Try doing the equations yourself

Let's imagine we are leaving for a distant country, China or Japan. It is highly probable that we will find out about the cuisine, the uses and customs of the people we will get to know, maybe we will try to learn a few words of the local language. We are in fact aware of coming into contact with people who live differently from ours. And it doesn't surprise us. A similar situation occurs with history, albeit with different effects. Studying history is like traveling: this time not in space but in time. Knowing the past means being ready to meet people who may have lived in our own places but who had a way of conceiving themselves and the reality that surrounded them very different from our sensitivity.

 

It is not easy to understand this difference and this is the reason why we find it so hard today to study history. We do not understand the past because ancient mentalities are profoundly different from current ones. In particular, today we live in a society that is flat on the present and therefore does not recognize the meaning of the passage of time, of historical distance and of change. Lacking historical sense, we fall into anachronism and judge the past incorrectly because it is judged according to categories that do not belong to it. It's like misjudging a six-year-old child for not being able to solve a second degree equation. Recognizing the historical distance, understanding for example that the Romans had values, ideas, political, economic and social structures different from ours, basically means understanding them better, understanding in an authentic way the reasons for their actions (without wanting to justify them!). Discovering the temporal and cultural distance is important to recognize the differences and, therefore, understand the human journey undertaken.

 

Let's try to give an example. Our Constitution reaffirms equality among all citizens as a fundamental right. Anachronism is to think that it has always been like this and always will be like this. The definition of this right is the result of a very tiring historical journey that has had to overcome what for millennia has been one of the most widespread and deeply rooted human convictions: natural inequality between men. To understand each other, let's try to take a one meter long line and think of it as the timeline that covers all history from 3200 BC (invention of writing) to today. If we wanted to see at what point in the time line the legal principle of the equality of citizens before the law began to spread, we would have to wait for 95.56 cm with the Declaration of Man and the Citizen of 1789. In all previous centimeters , always and only inequality! Equality and with it individual freedom are therefore young daughters of recent times and - like every child - they must be loved, protected from dangers by those who continue to hate and educated so that they can grow in the best way.