Reflections
The Sense of the Past
It’s commonly held that the present era in human history is defined by science and/or technology. The modern world comes into view with the advent of modern science and the scientific method. Modernity literally picks up steam with the industrial revolution. In a couple centuries, we’ve hopped from steam engines to AI. The angel of history seems to have its foot stuck on the gas pedal, hurtling us ever faster into the future.
In this blog post, I’m going to venture that our age is defined not by science or technology but by its historical consciousness. The very fact that we can see the world being transformed by technology suggests an awareness of a very particular place in history: the present is different from the past and the future will be different from the present. But while we’re more aware than ever before of being historically situated, we’re not always so good at reckoning with the implications of that awareness. Nor with what it might have meant to live with a less keen sense of the past. I’ll say a bit more about all of this in what follows.
How Far Back Does Time Go?
In Book 2 of his Histories, Herodotus turns his attention to Egypt. He tells the story of the Greek writer Hecataeus, who visited the Egyptian city of Thebes. Hecataeus had done a detailed genealogy of his family history, tracing his lineage back sixteen generations to a divine ancestor. Upon proudly telling the priests of Thebes about this lineage, they showed him into a temple lined with wooden statues. Each statue had been erected by a priest and the lineage of priests had been passed from father to son. In total there were 345 statues, representing at least 345 generations of mortal lineage before any god could have entered the human gene pool.
Hecataeus’s short view of history chimes with a lot of Greek myth. The heroes of the Iliad are only a few generations removed from heroes like Heracles or Perseus, who are themselves descendants or near descendants of the gods. A Greek genealogy would trace human origins to sometime in the second millennium BCE.
The Egyptians look farther back, and so do the Hebrews—the Biblical narrative would put Adam and Eve somewhere around 4000 BCE—but not a lot farther. To find a truly boundless conception of time, look to ancient India. According to the Mahābhārata, a kalpa lasts 4.32 billion years. One kalpa is a “day of Brahmā,” followed by a pralaya or night of equal length, in which the world is destroyed before its re-creation the following day. A mahākalpa, or “great kalpa” is one hundred years of this cycle of cosmic day and night—a little over 311 trillion years. A mahākalpa lasts a long time.
I’m just speculating here but I wonder if this idea of immeasurably vast time coincides with the invention in India of decimal notation and the number zero. If you can turn ten years into a million just by adding five zeros, huge numbers are much more accessible to the imagination.
The Buddha's Knowledge of Past Lives
The Buddha recounts three kinds of true knowledge he attains in the night on which he becomes enlightened, the first of which is his knowledge of his past lives. Here’s the stock formula by which he recounts this knowledge:
I recollected my manifold past lives, that is, one birth, two births, three births, four births, five births, ten births, twenty births, thirty births, forty births, fifty births, a hundred births, a thousand births, a hundred thousand births, many aeons of world-contraction, many aeons of world-expansion, many aeons of world-contraction and expansion: “There I was so named, of such a clan, with such an appearance, such was my nutriment, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such my life-term; and passing away from there, I reappeared elsewhere; and there too I was so named, of such a clan, with such an appearance, such was my nutriment, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such my life-term; and passing away from there, I reappeared here.” Thus with their aspects and particulars I recollected my manifold past lives.
Two things stand out to me in this account. The first is that that’s a lot of past lives—a number of generations that makes the Egyptian sense of the past seem just as puny as the Greek. The other is the sameness of all these past lives. Each life had its own distinctive particulars of name, clan, appearance, nutriment, pleasure and pain, and life-term, but these basic variables remain fixed. For hundreds of thousands of lives, these are the basic terms by which a life is to be understood.
The sameness is part of the point. What the Buddha sees is the cyclical nature of saṃsāra, the endless cycle of death and rebirth. By getting that bigger picture into view, the Buddha gets its sameness into view, allowing him to see the tedium of endless death and rebirth. Whatever delights and struggles you might get up to in this life have less spice when you see them as just more variations on a pattern you’ve cycled through countless times. Time to get out. Time to get free.
I’m especially struck by the phrase “of such a clan.” The historical Buddha lived at a time when Indian society was organized according to a clan structure—he is known as the Śakyamuni Buddha because he is the Buddha of the Śakya clan. From my historical vantage, I can see that not all societies are organized according to a clan structure—for one thing, mine isn’t. But from the vantage of the oral tradition that preserved the teachings of the Buddha (the first written record of those teachings dates to several centuries after the Buddha’s death), a clan structure was the only structure there was.
That mention of clan is one small indication that ancient India had a deep conception of time but not of history. They could count back hundreds of thousands of lifetimes but each one of those lifetimes was roughly the same as this one. Told that he would be taken back in time a hundred thousand years, an Indian from this period would anticipate finding himself in a world that would be readily recognizable, even if it differed in many of its details.
