Historian

If the salary was the same, what job would you be doing right now and why?

I’d record the living lights out of this day and age of ours.

You know, for posterity’s sake.

Because why? Because we have a duty to future generations to let them know we tried but mostly failed to pass on the torch of progress from the 1950s to the 2050s. Alas, History is not an uninterrupted progression towards a brighter, better future. It is mostly a winding path that graphs more downward than upward. Most people think that because their lives are better (by what standards?) than those of their parents, humanity must be trending up. That is not the case for most of history.

Prehistory was not a joyride either, btw, but the lives of our Rahan-like Cro-Magnon ancestors from 100,000 seasons ago was way better than that of Lucy the Australopithecus from 3.2 million years ago.

But that is neither here nor there. All that matters is that historically speaking, mankind has been undergoing way more tight, lean, horrible years, decades, centuries and even millennia than it has experienced periods of enlightenment, prosperity, advancement and peace. Most of the 100 billions humans who ever lived did so as troglodytes eating each other’s head lice and enduring a solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and horribly short existence. Only a fraction thereof lived through relatively short eras of opulence.

The standard lives of our ancestors were characterized by want and need, not by sufficiency and abundance.

This is something that needs to be said time and again, lest we forget that we are ever so close to being thrown back into a middle age that has more in common with Man’s natural state than a higher one.

For let us remember during the 1st Middle Age after the Bronze Age Collapse (1,200-800 B.C.), our ancestors forgot to write, read, till the soil, and abandoned cities. And during the 2nd Middle Age (476 – 1453/1492 A.D.), and even until much later, people forgot how to flush their toilets (or what a toilet was for that matter), or heat their dwellings, and neglected to wash their hands and bodies each day.

It seems to me that people lived longer as troglodytes than as civilized beings aspiring to heed to a higher calling.

My point: it is facile to forget that we too live through an Age that seems oriented downwards. And to confuse having a device in our hands that can show naked bodies and solving millions of equations per second with having escaped the curse of History – showcases our innate limited understanding of what it means to be civilized.

Technology means nothing in the grand scheme of things if we cannot maintain our grip on the metaphysical and spiritual dimensions of our species.

If we live like animals, imbued and consumed by the physical aspects and mechanics/motions of living, we will end up losing that which separates us from fauna, which is our self-actualization and belief in our manifest destiny.

Fact is that we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our ancestors because History is cyclical. It was never an arrow pointing up. Paradoxically, the very thing that masked its cyclical nature also makes us liable to head down the wave with the same inept happy go lucky fearnought attitude we also experience going up. And that is our very short lifespan. When our lives are measured in one, two, three, and nowadays four short generations (x20 years), it is almost impossible to remember, and very easy to forget the scale of human history.

The very same thing we hold against our peers, namely that “we are all three meals removed from a state of chaos and bestiality, only caring about the last meal and looking forward to the next”, is also the very thing that works against us, as a species endowed with memory and intelligence.

Most people do not care or give a damn about what happens to and with humanity in 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years from now. You talk to them about solar and climate cycles of 43,000 to 100,000 years, you get a blank stare and the customary “who cares about the long run anyhow?!”.

Most of you might even be inclined to agree.

Some might not. But let’s face it: 99% of people don’t even know what Deep Time is, let alone care about the fate of Homo sapiens 2.0 alive in the year of our Lord 56,793.

I would write the history of our Time for those people who aren’t even on the radar of human speciation because we owe it to them to leave the same kind of trace in the historical record those anonymous prehistoric Da Vincis and Michelangelos left us on the walls of Altamira, Lascaux caves and elsewhere.

We owe it to those future denizens of our species or next iteration of the human odyssey, to leave a warning, a speck of dust proclaiming that we lived, and we were wrong, but at least we tried to warn them not to repeat the same mistakes their dumb ancestors did.

I hope with all my heart and soul that we bequeath them sufficient and ample space to create their own opportunities and make their own mistakes in their own day and age.

In the meantime, I shall write this blog and plant more trees. Because there’s little else I can do on this Earth.

Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,

In all of the directions it can whiz;

As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,

Twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is.

So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,

How amazingly unlikely is your birth;

And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space,

‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth!

Monty Python – The Galaxy song