One of the more fascinating aspects of history, whether one looks at contemporary affairs or the deep mists of the past, is that as different as our expressions are, we are not so different after all. Wherever I have traveled in the world, I have found people to be very similar. Now, we act out differently based on our different circumstances, different places in society, and so on, but we are not that dissimilar. We are told in history classes and by others that people from other countries are entirely alien, and that maybe they are not well suited to self-rule because of their immaturity, and the other choices are dictators and thieves and gangsters. Whether we look in history or at our world, not much has changed.

In all of my writing, I have not really addressed the issue of time-travel, which might seem to be a curious gap in my writing. But in all of my thoughts about time travel I can only see two ways that someone would be a successful time traveler. The first is to use technology to claim a territory and fill it with time traveling refugees capable of wiping out rivals, and the second is for a time traveling refugee to attach himself to a powerful leader (a la A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court) and find protection in that relationship to serve the interests of that patron and find respect and freedom in response. Sadly, these problems do not exist merely in time travel fiction, but also in the real world. If we wish to live as we are (and for me, that means a fairly typical Westerner of the early 21st century), we must either be among our own kind in realms and areas under the control of like-minded people, or we must have the support of powerful patrons in lands where the freedoms we take for granted are not widespread.

What does this mean? It means that the fate of a time-traveler (or a historian) is analogous to the fate of a world traveler. Traveling to the past is like traveling to a different country. In doing so, we find that people are people wherever we go. They want a good living; they want love; they want respect and honor. How they define these things are somewhat different. How they describe their beliefs are different. But people are people, wherever they are. We have to remain sensitive to the essential similarity of human beings even as we address the obvious differences. We cannot assume that the people of other lands are any less capable of handling responsibility and deserving than we are, because perhaps we are not as capable as we think ourselves.

There are plenty of implications of this. One is that we might become more sensitive to the differences within us, to recognize that we are aliens from each other because of different worldviews and perspectives. By recognizing the distinctiveness within our own societies and families and institutions, we might find the outside world and the past less alien, when we recognize that the same differences have existed for many centuries over many areas of the world. Remembering that others are humans can help us from demonizing others for differences, and help keep us from being complacent about ourselves as well. For we are neither beasts nor angels, but mankind, struggling with our own mixtures of good and evil.