Why study the past? Surely history is dead and gone – just out-dated ideas, technologies and customs – particularly everything that happened before the industrial era?
The common answer to this question tends towards justifying the study of the past as a means of improving the present. Certainly this is true – and as we look at the rise and fall of political regimes, empires and power structures we glimpse a mirror of events in our age - which if we are canny, we will strive to heed. At the very least we must conclude that ‘nothing lasts forever,’ nor believe that the current way of doing things is either ‘right’ or the most ‘advanced’ way of living – human reality, as history shows us, is in a constant state of flux - and we should not get too attached to anything. It will change.
Yet as we widen the lens of our understanding of history, back through human civilization – back through the rise of cities, farming and writing (some 7,000 years ago) - back through the Last Ice Age (which ended some 13,000 years ago), back through human prehistory (beginning maybe 4.5 million years ago) and onwards towards the creation of the planet we live on, our idea of our own [self] importance begins to fade into insignificance. To put it bluntly, we are just a tiny part of something far bigger which has been going on for a lot longer than we have been around – and here I hand over to Dr Germander Speedwell, Curator of Uncategorised Special Collections in my book The Unnatural History Museum, as he interviews his would-be assistant:
‘We like to think of time as a straight line,’ Speedwell continued, sketching a rapid line down the left-hand side of the sheet with a ballpoint pen. ‘Beginning here,’ he added scribbling the words 4.5 billion years ago in scruffy capitals at the bottom of the page. ‘And moving forwards in a predictable linear fashion to here … like so.’
She gazed at him levelly as he drew a chevron at the top of the line to create an arrow and jotted The Present next to it.
‘Thus events progress,’ he continued in the same measured tone. ‘The first primitive life on earth,’ he jotted the words three quarters of the way up the line, ‘the development of back-boned creatures, dinosaurs, the evolution of homo sapiens, and so on.’ He jotted each down on the page in turn and she nodded slowly, still unsure of where he was going.
‘Stone tools, the development of farming, metals, the Romans, the Middle Ages, the Victorians,’ he continued in quick succession. ‘Apologies about the scale,’ he added briskly, ‘all this recent stuff would need to be crammed into the last two millimetres of the line if this were an accurate depiction of events on earth from the dawn of time until—’ He paused seeing Polly’s perplexed expression.
‘Anyway,’ he continued, and finished off his diagram, cramming plastics, space exploration, the microchip and social media into a small space at the top of the page, ‘we traditionally see time as something which marches on, moves forward, and generally flies – tempus fugit and all that!’
The human condition tends to make us live as if the world was created specifically for us – for our support and sustenance – as if history itself is all about us, marching predictably towards our current highly ‘advanced’ and ‘civilized’ state. Yet the perspective of Deep Time, tells us that we are just a part of this living planet and our existence on it has to be crushed into the last few millimetres of Speedwell’s diagram. To put it more succinctly (and to borrow the beautiful analogy used by Sir David Attenborough in his 1979 documentary Life on Earth: If the history of the planet was a single year, all human life and recorded history would take place in the last second of the last minute of December 25th. The universe was not made for ‘us’ – it has a different purpose entirely. Sobering, yes?
And if we are just a momentary blip, what of our political structures, social norms, preferences, and technologies? What of the ideologies we fight for, the historical identities we strive to defend? Against the backdrop of Deep Time and the 10,000 year sweep of recorded human history such questions drift into insignificance – everything we have now is just a human construct; and everything was once different. We were once all nomads, all hunter-gatherers with no concept of homeland.
Our evidence would suggest that it was our collective use of ideas and resources which allowed homo sapiens to flourish and colonize every environment on the planet – including those the human body was never built to survive – and our most distant ancestors were clearly reliant on one another to solve the problems they faced. They lived as a part of the earth and worked within its constraints without exploiting it. And so we can only hope that in our collective future we can use our shared intelligence (and knowledge of the past) to solve the pressing problems of an ever more populated and under resourced world.
So here’s to Deep Time, the lamp and the leveller: the mirror and the conscience of our next shaky steps through history.
Well there’s loads of Cool ideas in there. The ever constant march towards an end. Where are we going? Will we ever get there? Will we know when we have arrived? By looking at the past we can see the present and future comes from both, because they are all one but different. Wherever we are heading it’s bound to be Cool!