Napoleon has nothing to say to president Johnson
I came across this picture in a book recently, of LBJ watching a rocket launch in 1964. It’s a cool picture for a few reasons—I like the contrast of that insanely old crappy TV, and the massive futuristic rocket exploding in it. But the quote from Andre Malraux is what I want to write about: “Caesar could have conversed with Napoleon, but Napoleon has nothing to say to President Johnson.” To me this offers a lot of insight about the limits of history, something I wrote about last year.
Basically, I think the future hasn’t become what we were expecting in part because we have been too focused on the past, too burdened by history. This is contrary to what most people think—that we are ignorant of history and so doomed to repeat it. As I say in that piece I just linked to from last year, that is completely backwards. We repeat history not because we don’t know it, but because we know it too well, and our collective minds are too full of historical images and information to be able to imagine anything new.
Anyway, this image, of LBJ watching the rocket launch, and the quote about Napoleon having nothing to say to LBJ, goes along with this—that even Napoleon, one of the supreme giants of history, is obsolete now, in the age of rocket launches. History has little if anything to say to us now. Napoleon and Caesar were separated by almost 2000 years, but they still would’ve been able to understand each other—history was useful for that stretch, from Caesar to Napoleon (roughly); but the effort required to catch Napoleon up to speed with 20th century technology would now be too much, he would never be able to understand a rocket. So even a mediocre leader like LBJ has little really to learn from Napoleon—or if he did, it would be so much less than what Napoleon has to learn from LBJ (or from anyone in an advanced 20th century society, who has passing knowledge of rockets and other technologies that would seem like magic to Napoleon).
Even a giant of history like Napoleon, I think, would find it stupid and bizarre if a leader from today—where we have rockets and satellites and countless amazing military technologies—wanted to learn from him; history itself, if it could speak to us today, would tell us to ignore it, that what we have now is so much more important than anything they had.