Among the blessings we count today, we should give thanks for history. Remembering the past is not just crucial to a sense of gratitude; it is also the foundation of our traditions and indeed our entire civilization.
Thanksgiving celebrations typically offer enough imagery to put us in mind of the Pilgrims, a people far removed from our modern lives, whose sufferings through the brutal winter of 1620-21 (which claimed more than half of their number) formed the backdrop for the first thanksgiving in celebration of their survival and the divine Providence to which they attributed it. We think as well of the Wampanoag nation, the tribe that shared that celebration.
For over 400 Thanksgivings since then, many of them long predating the national holiday or even the nation, Americans have endured difficulty and strife and left a better nation than the one they found. That includes the generation of the Founding Fathers, who gave us the nation and its exceptional and durable political system and laid the foundations for its economy and society.
We do not give thanks merely for those who came before us, faced harder lives, and built the nation we live in. We should also give thanks, specifically, for the fact that they left a record of what they did, that we should learn from it. It is a grand and glorious history, and also a querulous one that reminds us that few of our problems are really new.
Written language is the sine qua non of civilization. Humans without written language may form societies, complete with hierarchies, division of labor, social norms, moral rules, folk songs, and epic stories about their past. But without written language, there are hard limits on the amount of technical, scientific, and mathematical knowledge that can be passed down, or the rigor with which one may compose and criticize history, philosophy, literature, or theology, let alone economics or the other social sciences.
Tradition is nothing more than the accumulated trial, error, and progress of the past. The recording of history allows us not only to respect tradition but to understand how, when, and why to question it. Chesterton’s famous line about not tearing down a fence until you know why it was put there assumes a world in which it is possible to learn the answer to that question.
To learn our history is to form the basis for that “informed patriotism” that Ronald Reagan cautioned us to preserve. In politics, it is to understand our party, our movement, our old books and enduring ideas, the great causes of the past and the great errors. In law, the writing down of rules is the essence of how democracy governs and does so with respect for equal justice. It is what gives us a larger sample size of observations than any social-science experiment.
So, let us give thanks, and remember — and let us commit ourselves always to remember.