Tuesday 144: What we'll talk about when we talk about what it was like

To fall asleep lately, I've been listening to a BBC podcast called "In Our Time," in which the host--the placid, grandfatherly voiced Melvyn Bragg--engages various scholars and academics in discussions of popular history, science, the humanities, and other general curiosities. Subjects include the 30 Years War, Relativity, Middlemarch, and Hindu scripture. I don't know how long the episodes are, because I'm always dead asleep in ten minutes, despite the fact that the subjects invariably interest me. There's just something extremely calming and narcotizing about listening to a person speak deftly, expertly, and even with excitement—their grasp on a subject so enormous that it's somehow comforting, like the embrace of a parent feels to an overwhelmed toddler.

No matter what topic is discussed, a sense of enormity tends to stay with the listener. The show's been running for years, and of course there's no shortage of things to talk about. The world is an enormous place, and whether the subject is chipmunks or Genghis Khan, three smart people can make it fascinating. It creates a paradoxical vacuum of historical context: going for a walk down the street or through the woods takes on meaning that is at once infinitesimal and epochal. To be a human subject in a historical moment is both meaningless and essential, or, put more eloquently:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”

This got me thinking: When we look back, just how fucked up will our historical moment seem? Even just taking the last five years into account: We had a global disease that rocked modern society just as technological modernity accelerated unchecked, fueled by addled and increasingly hallucinatory capital markets to create the fever dreams—virtual reality, decentralized money, artificial intelligence, &c.—of a connected world that had completely lost the meaning and purpose of that connection.

When we talk about the twilight of the American Empire, will it be through the lens of the crusading, neo-colonial forever wars that dominate our present consciousness, or will we recognize the slow insidious creep of a surveillance state as the prevailing current defining the United States after 9/11? It's all enough to make you want to focus on the chipmunks. And fall asleep.

The idea that you can't ever really understand your historical moment until it's past has always made sense to me. From the perspective of a nobody (which most of us are), it's apparent in the interest of a younger generation. An example: The phrase "Keep Calm and Carry On" went so far as to invade a layer of popular imagination defined by big box stores in the 2000s, but was of course introduced as morale-boosting print media in Britain during WWII. It came to define an understanding of the stoic, indomitable character and attitude of Britons during the blitz, but the poster itself wasn't that widely produced or displayed in the 1940s. I find this significant. During the worst days of the Covid pandemic in New York City, sirens were nonstop. There were news reports of mortuaries and hospitals overflowing with bodies. Once, late at night from my bedroom, I looked up at the moon and heard an unmistakable wail of grief from a neighboring apartment—like the smell of death, this stuck with me. Some deep part of my brain knew that someone, a sibling, a parent, was dead.

When I spoke to friends and family outside the city, they all expressed similar concerns: "It seems crazy there." "Do you need to get out?" And was it? Although it never felt like it, it must have been. I think of this time whenever I see one of those cheap "Keep Calm..." notebooks jammed onto a messy endcap at the local Kohls (shudder), because I feel some psychic connection with those people. You just keep going because what else are you going to do? Some people might go crazy. Most of us are always unsure about what, exactly, is happening.

Now, this point is illustrative, and I should make it clear that there's a difference between mechanized state violence and what amounts to (of course, I don't want to minimize it, but still) a Very Bad Flu. But there is a connection to be drawn between the two experiences of history, and their place in a collective memory.

Real tragedy and unforgivable crime might then be identified by the consciousness of one's historical moment being realized. Every dispatch from Gaza, Sudan, West Papua, is heartbreaking, because victims share this consciousness. Their suffering supersedes their experience of violence, reframing not just their relationship to death, but drawing them into history. And for victims to cross this river requires genocidal perpetrators to have done the same, to act with the self-consciousness of actors on the stage of a present, finite, delicate human history. With all the alienating distance that modern weaponry and state ideology can engender, technological this awareness, impossible to deny, is the true poison root of crime against humanity.

Minutes before the poet Seamus Heaney died in 2013, he texted his wife the Latin phrase, Noli Timere. "Do not be afraid." The Telegraph's Christopher Howse notes that the phrase appears in St. Jerome's fourth-century translation of the Bible about 70 times. And in fact, every time "timere," to be afraid, appears in this translation, it's accompanied by either noli or the plural nolite, do not. Usually, it's either God or an angel speaking to some poor sucker in the grip of abject terror, having been confronted by the colossal harrowing embodiment of pure truth, light, creation, and being (Christmas-minded readers may remember Linus' biblical soliloquy in A Charlie Brown Christmas, which includes the phrase, "Be not afraid.").

Whether we find ourselves in the presence of history's terrible angel of truth, or chasing her shadow, the lesson remains the same: Do not be afraid. Look to her and accept her light and do not be afraid. To turn from her is to accept her myth, and thus be ruled by it.