This is going to be a long essay, and most readers will probably want to skip it and go read the newspaper comics. It is provoked by a comment on a twelve-year-old article. The commenter thinks Dr. Boli is despicable, and if you are reading this Magazine, she does not think much of you, either. Because the article is so far back in the archive, because the commenter expresses herself clearly, and because she makes explicit the assumptions that are only implicit in many similar comments, it seemed worth bringing her comment to the front page and engaging with it, as the young folks say.

We mentioned that the article is twelve years old. Dr. Boli always leaves the comments open for every article, no matter how old. Many sites close comments after a week or so, but we would miss a lot if we did that. For example, the Free Blank Sheet of Paper is like flypaper for commenters, and we have learned much about the American mind from those comments.

The article in question was called “Popular Misconceptions About the Civil War,” and here is the comment in full:

There is nothing funny about this so-called “Celebrated Magazine.” I think the man who wrote it is the only one who is enthusiastic about it. To compare slavery with modern-day corporations is despicable and shows a lack of intelligence. For people to make excuses for what this man wrote and state that his comments were a joke or a parody is just as bad! How about we all stand up and say slavery was horrific and should never have happened? There aren’t many things in history to laugh about; instead, we learn how to not make the same terrible mistakes that ruin others lives. THINK: is it thoughtful, helpful, necessary or kind? If it isn’t, please don’t say anything.

Having read the last sentence, Dr. Boli went back to the sentence in which our commenter called him despicable and lacking in intelligence and tried to fit it into one of the four categories—thoughtful, helpful, necessary, or kind. Necessary was probably the one the comment was intended to fit.

But to Dr. Boli, the most interesting sentence in the whole comment was this one:

There aren’t many things in history to laugh about; instead, we learn how to not make the same terrible mistakes that ruin others lives.

This seems to be the implicit assumption in many arguments today, and our commenter has done us a great favor by articulating it clearly and expressing it economically.

Now, it is probably unfair to bring logic to a moral argument. There is, after all, no logical way to prove that something is funny, or that something is offensive.

However, if there is very little to laugh about in history, then there is very little to laugh about. All laughter is suspect, because we are living in history. This is the puritan ideal: laugh too much and you’ll find yourself in the stocks.

We can admit that it is logically possible to say that we are not living in history. You could in theory make a meaningful distinction between the present and the past, between current times and history. If you believe that the world was perfected at some point in our own lifetimes—if you believe that the Millennium has arrived, and we are the righteous who have inherited the earth—then you can draw a line at the point where the world became perfect, and say that history was what happened before that. After that line is goodness and joy and laughter; before that line is wickedness and misery and pain. To transport joy and laughter back into those miserable times would be a fallacy.

That would be a logically consistent belief. It would also be stupid; that probably goes without saying. To believe that everything in the modern world is fundamentally right would require a more-than-Panglossian optimism. So we are left with a simple syllogism: we are not permitted to laugh at history; history is our entire existence; therefore, we are not permitted to laugh at all.

But it may be that we are permitted to laugh at a few things, even in history. Laughter of approval is sometimes allowed by the more relaxed sort of puritan, though the purest puritan would renounce it. We might laugh, for example, at bad people getting the punishment they deserve.

That would put us on the side of the tyrants.

What will tyranny look like when it comes to your country? For most people, tyranny will look like bad people getting what they deserve. Dictatorship is democracy run rampant. It almost always begins as the majority getting what they want right now, without having to put up with delays like people filing lawsuits and courts deciding whether it’s actually legal and blah blah blah. If you are in that majority, then as the dictatorship takes root you will be cheering. At last you have freedom: you are free from the tyranny of laws and bills of rights and sour-faced judges telling you you can’t do that. As the secret police raid your neighbors’ houses, as people you didn’t like very much disappear, you will laugh. Bad people are getting what they deserve. It’s funny because it’s right.

