Pull up a map of the world. It feels strangely permanent. Italy is Italy, France is France, Germany is Germany, America is America. But now pull up a map from 500 years ago. You barely recognize the place. Italy doesn't exist as a country. Instead, the peninsula is divided among places like Venice, Florence, Milan, Naples, and the Papal States. Someone living in Venice isn't a citizen of Italy. He's a Venetian. Germany doesn't exist as a unified country either. Much of Central Europe is a sprawling patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and free cities inside something called the Holy Roman Empire. Go back farther and the map changes again and again. Kingdoms become empires. Empires collapse into kingdoms. Borders move. Countries disappear. New ones appear. And yet every generation has a tendency to look at the map they inherited and imagine that this is finally the finished version. The Romans literally called Rome the eternal city. Their empire would last forever.
Until it didn't. And I think we make that same mistake today. Americans talk about America as though it's not merely a country that exists right now, but a permanent feature of human civilization. But history gives us absolutely no reason to believe that. Two thousand years from now people may look at the United States the way we look at Rome. A civilization that once seemed permanent. A name on an old map. Because the strange thing about living through history is everything around you feels permanent. Right up until it becomes history.
