Revolutions That Break with the Past Fail

Starting anew with a clean slate has been one of the most harmful ideas in history. It treats previous knowledge as an impediment and imagines that only present knowledge deployed in theoretical purity can make real the wondrous new vision. Thus the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949 each made brave new worlds that catastrophically failed. By cutting off continuity with the slower parts of their cultures they had no fallback. The American Revolution of 1776, by contrast, was highly conservative. Its instigators studied Roman, Venetian, and even Iroquois history for precedents. There was little of the brutal rhetoric of making a total break with the past. As a result, all the leaders who started the revolution lived to see it through to completion, and its innovations in governance aged relatively well. The Americans severed the political bonds with the Old World but not the cultural bonds. They burned their bridges, not their libraries.

Burning libraries is a profound form of murder, or if self-inflicted, suicide. It does to cultural continuity and hence safety what destroying species and habitats does to nature's continuity, and hence safety. Burning the Amazon rain forest burns the world's richest library of species. The accumulated past is life's best resource for innovation. Revolutions cut off the past. Evolution shamelessly, lazily repurposes the past. Reinventing beats inventing nearly every time.

Stewart Brand, Burning Libraries (Winter 1999)

• culture
• history
• knowledge
• libraries