Arsene Wenger and what Arsenal teaches us about history

For an Arsenal fan, it's been the same for the last 12 years. The expectation, the anticipation, the inevitable disappointment. The one player left standing alone on the pitch who has carried our hopes for the season, frustrated and helpless. The same advice is thrown about every year: Buy, spend more, build a squad. After a few weeks the hype dies and no-one of significance is added. Back to the youtube videos of Bergkamp and Henry, remembering the good old days at the turn of the century. We never seem to learn.

Maybe we just can't learn from the past? But I refuse to accept this position. The reason I believe we can is that our collective knowledge is not incremental. Whilst in science and medicine, change has been consistently improving (even if for sometimes random reasons), it is mistaken to think this applies to the rest of life. Are we happier, more fulfilled and better people than those who lived 500, 1000 years ago? It doesn't seem so. Not that things are necessarily worse now, that would be equally misleading to suggest, but that it seems that each era has its thing, its area of strength that gets forgotten by subsequent generations.

I often think that when I go into a library. It hits you - there are thousands and thousands of books here, how many have people actually read? How much of their knowledge and insight is lost forever? Has internet access made us wiser or simply lazier? 

In studying rabbis who lived around the time of what is known as the 'Renaissance' period, I have encountered the idea of using history and find it fascinating to apply to our own society. Renaissance literature, architecture and paintings were geared around a vision for the betterment of the world based on learning from the knowledge of the ancients, a general optimism about the role of man in the world and his ability to spread values that would improve society. Knowledge wasn't simply for the elites in the academy, it served a broader purpose. One theory went, that by looking and living around things of beauty which promoted good values and ideals, society would become a more peaceful, moral and harmonious place. Paintings of classic Christian figures stopped looking austere and frightening and started looking human and compassionate. 

Buildings in Italian cities are brilliantly symmetrical, with arches and courtyards, with many 16th century books written on how architecture should be designed to enable, for example, a mother to shout out a window to her child playing outside so he could hear.  

This is just one important lesson we can find in historical annals, the power of both the visual and emotional stimuli to envision a better society. So as an Arsenal fan I look back to Dennis Bergkamp, Robert Pires and the gang and remember the days when beauty and success went hand in hand. 

The Jewish world has been enormously affected by the Enlightenment and the triumph of Science and reason in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Even today, many discussions are framed in terms of the rational as opposed to the irrational in religion. But it hasn't really developed a renaissance-like mindset in the same way - there was not a movement comparable to the one in the Christian world (not an unconstested view). It was clearly more difficult when we were a minority with little financial independence but it would be an interesting question as to whether some of the more romantic and idealistic conceptions of the past using visual media could be appropriated by Jewish leaders in their visions of building a more harmonious Jewish society.