History, the Undiscovered Realm

Hello again, brothers and sisters. It's time to go back. 📜

These letters tend to be something of an occasional stream of consciousness, with little continuity to tie them together. However it seems like a good time to follow a thread as we continue to discuss history. Given our normal focus on futuristic thought, looking back may seem a strange choice. But I hope to dispel a dangerous myth that traps many in our time into a blinkered world, predicting unreal futures that continue to vanish with each passing year.

Photo by David Rodrigo on Unsplash

Any individual generation can neither fully grasp the bits of wisdom we retrieve from the debris of lost civilizations nor see those who will discover our gestated understandings hidden away in the sand. Each of us exists alone in history, learning and writing and hoping that others will discover our importance.

Excuse if you might the poor taste in quoting myself. It is at this place that I would like to pick up the conversation. When I asserted human difficulty in understanding the past, present and future, I did not mean to fully dismiss the practice of making an honest attempt. Nor did I mean to represent each of these ages as equally opaque to our eyes. We have much to learn, if we can manage to stay humble and thoughtful. Among people inhabiting only the liminal last decade, the man who can travel back in time is like a king. And by my judgement, history has become a region so often neglected that those who can enter its reaches are now possessed of a superpower.

It seems that for most of the popular imagination history has effectively withered until the only time most consult as they consider the past is a period far shorter than even the brief lifetime of a human being. For some, anything further than the past decade or so recedes into darkness, a period of unknown corruption and failure that has mercifully come to an end finally with their generation, time's pinnacle. For others, history floats hazily in the mind as a far bright lost age, uselessly pined after as the happy perfection from which our moment has degenerated. Perhaps the second form of historical myopia is the easiest to correct; it ought to occur upon even a moment's thought that while the past is a place of wonder for us, it was dully normal for those people who inhabited it. Our halcyon days are a frozen slice of time that seemed to those alive within them to be a roiling period of failure, who in their turn were tempted to look back to their very own lost age. As the tiny slice of time that most inhabit moves forward, our times of anxiety and uncertainty will be retroactively reconsidered by those who did not experience them. There will be people in the near and far future who wish to travel back and enjoy the "cozy, creative solitude" and "exciting revolutionary change" of pandemic life, depend on it. And we would seem as strange to those who lived the days we idolize now.

But unthinking nostalgia is the easiest historical extreme to spot, and to deal with. Even a few minutes of study shows us quickly that our ancestors inhabited a real world, and that it shares with our time the same or equivalent disappointments and suffering. As far as I can tell, the much broader and subtler attitude when approaching the past is the quiet assumption that anyone encountered in history's pages is a primitive figure best used as a counterexample. Sure in our unshakeable belief that progress is up only, we see each person and event from days past as hopelessly retrograde through our own warped vision. The ability to parse a primary source in their own setting and intellectual world, the historical imagination necessary to adapt ourselves to any other mode of life or way of thought, is all but lost. We canonize our own brief passage of seconds and use it to render judgements on a dimly-grasped version of the past. Then we stand dumbstruck at our continued inability to anticipate the oncoming problems of our own world, much less understand the coming struggles of our children.

Because of the inherent corruption and failure present in the human mind, our struggle to understand ourselves and act accordingly is already difficult enough. It becomes truly hopeless if we cut away everything but the glossary in the book of the world and content ourselves with arguing over the meanings of the terms it contains. The study of history is not an elective in the pursuit of life, it is a foundational part of understanding the world. A generation that can simply dismiss the millennia-spanning Christian faith as "backward" and "irrelevant" merely displays its own anxieties at the thought of being weighed in the past's scales.

A humble approach to history begins with allowing our intellectual innovations and sophomoric realizations to be judged by the believers and thinkers and scholars of another time. As they read us, we quickly see our own blindness. We save ourselves from embarrassing extremes and flawed premises. Of course we will find things to critique and much we disagree with. We may be surprised however by how wisely, and incisively, the voices of the past disagree with us. The preserved words of wisdom that built the world we inhabit, to say nothing of the Word that spun worlds into existence, is a corpus that remains accessible to us. This very fact should cause deep gratitude because it was not inevitable. Other humans have lived without the very historical benefits we deride. The Old and New Testaments are ancient, but they are not eternal. What a loss if we fail to look into the library of libraries that remains preserved for us, and into which others would have longed to look.

Photo by Will van Wingerden on Unsplash

This I would argue is one of the chief failures of the noisy discourse we all sadly bemoan that seeps into every moment of our modern world. Many aspects of our present result in (I hesitate to say are designed for) the destruction of the historical mind. The "timeline" chronicles little and preserves nothing. Our academies specialize in subjects that have only existed for the lifespan of an adolescent. Our mayfly understanding is generating religious life and philosophical thought and civic policy that can only survive fleeting moments, soap bubbles in the tide. Our futurists deal in beatific visions of the Singularity and a Post-Work Economy but remain strangely silent in explaining how this time will be different. We once even proclaimed "the end of history," as if the turning of a millennium somehow drew the curtain on crises. Wars and pestilence quickly put a stop to such talk, of course. But we would have never spoken our hubris so clearly had we spent a few hours with the failed utopian visions of 1913 or 1919. For a people whose' small children possess the keys to time machines on a plastic card they can put in their pocket, we sadly remain severed from our own heritage.

Please forgive what might seem like the self-satisfied righteous anger of a onetime history major whose' skills are not valued by the market. I hope I remain humbled by the truth that any respect I have for the past was given to me, primarily by my faith which insists that human souls can be read by a Book. In fact, if you will indulge me I would like to make a practical suggestion, for once. Have you ever read the Old and New Testaments? If you haven't, there is no better place to start your journey into the past. I must admit of course that I do not approach that holy library with (only) the forensic eye of a scholar, and I don't believe it can be viewed simply as a historical curio at all. I am, at least, a strictly honest internet religious zealot. But even if we don't agree, you ought to be able to come to this treasure with a mind ready to ask "What does this Book speak to me that nothing else can speak?" I must warn you that the process has been known to be disturbing and disorienting. We should expect as much when a generation whose' historical faculties have been violently amputated approaches sacred ground. When you journey back, prepare to be found wanting. The people of the past, after all, have a way of refusing to stay dead.

WGMI 😎

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None of us can fully escape this [historical] blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. ~ C.S. Lewis

Do not move the ancient landmark that your fathers have set. ~ Proverbs 22:28