"THE LIFE OF THE MIND, AND . . . THE MINDFUL LIFE"

Tony Judt (with Timothy Snyder), Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012) (From the Snyder's "Foreword": "There is one truth that seeks us rather than the other way around, one truth that has no complement: that each of us comes to an end. The other truths orbit around this one like stars around a black hole, brighter, newer, less weighty. This final truth helped me to give this book its final shape. This book could not have arisen without a certain effort at a certain time, little more than a companionable gesture on my side, but an enormous physical campaign in Tony's. But it is not a book about struggle. It is a book about the life of the mind, and about the mindful life." Id. at xvii. "As it happens, I don't think neglecting the past is our greatest risk; the characteristic mistake of the present is to cite it in ignorance. Condoleezza Rice, who holds a PhD in political science and was the provost of Stanford University, invoked the American occupation of postwar Germany to justify the Iraq War. How much historical illiteracy can you identify in that one analogy? Given that we are bound to exploit the past in order to justify present public behavior, the case for actually knowing history is unanswerable. A better-informed citizenry is less likely to be bamboozled into abusive exploitations of the past for present errors." "It's terribly important for an open society to be familiar with its past. It was a common feature of the closed societies of the twentieth century, whether of Left or Right, that they manipulated history. Rigging the past is the oldest form of knowledge control: if you have power over the interpretation of what went before (or can simply lie about it), the present and the future are at your disposal. So it is simple democratic prudence to ensure that the citizenry are historically informed." Id. at 265. Also see Francis Fukuyama, "One Man's History," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/5/2012.).