Thought for the Day - 16 July 2024
The following is the script from my Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday, 16 July 2024. You can listen to it on BBC Sounds here:
Good morning,
Soon after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, commentators were drawing parallels between Saturday’s attack, and that on Ronald Reagan in 1981. Reagan was forever changed by his close encounter with death, and like Trump, believed he had been spared by God.
In big moments, we look to the past to make sense of what’s happening now. The UK election this month seemed twinned in public consciousness with Labour’s 1997 victory. In the run-up, political analysts pointed to similarities then to predict what might happen in 2024.
Academics have described this as historical recurrence – events in history that bear striking similarity: the rise and fall of empires, catastrophic changes in climate, the assassinations of charismatic activists like Gandhi or Martin Luther King.
Sports fans will be familiar with commentary that points backwards, twinning previous wins or defeats with matches happening now.
We describe football coming home, and hark back to that celebrated day in 1966 that still haunts the collective memory of every England football fan. A major win continues to elude the men’s national team, but the idea that history must at some point repeat itself keeps us hoping that this might be the time.
Gareth Southgate’s penalty miss in 1996 foreshadowed Bukayo Saka’s in the Euros final in 2020. It helps to know others before us have faced the same challenges we have. So much of political and footballing commentary meditates on the past.
The gospels often point back to what’s come before, too. The victories and losses and joys and heartbreaks of Old Testament figures are echoed in the lives of those that come after them.
Eve - the first woman - foreshadows Mary, Jesus’s mother. Jesus is referred to as the new Adam.
Humans can’t help but draw patterns – to trace lines from the past to the present. Perhaps it makes us feel less like we’re floating specs of dust in a universe filled with cosmic randomness, and more like we mean something.
Like what we see, experience, read in our newspapers – is connected to something else. Something bigger. It hooks us in to a larger narrative, and helps us find our place.
I’ve always found the words in Ecclesiastes – that there’s nothing new under the sun - a little depressing. But maybe they can provide a sort of comfort instead.
Like someone, somewhere, has the long view of human history and is in control; or like we ourselves have more control if we can predict what’s coming next.
At the very least – in a world that feels increasingly uncertain – maybe it simply helps us feel less alone.
Image: Pierre Bamin for Unsplash
