Now and then (and later…)
I’m watching a good doc series on PBS called A Brief History of the Future. I find myself saying “yes!” out loud frequently, because it makes some seriously important points that I think would make us all feel better to think on.
The first of those, and one I’ve felt strongly about for a while, is that we have to get away from our auto-default to dystopia when we imagine the future. We have a much easier time imagining a dystopia because all it requires is running out the hypothetical scenario of “what if we don’t fix the problems we already know we have right now?” That’s a lot easier than learning enough, and imagining enough, to envision possible or even probable solutions to those problems. We tend to normalize whatever situation we’re in if we’re in it long enough—well, that’s just the way it is”—but when we say “that’s just the way it is,” what we’re really saying is “that’s the way it has to be.” And that’s a fallacy. I don’t think you need me to make you a list of all the “ways it is” that were that aren’t any more--and plenty of people then thought that was the way it had to be.
As smart people have pointed out, capitalism as we currently suffer under it has done a great job of convincing most of us that it is the only way to organize an economy or even a society—or at least the best of all possible alternatives. It has cast itself as inevitable; even as the “end of history.”
Codswallop.
Anything that ends in “-ism” is something we made up, and we can make up something else. We can replace it, or change it.
Gene Roddenberry would be mighty concerned, I think, with our current moment’s struggle with imagining our future as anything but a disaster. I think he would also understand, though, what we’ve been through the past few years. But he would be excited about this moment, and he would be urging us to get excited about it too—so that we could meet it. The sense of possibility stirs our creativity and energy. Despair is paralyzing.
Dystopias can serve a purpose besides entertainment, in the same sense that David Attenborough’s documentaries can. They warn us of the consequences of not correcting course—of not solving problems we are now fully aware of. Attenborough, though, has been getting wiser for damn close to a century, and his films always include evidence for hope, by pointing out not just what is possible for us to do, but what some of us are already doing--and how powerful and resilient “nature” is.
Still, I think we can get over-saturated with warnings—I know I can. And that over-saturation can cause pessimism or even despair. That’s why I think docs like this one are so important.
OK fine but this is supposed to be a history series …
The doc points out that our perspective has been narrowed by the pace of highly-visible changes in our society, and that we need a bigger perspective to be best-equipped to prepare for a good future. You’ve read something like that here before if you’ve been reading these awhile.
Unsurprisingly, indigenous peoples in places colonized by imperialism are leading a lot of the effort to change attitudes and practices fueling our destructive effect on ourselves and everything else. That makes sense; they have all, as peoples, survived catastrophe before, and they have been, traditionally, more intimately connected to the non-human world than modern “Western” society (it wouldn’t take much).
Two things on that, from a historian’s perspective: One, “white people” have been paying attention to “Indian” (and African) ways ever since first contact. The idea that we could learn important things from them is about five hundred years old. That idea just couldn’t or didn’t stand in the way of relentless rapacity. Two (speaking of relentless rapacity), “white” people have never had a monopoly on that. We just chose to invent and use technology that amplified universal human tendencies. It’s widely believed, for example, that prehistoric “Americans” drove much of the megafauna they encountered to extinction—which they could do because they were such effective hunters. And relentless. They didn’t think about the long term.
And that is the root of the whole problem, as Hodder wrote. We have to get better at thinking through the ramifications of the decisions we make.
History of technology is an important tool in that species-wide “upskilling.” If Hodder is right, and our very evolution is driven by our “entanglements” with “things,” then how could HoT not be important?
The cathedrals and mega-mosques of Europe and the Near East were designed to be built by multiple generations of people, all devoted to something timeless, as far as they were concerned—relative to their own brief lives. It typically took four generations to build a Gothic cathedral in the 12th century. They are all still there—unless they were deliberately destroyed by later humans.
An indigenous tribal leader interviewed for the Future doc has devoted her life to reclaiming and teaching the traditional cultural practices and worldviews of her people to the younger generation. She believes that to be necessary in order for those people to grow up with a sense of who they are, what the world is, and how they should act in it.
You’ll hear the platitude “You don’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.” For me, that makes more sense if I change it to “You don’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are, and you don’t know where you are if you don’t know where you’ve been.” Imagine suddenly becoming conscious right now, with no memory of your own past. You would be utterly lost. You would be paralyzed.
When we gain a long-term perspective, we realize that, yes, things change, but not completely. Things we think are unique to our own time frequently, we learn, aren’t. This should not breed fatalism; it should breed realism and a deeper understanding of human behavior writ large.
As I’ve argued before, we should not look to the Age of Sail for lessons in sustainable living. Hell no. The whalers of 1800 didn’t wipe out all the whales not because they felt the folly of doing that and refrained. They didn’t wipe out all the whales because their technology didn’t allow them to do so in a cost-effective way. Even so, they drastically reduced whale populations in certain parts of the world—and sealers did so even more. A lot of the places where seals and sea lions and walruses hang out now had none of those animals on them 150 years ago. They were wiped out.
We are no longer burdened and blinkered by a naive faith in the inevitability of “progress”—especially faith in the inevitability of new technology to make our lives better. That is an asset, but a wasted one if we just swing wildly to the other extreme—that “progress” is impossible, or that technology is inevitably bad.
Sustainability is our concept. It is a “now” concept. History won’t show us much in the way of deliberate, conscious sustainability. It will show us a variety of human survival strategies. It will show us some more or less accidental sustainability, and the benefits of that, and it will show us what tends to happen when we make technological choices with unintended consequences. History does not limit us or narrow our viable options. It does the opposite. It’s waiting to show us not just how awful and foolish we are, but how clever and adaptable and ingenious we are, how empathetic we really can be, and how much we have learned and passed down in the past few thousand years. We have everything we need--including a vast knowledge of our own history—to get from here to where we go next. We just have to choose to do it.