The last word, Professor of ancient history says the future will be better
Dr. Mark Damen skipped the stairs and stepped right up on stage as he headed to the podium, giving the audience a taste of what would follow in the next hour.
Damen gave this year’s Last Lecture Thursday to a crowd that filled about half the Ballroom. The Last Lecturer is nominated each year by students and selected by students in the honors program. This tradition has gone on at Utah State University for over 30 years, said Christie Fox, director of the honors program. The Last Lecture gives the chosen professor the opportunity to deliver a lecture as though it were his or her last lecture on campus, on whatever subject they choose.
Damen’s lecture was no dull run-down of some dire issue facing humanity or long harangue on some obscure point in history. Damen, who is a professor of classics, theater and ancient history, approached his assignment with a bit more creativity and plenty of energy.
“The hope endures that there’s something still worth saving amidst this tundra called the human experience, some reason we should go on,” he said, mopping his brow every few seconds with a green-checkered cloth. “And even if we know what we’re looking for, how do we find it? Well, this is your lucky day.
Every day, Damen said, we draw a line from our past to our present and use that to decide where we are going. Because of this, the study of history is the study of everything we know.
“Change your perception of what really happened in the past and you change the trajectory of what you think should come,” he said.
He outlined five “misconceptions” many people suffer under, all having to do with the past or future. They were:
• The past is past
• The past is simple
• The future will be better
• Those who don’t know the past are doomed to repeat it
• Nothing that’s actually happened matters in the slightest – a quote from Oscar Wilde.
“Do you know how many centuries have passed?” Damen asked.
Damen said everyone acts like they live in exciting times. No one complains there aren’t enough problems to make things exciting. Every age, he said, has felt it was on the brink of extinction.
“History is not about dead people,” he said. “They made their lives unnecessarily complicated, just like you. Don’t try to flatten out and simplify their lives.
People tend to go up and down, he said, not progress indefinitely. Though we’re now on a historical high point, he said if you were to go forward several centuries you would find people building houses with mud bricks. He said the year 3006 is more likely to look like Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade than like Star Trek.
Damen said since people are creatures of habit, those who know history are more likely to repeat it than those who don’t. People are amazingly obedient collectively, he said.
“People who know the past are more apt to fall into comfortable modes of experience,” he said. “Brutus killed Caesar because his Roman upbringing programmed him to do it.
Damen also suggested five “conceptions” for his audience to consider. They were:
• Measure your soul over time
• History breaks the world record every day
• Plan for a dark age
• Don’t dig too deep
• Listen, love and live the moment
Damen suggested reading a good book and then setting it aside. Five years from now, he said, read it again. And again in 10 years, and again in 20. Over time, he said, “a miraculous thing will happen.” He said the book will seem to change because the reader is changing.
Damen said his “best barometer of the soul” is Virgil’s Aeneid. He said when he read it in high school, he put it aside, disgusted and disappointed. However, he “rediscovered” it in college. Through the years, he said, the Aeneid has been everything from a love story to a story about a fruitless job search, depending on who he was at the time. He said it’s important for everyone to have an author who helps them know themselves over time.
He also said it’s important to pass on our history to the next generation. Humans have kept a longer record of their past than any other creature, Damen said.
“Every day we move further from our farthest memory,” he said, stretching the record for longest record-keeping daily. Pass on the past, he said, because it
‘s been passed on to you.
Damen said some of the greatest discoveries were dug up out of the ground by average people. The best way to preserve something of value, he said, only half-jokingly, is to leave it in the ground for future archaeologists to find.
“If you want something to last, if you really love something, bury it in your backyard and don’t tell anyone where it is,” he said.
However, he said it’s important not to dig too deep in the quest to preserve your own record.
“Don’t disrupt all future archaeology,” he said. “Imagine if someone had decided to remove those unsightly Pyramids from Giza to put in a mall?
Damen said he wept on 9/11 when the twin towers collapsed. But, he wept more when he saw people pulling up all the wreckage and the foundations of the two buildings in a “noble effort” to build a monument. By removing the buildings’ foundations, they erased the memory and record of the victims of the attacks.
“We’ll all be history soon enough. If the gods are kind, not too soon,” Damen said. “And if they aren’t kind, well, dump them and get new gods.”
-ella@cc.usu.edu