A few weeks ago, I read a piece in the New York Review of Books on the World War II diaries of Ernst Jünger. Jünger, as you may or may not know, was a German intellectual who lived from 1895 to 1998 (!!), served in the Imperial German army in World War I and the Wehrmachtin World War II, wrote a powerful book about his experiences in the trenches from 1914-1918 (in English, Storm of Steel), and kept writing throughout his life. He’s one of that remarkable group of humans—almost but not entirely all men—like Erich Auerbach, Ernst Kantorowicz, Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, Arnaldo Momigliano, Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, and others—who wrote out of a fundamentally nineteenth-century education into the second half of the twentieth century.

Some of them transformed that education in quite radical ways—Albert Hirschman, for instance, arguably Norbert Elias—but most of them remained in some deep fundamental way conservators of their legacy. Murdoch’s novels would not be out of place in the late nineteenth century; Arendt’s work, as much as I love it, is marked by a declinism that is not far off from Kantorowicz’s and Jünger’s deeply aristocratic disdain for much of the twentieth century. In a way we know the central Europeans of this sort (especially those who were Jewish) more than the British, for instance. This is because the institutions that would have housed the Central Europeans were consumed in the anarchy of the first half of the century, while Oxbridge colleges more or less remained sustaining habitats for the Brits up till the end of the century; so, while the Brits could be fed, watered and quartered in bucolic quadrangles by the Cam or Isis, the Mitteleuropäischenwere cast adrift, and wandered like Odysseus, never really making their way home. Anyway, that’s all another story.

What I wanted to say is that, in so many ways these days we are coming to terms with the “complicated legacies” of the past. This process is painful and violent and harrowing. Many of the people we love or admire or respect have been shown to be in their “personal” lives—that is, their actual lives—monsters, not infrequently of a prosecutable nature.

I spent a week early in the summer, in a workshop here in Charlottesville, on “teaching race at UVA.” While there were a number of scholars of color among us, the majority was white, and we white people were looking especially for help in thinking about how to “de-center,” as one of the leaders put it, our whiteness—to make it visible, to make it contingent, to make it problematic, and invite people to assess it.

It was a terrific week. I learned a great deal. One thing that was made unmissably clear to us all, if we had somehow missed it over the past couple decades (and you never can know with white people, so I think we all appreciated the reminders), was that the history we had been taught as children was deeply slanted, leaving crucial facts in obscurity while acting as if epiphenomenal events were somehow important.

All of us now, if we aspire to be reasonably truthful in our relationship to history, to our neighbors and our world, will need to reassess, not entirely unpainfully, our whole understanding of the world. The scope of these reassessments has a lot to  do with the "we" who are reassessing it. This happens in regard to eras and events that we had every reason to reckon with much earlier (such as American Slavery), as well as eras and events, and figures, where we might have had suspicions, but could still be legitimately surprised, and not know what to do. What are we to do with the artifacts that we once valued, and perhaps continue to value, if they are utterly stained in horror?

I suppose that’s what we’ve been beginning to do over the past few decades; it seems to have accelerated in the past few years.