Historical forgetfulness
I just finished reading a piece in a magazine that began by quoting Nietzsche about the abyss, and the dangers of staring into it for too long. As an example of the abyss, the author cheekily mentioned Internet advertising, and then proceeded to dissect the industry.
Apart from being so absurd it made me laugh out loud, the contorted intro also got me thinking. As modern technology increases the rate that information and people and goods move around the world, we increasingly feel like our lives are speeding up. Indeed, the spatial and temporal scope of potential impacts of all of our actions is much larger than it was a century ago. As we strive to keep up with the pace of modern life, however, we seem (in America at least) to enjoy our forgetfulness. Our memory, our cultural sense of history, more and more refers to things in recent history, perhaps the last few decades at the most. Maybe this natural trend of forgetfulness has been exacerbated by modern technology but has always been there, in one form or another.
This natural tendency to forget history is both a good and a bad thing. Dark, horrendous events can happen, from the Holocaust to the terrorist attacks of September, 2001, perhaps even made more frequent and intense by humanity’s increased technological power, and yet cultures generally move on, with perhaps a few psychological scars. The abyss Nietzsche was referring to, the existential uncertainty that hides within all of our souls, we moderns mostly forget about too. Our forgetfulness, in other words, helps us deal with the increasing scope for human mistakes to cause tremendous consequences. The only problem with this salve of forgetfulness is that it makes it much more difficult to learn from history. Mark Twain once said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. I worry sometimes that our high-tech culture, obsessed with the now, is losing its ability to hear the rhymes.
Ecologists like me worry about a version of this problem often. Humanity is rapidly depleting the wealth of nature, reducing the diversity of life and the beauty of the landscape. The problem is that each generation remembers at most the nature that they saw growing up, not the original pristine version. This problem of shifting baselines, of the perpetual “new normal”, is a challenge to wise public policy making. It is arguably harder to motivate action for slow-motion failures than for dramatic crises. Jared Diamond in his book Collapse strongly makes this point: the underlying causes of long-term societal declines are almost always issues that leaders did not place high on their priority list, simply because the underlying process was so slow.