But here is where our commenter’s suggestion about the use of history seems absolutely correct: “we learn how to not make the same terrible mistakes that ruin others lives.” If we remember that this is how the world looked to respectable Germans as the Nazi night was falling, then we can recognize the larval tyranny and squash it now. If we remember that fugitive slave laws made anyone who so much as helped a free Black citizen a suspect, let alone someone who gave aid and comfort to an escaping slave, then we may recognize similar laws when our legislators try to foist them on us today.

But this vigilance requires a certain assumption. It requires us to assume that we might, possibly, be just as bad as our ancestors. It requires us to look back at history and see the Holocaust, slavery, the Inquisition, the Crusades (looking at them from both sides), and every war and atrocity there ever was in the world, and think to ourselves, “I wonder what we’re doing now that will make our descendants curse us.”

If you are really so self-assured that you believe our age has figured it all out, that we are invariably the moral superiors of our antebellum ancestors, then you will not be on the alert for evil today. You will leave your door unlocked, and evil will walk right in. And you will not even recognize it for what it is, because you will believe that evil cannot possibly take up residence in your own home. Who is that fellow in the expensive suit who wears horns on his head and smells like brimstone? We don’t know; he just appeared in the parlor one day, and he seems very nice.

In other words, you will be in exactly the same position as your antebellum ancestors, who grew up in a world with slavery and for the most part simply accepted that this was the way the world worked. After all, they were living at the peak of human civilization. They had learned the lessons of history; they were better than their ancestors. And so they left the door open, and Satan walked right in.

One-third of the white population of the South before the Civil War owned slaves. (Mark Twain’s family was among them.) Were all those millions of people evil? Yes, without a question. But were they more evil than we are? That is the question we must constantly have before us. The answer at any given moment, just as a matter of statistics, is probably no. As it is written, There is none righteous, no not one.

But how do we exercise that vigilance most effectively? Well, we laugh. We laugh at evil, because the sin of Satan is pride, and laughter is the one thing he cannot endure. And while we are laughing at history, we are always on the alert for analogies to our own time. To laugh at history is not just permissible; it is our moral duty. To believe that we are capable of the same mistakes, and that we are probably making mistakes just as big right now, is the only sane way to apply the lessons of history to our own time. This implies, of course, that it is our moral duty to laugh at ourselves. And Dr. Boli takes that moral duty very seriously.

Photo from Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (photograph by Jeon Han), CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Francis, the first Bishop of Rome of that name, will be remembered as the man who stood before the world for a dozen years as the smiling face of the Roman Catholic Church. He will probably not be remembered as the most notoriously dour face in the College of Cardinals, but that was his reputation before his election. Dr. Boli’s favorite picture of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires before he became pope was taken on the subway, where he was sitting with the rest of the commuters, looking as utterly glum as any assistant clerk on his way to the office.

In the coming days we shall doubtless hear many eulogies and not a few critical assessments of Francis, but Dr. Boli will remember him most for his smile. It was a deliberate act of heroism. It was not natural to him at all, but he realized that what the Catholic Church needed at this moment was a smiling face at the top. So he taught himself to smile. It had to be done, and he did it. Moreover, he managed to make it look natural, unlike his predecessor—a naturally pleasant and cheerful man who always looked slightly terrifying when he smiled.

If there is one lesson to be learned from the career of the late Pope Francis, then, let it be this: that pleasantness and good cheer can be a duty, and that the world cannot be improved without them—even if they come at great personal cost.

From an 1884 fire-insurance map of part of downtown Pittsburgh:

The long-gone First United Presbyterian Church (not First Presbyterian—that’s a different church, still going; these were the United Presbyterians) on Seventh Avenue. Note:

1. “Meat storage” in the basement of the church.

2. “Passage under gr’d” to the J. Stevenson & Co. ham house.

Fortunately, some Presbyterians repented of their evil ways and left the First United Presbyterian Ham House, as we can see by the fact that there was a church for reformed Presbyterians just behind First United Presbyterian.

The late Patricia Fullinwider, career public servant and politician and great friend of Dr. Boli, campaigning with another great American in 1976.

On this day in 1477, the Battle of Nancy was fought. Victory ultimately went to the Sluggonian forces, in spite of a vigorous last-ditch volley of exclamation points from the Nancian archers.