Whenever
we hear the word “history”, we are reminded of being bored to death. Bored to
death with details, that is. We remember being bombarded with the four Ws –
who, what, when, where (rarely the “how” and “why”) – back in our high school
and college classes in history. We get to be drowned in info, then forced to
commit those to memory. Every day, till graduation, we despised the chore of
blind memorization of the facts. We often thought as to what point is it in
learning about dead men. Rarely have we been shown another side to it.
Until Machiavelli came along.
An obscure 16th century Italian
writer in his time, Niccolo Machiavelli only gained famed after his death. We
know him through his work, “The Prince” – that handbook of statecraft consulted
by men of power down through the ages. Two years after his death in 1527, the
book circulated outside Italy and has since influenced many famous persons of
history. Rumor has it that Marcos himself owned a copy , its ideas influencing
his political actions. Whereas, his downfall came when he failed to heed its
precepts. The stark, sometimes violent, advice seeming to advocate evil made
Niccolo’s surname synonymous to cunning and deceit. It was really an unfair
association – the result of the influence of the clergy. Their religious zeal
led them to denounce his works, overlooking the pragmatic and down-to-earth
ideas on politics that he offered. It was those very ideas that greatly
appealed to many readers – and the bane to later generations of moralists.
But Machiavelli was merely echoing such an
approach. To the east, a thousand years before, a civilization’s wise men and historians
are distilling military and political ideas from their empire’s chronicles.
This was ancient China, where later generations are to read of Sun Wu’s “The
Art of War” – standard textbook in today’s Japanese, Russian and (of course)
Chinese military academies. The wisdom and follies of warriors and kings in
“The Annals of the Spring and Autumn Wars” served as the lessons that Sun Wu
gleaned – lessons that are surprisingly applicable even in modern wars. The
Chinese Communist victories over the Japanese (then later, Chiang Kai-shek’s
Nationalist army) owed to Mao Zedong’s leadership – he, being an earnest
disciple of Sun Wu’s precepts. Principles of statecraft taken from China’s
imperial history also influenced its governance, as of those of Korea’s
kingdoms and Japan’s empire (it must be remembered the two countries are within
China’s cultural and political influence).
The common threads between Machiavelli’s
approach and of his Chinese counterparts are 1) the belief that human nature
influences the actions that shape history...
and...
2) the circumstances of history repeat itself.
and...
2) the circumstances of history repeat itself.
A person’s consciousness or nature (what
he believes in or how he views life) has a significant impact. His actions are
influenced by his personal nature, determining the outcome of events –thereby
shaping history as a whole. And the circumstances of history – the factors that
bring out an event – recur in a generation’s lifetime; that needs the
appropriate action to resolve it.
It is those concepts that served as the
framework for Machiavelli and generations of Chinese sages in their works. In
addition, the appropriate action – be it immoral or not – determines an outcome
for the good of all. The keyword here is “circumstance”. Machiavelli showed in
his book examples of leaders who took moral action (often out of vanity) in the
inappropriate circumstances, the result being the ruin or loss of their
kingdoms. The Chinese wise men were to also warn future emperors and statesmen
of the errors of past Chinese leaders in what their unwise decisions had
brought them.
In the Philippines, Prof. Teodoro
Agoncillo attempted to add social commentaries to our history in his work, “The
History of the Filipino People” and its later version, “A Brief History of the
Filipino People”. The former is a college textbook on Philippine history,
whereas the latter is a rare, non-mainstream work of his (probably out of print
now). His insights, sadly, never went mainstream. It will be time before
someone musters enough audacity to assert his views to the educational
community.
And it
is such views that present and future Filipino generations need to appreciate
their past. In the Orient and in Western nations, they esteem the role that
political history plays in education. They value indeed the lessons learned
from the past – an appreciation that Filipinos have yet to develop. How – and who
– a nation will be tomorrow depends on how much they themselves today. And it
is the light of the past that they will need to for that search.
As a
wise Chinese emperor (The T’ang emperor, Taizong) was to remark, “With history
as a mirror, one can understand the rise and fall of a nation”. And the
Filipinos badly need such a mirror
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