human beings prove exceptionally tolerant under harsh, relentless situation, which serves as an obstacle of progress in many cases. If we can tolerate it, so be it, why change? As well as proving how insufferable lives have always been, Tolstoy’s telling quote also tells us our adaptability enables us to acquire happiness, outside of physical world. How much we possess is not the only force that determines how happy we are, neither nor how long we live, for it can be tedious and boring. It is also a matter of depth of life, and what we believe in. Life and happiness were discussed almost two thousand years ago by the Greeks, Chinese and other civilizations. In Iliad Achilles was faced two courses opened to him, either a long quiet life with little “glory” or an ephemeral life that marked his name in history. Confucius talks about the importance of practicing and clinging to virtues at the cost of life in a dilemma of moral crisis. These sages enrich the idea of what life and happiness is about, reminding us of an alternative yardstick of examining meaning of life.  It also reminds us of a perpetual situation of which we are plunged into, that we are forced to adapt and make difficult decisions as long as we breathe. We always suffer.

If the past and present are not necessarily better off or worse off on solely account of material progression, and people sufferings can be a matter of perception and self-perception, what is it that draws me to the past and makes me turn away from the present? People suffer in the past for all sorts of ridiculous reasons like us today, or many will argue that it was even worse. Sufferings wrench my heart, whenever and wherever they take place. Two things mark the differences between sufferings in the past and sufferings happening now. The past is handled logically, and tampered is with a consolatory chronological order with beginnings and endings. The present is messy and tumultuous. Secondly, reading the past I am an observant who shares little responsibility for what happened, whilst reading the news I am one of the many participants that is endowed with duty to shape our future.

I am sympathetic with the people sufferings in the past. The Russian Revolution was made up of heaps of skeletons, streams of blood and piles of corpse. I was working on this topic in my first year at St. Andrews, and I spent nights of research on such topic in the library to a point that I felt too depressed to continue. It was a pain of witnessing an unfortunate fall of the liberals and following ascendance of Lenin and Stalin, no doubt at the will of many Russian people, and at the expense of their lives too. I tried to extract and examine many strings of cold causation in that period, formed them into arguments, a process of extracting knowledge from it. Apart from this mechanical job, I seemed to hear voices of screaming and crying of those Russian people that night in the library, when I closed the book and put it aside. Pining so much hope on the promising future human beings, I cannot stress enough a power of imagination that enables to tolerate with so much misfortunates after repeated broken promises. Always hope for the better tomorrow, and it never comes. I have so much sympathy with them, but I am fortunate in one way that I was not one of them. I am only an observer that watches them with detachment. That is why I can endure reading the past. Whilst in looking at the news and present, I am one of the characters, no matter how trivial I am, in the tragedy that has been performing for thousands years.