https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/04/turgenevs-fathers-and-sons-a-novel-for-today/
Even without the COVID-19 epidemic, the Western world has been going through turbulent times, economically, socially, politically and culturally. All times are turbulent, perhaps, and we just happen to be so constituted as always to think that our present turbulence is unprecedented and greater than that of any in the past. It is only in retrospect that some or other period of the past seems peaceful and placid to us, which it never did to those who lived through it; nevertheless, there seem to us to have been periods that we are pleased to call normal, that is to say times when most important questions seemed to be settled and all problems were either minor or susceptible of easy solution.
Past travails, however, illuminate present travails. Historical analogies are never exact—that, after all, is why there are analogies rather than repetitions—and the lessons of the past are always disputable; moreover, there is no human experience from which the wrong conclusions cannot be drawn. Perhaps one of the ironies of our present conjuncture is that, while multiculturalism is extolled and treated almost as an unimpeachable orthodoxy, so many people lack historical imagination and cannot enter mentally into a world in which people had a different scale of values from their own. The past for them is not another country where they do things differently; it is the same country where they were not as enlightened as we.
Karl Marx was quite right when he said that men make their own history but not just as they choose: from this well-expressed truism, however, he drew the false conclusion that there existed historical inevitability. In his view, men could have free will only if they were free of all constraining circumstances whatever, but this is not only to invoke an impossibility, but to mistake the nature of infinity. It does not follow from the fact that some choices are closed to me—I cannot, for example, be King of England—that the number of choices before me is not infinite. A grammar limits what can meaningfully be said, but it does not limit the infinitude of what can be said.
The great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev was an exact contemporary of Karl Marx. They were born and died in the same years, 1818 and 1883. These were not the only parallels in their lives. They both came under the influence of Hegelianism in Berlin, and they were in the same place when the revolutions of 1848 broke out.