Triumphs of the Spirit: How History Responds to ideas and Yearnings

• Share

How history responds to ideas and yearnings

So, little by little, time brings out each several thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of light.

—Lucretius

News, almost by definition, tends in the other direction.

Events may be merely busy, of course—a sort of itch of the unusual, a restlessness in the world. But when the news is momentous, it may run toward darker, murkier regions, toward war and catastrophe.

Yet, sometimes, the news does rise toward the shores of light. Sometimes history responds not merely to the promptings of blind accident or economic tides but to the pressure of ideas or to a kind of coalescence of yearnings. "I have a dream," Martin Luther King Jr. cried at the Lincoln Memorial one August day in 1963. His dream and others made the news, made history, as completely as any bombs or earthquakes did.

There are individual dreams and collective dreams. Charles Lindbergh's trajectory across the Atlantic in 1927 was a vivid feat of individualism. He became one of the last romantic heroes. He brilliantly employed the technology of flight in its primitive stage, before technology seemed to overwhelm the individual. If the American space program produced a triumph of teamwork in an age when hundreds of human brains were needed to collaborate, like microchips, in the mastery of so much detail, Lindbergh's flight represented a peculiarly, almost wistfully, American way of doing things. It was a lonely achievement of the American character, self-contained, self-confident, in motion across great distances. Lindbergh perfectly embodies a contradiction in the older American soul. He was a kind of mystic mechanic. He arced up into another element. He took human possibility into another atmosphere. He made American materialism soar—the first great American export of the technological age.

The birth of Israel was an utterly different sort of achievement. If Lindbergh was the individualist outrider of a new age, the idea of Israel was a collective vision. It arose from an ancient tribal aspiration, the hope of an ingathering after the long centuries of the Diaspora.

The object was to create something where nothing had been before, or at least not for many centuries. After the terrible revelations of the Nazi Holocaust, the impulse was to create, to will a Jewish state into being in the desert. The Zionist ideal, unfortunately, did not sufficiently reckon with the complexities of Middle Eastern life and politics. The European Jews arrived in Palestine, one writer said, as if they had come to colonize the moon. But the place was not untenanted, and all the history of Israel since its birth has been troubled by a 35-year war that, quite apart from the usual territorial disputes and ethnic antagonisms, has been one of conflicting visions, of Israeli hopes and Palestinian hopes.