Relationship to the Past

~ Clarissa

When we think about the relevance of ideas, we naturally weight those ideas by their number of living believers. For instance, Mithraism is not relevant at all, since there are no living Mithraists. In historical terms, this algorithm yields a fisheye lens, focused on the present. The living, who exist, are more important than the dead, who do not. Now, let us reweight the relevance of ideas by their living or dead believers. Now, ideas matter if anyone has ever believed them. This political map too has a window: the Overton window of history. How does it compare to the Overton window of the present both in position, and in size?

Curtis Yarvin, Grey Mirror

What is our position vis-a-vis history? Is ours the only true and correct way of being, akin to a religion? Or can we accept that our current way of being is not vastly superior to any that existed previously but one of many valid ways of being? Is it possible that we understand some things worse than people in the past?

The ability to see the present as equal to and part of the past is comparable to the ability to see one’s own religion as just one of many religions. The discovery of this ability was the core mental transformation of the Enlightenment. Once the Peace of Westphalia recognized that multiple faiths could coexist politically, modernity began.

But in the domain of politics, our minds remain shrouded in medieval gloom. The Overton model is a pre-Enlightenment model. Everyone outside the window is a Gentile. That is, an “extremist.”

The entirety of our history save for the last 15 seconds is widely considered to be a manifestation of right-wing extremism, evil, mean, and completely mistaken. A person who thinks like this about his past will be extremely miserable. If you are burning with hatred for everything that happened to you until this morning, you will be seriously unwell. But that’s how we are all conditioned to think. Right, left, center – we all see the past as one huge mistake and the people who lived then as morally inferior to us.

But what if it’s the other way round? Is that at all a possibility? What if we are the morally inferior ones?

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Published by Clarissa

21 thoughts on “Relationship to the Past”

  1. This is one that I struggle to get across in conversations. People get hung up on *one* way of doing things, *one* suite of technologies, etc. as… the only possible thing that could have happened. But, you know, if we hadn’t developed microchips, we wouldn’t have *no* technology, we’d have very different technology. Something else would have been discovered, things would have developed along different lines. It’s interesting to ask… what developments has this, one, dominant technology (or idea, or philosophy, or system) *displaced*? What other systems of governance, trade, communication, etc are possible? In what conditions do they work, or not-work? What’s been tried and how did it work out?

    There’s a tendency to look at things in a very strict binary, where, say, it’s *either* democracy or communism. As though there are zero other ways of doing things. It’s *either* high-tech digital everything, or banging rocks together and living in caves.

    It also results in an inability to look at suites of technologies as individual parts that could be perhaps chosen from: any suggestion that, perhaps, some older technologies are more functional or appropriate… is likely to be met with a sort of incredulity, like “OMG you wanna go back to (social/biological evil of some prior age)??” no, really, I just think we were better off as human beings before everybody was getting pinged all day by cell phone notices, and maybe we ought to have a closer look at the risks of irradiating everybody all the time?

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    1. And it’s the same in the moral realm. Yesterday we saw a tweet from a woman who failed at marriage lecture a woman who didn’t with a sense of a complete conviction that she’s entitled to do so. I’m sure she would say ages vastly morally superior to anybody who lived 100 years ago but is that true? We do assign to ourselves a huge moral superiority compared to the past but is that feeling justified?

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      1. In a hilarious coincidence, our reading from Life of the Spider today had Fabre musing on the same topic, in the nineteenth century:

        “We are the larvae with the changing skins, the ugly caterpillars of a society that is slowly, very slowly, wending its way to the triumph of right over might. When will this sublime metamorphosis be accomplished? To free ourselves from those wild-beast brutalities, must we wait for the ocean-plains of the southern hemisphere to flow to our side, changing the face of continents and renewing the glacial period of the Reindeer and the Mammoth? Perhaps, so slow is moral progress.

        True, we have the bicycle, the motor-car, the dirigible airship and other marvellous means of breaking our bones; but our morality is not one rung the higher for it all. One would even say that, the farther we proceed in our conquest of matter, the more our morality recedes. The most advanced of our inventions consists in bringing men down with grapeshot and explosives with the swiftness of the reaper mowing the corn.”

        https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1887/pg1887-images.html

        I’m going to miss this book when we are done with it.

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        1. methylethyl

          “The most advanced of our inventions consists in bringing men down with grapeshot…”

          Nah, the most advanced inventions usually involves improving our foodstuffs. Spent a warm afternoon last weekend showing my new neighbours how to graft fruit trees and take grape and fig cuttings. The ideas may be medieval, but the tools: electrical tape, snap off razoe knives, and pruning spray are modern, yet the clear eyes and steady hands necessary remain ;-D

           

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          1. 🙂 Certainly, not enough credit is given to old, mature techniques and technologies like selective breeding, grafting, propagation… we depend on them, and we take them entirely for granted. A bit like the way archaeology for most of its existence forgets or ignores tech that isn’t made of stone or metal, because it doesn’t survive so well. But the most basic, fundamental, and early technologies that allowed us to do things other animals couldn’t, included cordage and basketry. What good is a flint spearhead, without a sinew to haft it?

            Fabre is a gem, though– cranky, eloquent, obsessed, eccentric, and king of the philosophical digression. This passage was, after all, from a book about spiders. You’d never know outside context that he is talking about the banded epeira in this chapter.

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              1. Yes, for the longest time, they were finding these odd stone and ceramic artifacts, just kind of a *thing* of a certain size and no beauty, with a hole in it. Groups of them. So puzzling. Probably went through the “well it must have some obscure ritual purpose” phase… and in the end they turned out to be loom weights. The loom didn’t survive, but all along they were evidence of textile manufacture. And the thing was… we had *pictures* of the things in use all that time, on Greek painted vases and stuff.

                https://trc-leiden.nl/trc-digital-exhibition/index.php/ancient-greek-loom-weights/item/130-2-what-is-a-loom-weight

                I love your link’s subheading. It perfectly illustrates the trajectory of these things: we don’t know what it was, so it must’ve been a magic wand… (insert intermediary phase where non-archaeologist craftsperson looks at it and says: well obviously that’s for knitting/weaving/ropemaking, gets pooh-poohed for being a dumb nonacademic) right up until we figure out that it’s an important tool and people still use similar tools for similar purposes today.

                Still waiting on the perfectly mundane explanation for those Roman dodecahedrons.

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          2. Yesterday the Trump administration inflicted the largest bombing on Yemen so far. The point about not wasting money on foreign conflicts rings very hollow today.

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  2. Ironically, one example of this small mindlessness is the lazy, thoughtless contempt for the medieval era exhibited in the second selection here. Were there no intelligent ideas during those several centuries of Western history? Yarvin only respects the Enlightenment, even though this liberal age planted the seeds for the American Revolution he hates so much, because it’s far more in line with the worldview of a atheist 21st century computer programmer. This is only natural, but it’s ironic that it comes out so strongly in this particular context.

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    1. Yes, it’s like when my students said that the European conquest of the New World was “a mistake.” That they wouldn’t exist without that “mistake” never occurred. It’s not exactly healthy to see everything around you as a result of a mistake.

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  3. SA probably has the largest gap between the modern and the ancient that exists anywhere. The main appeal of the ancient is that they didn’t have to deal with modern complexity.

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  4. “Once the Peace of Westphalia recognized that multiple faiths could coexist politically, modernity began.“

    Absolutely true, but that is also when religion started to become obsolete and then irrelevant to the modern Western world.

    It is because of this that we in Europe are now being colonised by people for whom religion is neither obsolete nor irrelevant.

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