Deep Time vs. History
What does it take to have a deep conception of history? Those statues the Egyptian priests showed to Hecataeus give some part of the answer: you need a record of some kind. One thing that Herodotus, the redactors of the Book of Genesis, and the compilers of the Buddhist suttas have in common is that they were not all that far removed from the earliest written texts in their cultures. I can read Herodotus and think, gosh, people sure lived and thought differently back then than they do now. Herodotus didn’t have access to any texts that predated him by thousands of years. He had to travel to Egypt just to see statues that old, and statues give nothing like the level of detail of written texts.
Oral traditions tend to dwell in an eternal present. The sum of what an oral culture knows is what is preserved in present memory. The poems and proverbs in which oral cultures encode and preserve that knowledge serve their present purposes. Starting with Milman Parry nearly a century ago, scholars have uncovered the techniques by which Homer encoded an encyclopedia of his world in his poems. Epic similes and lengthy asides give instruction on how to trim a ship’s sails to the wind, when to reap a harvest, and so on and on and on.
You also get a few generations of genealogy. What you don’t get is any sense of a world that had ever been different. Scholars in the present can trace hints about the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey by passing references to technologies of war, agriculture, and—enticingly in a single fleeting mention—writing, which reveal different historical moments for different passages in the poems. But the poems themselves are blind to these differences. To the oral imagination, the world has always been roughly the way it is now because there’s very little evidence of a markedly different past to compare to the present.
The History of the Discovery of History
Over here in the twenty-first century, there’s no shortage of history. Together with anthropology, history has provided us with irrefutable evidence of the radical contingency of our ways of life, and the extent of the conditioning of our modes of thought. The record is clear and undeniable: it’s possible for people to live, think, and behave very differently from the way that we do.
You see a growing awareness of history creep into European thought over the last few centuries. In the late eighteenth century, Kant turns away from dogmatic metaphysics and toward critique. Rather than inquire about how the world is in itself, he asks how human cognition is structured such that the world presents itself to us in the way that it does. He recognizes that human cognition is conditioned and that we have to understand that conditioning if we’re going to understand what we cognize.
By the early nineteenth century, Hegel takes things one step further. It’s not just that human cognition is conditioned. It’s historically conditioned. How the world is accessible to us varies depending on where we find ourselves in the stream of history.
A century before Hegel, Giambattista Vico was beating a similar drum. But not long before that, Renaissance artists were depicting Biblical scenes of people wearing Renaissance garb. The idea that fashions might have changed over the previous one-and-a-half thousand years didn’t hold a lot of sway.
The historical consciousness that we see taking shape in Vico and Hegel gets even sharper contours in the high modernism of the early twentieth century. By this time, European culture seems to many to be close to exhaustion and in need of renewal. Both the sense of exhaustion and the sense of renewal depend on a keen awareness of history. For Schönberg, for instance, the possibilities of tonal music had been exhausted and the only way forward was to invent a new system of composition that didn’t depend on a key system. To come to this awareness, Schönberg needed a deep understanding of the history of European music. And it’s only from that deep understanding that he could see a lateral move that might open up new possibilities.
You could say something similar for Pound and Eliot with poetry or for Heidegger with philosophy. Heidegger calls for a Destruktion of the history of philosophy—the idea that Derrida further radicalized as deconstruction—by which he means a destructuring that draws on a deep knowledge of philosophy’s history so that we can open up latent but hitherto unnoticed possibilities.
These are just a few moments in the history of the discovery of history. What they add up to is an awareness that we can’t simply carry on as we always have because there isn’t one way in which we’ve always carried on. This awareness seems to be lacking in the Buddha’s recollection of his endless lineage of different clan memberships.
Learning the Wrong Lessons from History
I’m arguing that the present period in history is distinctive precisely in virtue of its awareness of being a period in history. There’s a further question of what we should do with this awareness. Too often, I think, we don’t follow out its consequences rigorously enough.
One lesson a lot of people take from the past is that it was awful. Women were oppressed, slavery was commonplace, wars raged over the petty ambitions of narcissistic men. People in those periods saw the world through the fog of their own prejudices. But, uniquely in our period, and only for a select few, that fog has lifted and we can see things for what they are. That seems to be the attitude of many present-day judges of the past. There’s a strong tendency to judge the past according to the values and standards of the present. To see past values and standards as products of benighted historical forces but to see present values and standards as simply the correct ones. The idea that we, too, might be conditioned by our historical situation seems lost on a lot of people.
One consequence of this historical double-standard—the blinkers of history for them, pellucid clarity for me—is precisely a failure to escape our own history. Santayana’s line about those who forget their history being condemned to repeat it applies palpably here. Consider transhumanist ideas about body hacking the human organism and transcending its animal limits. The people who promulgate this creed tend to be strident atheists. They’re hardcore rationalists who think they’ve seen through all the superstition of the past and are using only the best epistemic methods to look toward the future. But how, one wonders, did the idea of living forever as a disembodied intelligence come to seem so appealing? You can find a great account of the links between the transhumanist future and the Christian past in the second chapter of Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine.
The tricky lesson of history, it seems—the lesson we seem to struggle to learn—is that it applies to us as well. I can see clearly how the worldviews of a Medieval monk or a Roman patrician were very much of their time. I have a harder time seeing how the same is true of my own.
This, it seems to me, is a principal lesson of high modernism. You can’t outrun history but you can have agency over how you inherit it. Precisely by coming to a deep understanding of that history, you can see its patterns more clearly, and see new configurations that don’t just recapitulate those same old patterns.
Who's Better Off?
Are we “better off” for having a deep sense of history? I’m not sure that’s the right question. The ancient Greeks, Hebrews, or Indians operated in contexts where there was no deep written tradition. We do. Given that we do, it’s better for us to understand that tradition. But to ask whether, say, Herodotus would have written better history if only there’d been more history before him is, in effect, to ask whether the first historian would have been better off if he’d not been the first historian.
I’ve written before about the immense power that Homer’s epics have precisely in virtue of working with a more limited palette. A Homeric epic written today would inevitably be a pastiche because we’d deliberately be averting our eyes from the nearly three millennia of tradition that’s accumulated since those poems were composed.
I can’t be Homer and Homer can’t be me. Instead of asking which of us is better off, I think there are two other questions we might ask. The first is to ask about the particular virtues and vices attached with historical awareness. The thinking and writing and making and doing that people do today are necessarily different from the kind done by the ancients. What are the strengths of this way of inhabiting a tradition that we can foster, and what are some of the pitfalls to avoid?
The second question is how this affects the way I might relate to texts from the past. I can’t, with my historical awareness, read the Buddhist suttas the way they would have been received by their earliest readers. What difference does that make?
I’ll wrap up this blog post by considering each of these questions in turn.
A Sense of the Past: Virtues and Vices
How can I inherit the historical tradition responsibly? On a basic level, the answer is simple: learn more history. It’s a point I’ve made at some length in an earlier blog post. One upside to doing this that I mentioned above is that seeing my place in a tradition will enable me to intervene in that tradition more clear-sightedly. It might also make me more clear-sighted about my own position within that tradition. The more I come to understand how the present came about, the more I might see how contingent this present arrangement is. And the more I see its contingency, the less rigidly attached I’ll be to my particular perspective.
Among the central virtues of this sort of historical awareness are intellectual humility, flexibility, and a sense of irony. With an awareness of the peculiarity of my own point of view, I’ll be less likely to suppose it’s correct in any absolute sense, and that in turn will allow me to shift perspectives and see things differently. With that flexibility comes an ironic awareness that any perspective I take isn’t absolute, that it’s just one way of looking at things, that the sands are always shifting under my feet.
Like all virtues, these ones can shade into vice. They can breed a detachment that shades into indifference or ennui. They make it hard to commit or to engage. They can breed aloof hipsterism or world weariness.
But also, they don’t have to. I want to suggest that all these vices come precisely from a failure of flexibility or humility, that is, from a tendency to get too settled in your sense of contingency. If you’re going to be consistent in your ironic attitude, you have to be ironic about irony as well.
Reading the Past with a Sense of the Past
That last point informs my response to the second question I raised above, about how I might relate to texts from the past. The worry is that the stance of ironic detachment might prevent me from taking anything seriously, most especially texts that aren’t as aware as I am of their historical situatedness. If I approach everything with a hermeneutics of suspicion, I’m deprived of an unsuspicious encounter with anything.
This is a topic for another blog post, but I think the answer to most skepticism is more skepticism. If I can’t take a text seriously because it’s merely a product of its times, the answer is to say that everything is a product of its times—including me—and so the “merely” drops out. If there are no unconditioned texts, and no unconditioned ways of seeing, I’m not falling short of some unconditioned ideal by encountering a text through a historical lens.
Let me circle back to saṃsāra. Earlier I posited that the distinctive world weariness you find in the Buddhist suttas is at least partly conditioned by a sense that nothing ever changes. Time travel seems a much more exciting prospect to me than it might have done to an Indian in the first millennium BCE because I imagine the times I could travel to as very different from my own. What were people actually like back in the time of the Buddha? What will the world be like a hundred years from now? A thousand? Far from seeing sameness, I find any time horizon beyond a century or two almost impossible to imagine. There’s a reason most sci-fi is set in the near future.
I can’t help but read the Buddhist suttas as products of a very different moment of history from my own. And that means I can’t help but read them from a certain distance. It’s not just the talk of clans. There’s a whole range of things in the suttas that strike me as bizarre, as ridiculous, as offensive.
But for all that, I’ve profited greatly from reading the suttas. I don’t read them as the first generation of readers would have done, but I read them nonetheless. Just because they’re of a place and of a time doesn’t mean they can’t speak to me in my very different place and time.
One of the things I find helpful is its talk of conditioning and the unconditioned. The suttas aren’t dense in historical awareness but they do carry a profound sense of the way that our thoughts and deeds are conditioned by prior causes. According to the Buddhist teaching, we’re bound up in saṃsāra precisely to the extent that we’re ignorant of the causes of our conditioning. The Buddhist path to liberation is one of seeing this conditioning clearly and thus releasing ourselves from it. In laying out this path, the Buddha doesn’t talk about history. But if he were teaching today, he might have done.