I can’t lie—I have at times in my life used the line “people didn’t need this back then” to justify my opinions about contemporary society. Sometimes Back Then is 19th century England, Medieval Europe, or some far off prehistoric time. People didn’t sit around on their phones Back Then, did they?
I’m not alone in these thoughts. Trumpy old uncles to Deep Earth eco-activists, there’s usually a need to refer to some better lost time that a small but influential group of stupid or greedy humans destroyed.
It’s not coincidence that the 2019 novel Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss, just like the rightward nostalgia it evokes in the character we only know as “Dad,” comes at a time when anxiety about what comes next for us seems to be at an all-time high. I say “seems” because I am unsure about the exceptional place given to the present. Whenever people hark back to a better day, it’s usually to condemn their own time, evoking the panic that comes with standing on the precipice of absolute ruin. Moreover, I don’t think periods of time, arbitrarily sorted into units like “ages,” can be lined up to pick which one had (or has) it the worst (or best) of all.
Plagues
In one of those weird rhythms that happens with certain books, I’ve found myself reading the opening sections of the The Decameron every autumn for the past five years. Every time it seems entirely new to me and I wonder if I ever read it to begin with. But the thing that remains constant throughout it is the given-ness of plagues. They’re taken for granted as something that happens, even if not as frequently, as a hurricane or an earthquake. It was something you expected to happen, before the invention of antibiotics, in Europe, Africa, and much of Asia. I imagine everywhere else, too, where people lived. A single plague would sweep through civilizations, decimating populations in what accounts depict as gruesome, terrifying. It’s not as though plagues don’t exist today, but it’s limited to regions that are also victims of war, poverty, and exploitation. For most of the world, the closest to a full-blown plague we get is while gazing at fantasies about future epidemics or zombies on our screens.
Short of historicizing “anxiety,” it’s hard to imagine the level of everyday anxiety I might feel as a plague moved towards my village. I would be anxious about tomorrow, or I might make decisions that today would seem anathema.
Ghosts
“I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts…it is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.”
– Mrs. Alving, from Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts”
Historical fascism looked to Back Then to project a utopic past to justify the exclusive, violent future it sought. That doesn’t mean all thought about how things might have been is fascist, though.
A guess that I’m okay making is that fears about impending doom—whether plagues or an infected injury or an invasion or any one of many terrible things—would have influenced the evolution of how we think about the world. I think these fears began at the personal level, but achieved a social reality by being shared over populations and generations through stories, collectively experienced events, or traumas coded into religious beliefs. I also imagine this being a process of transformation over millennia, arbitrary in all but for how well it served something resembling survival. Perhaps that’s far-fetched—my point is that the effect was something far more ingrained than an individual’s habitual thinking.
When these threats are gone, the habit of living with them remains. Surviving or living with Big Dangers shaped our understanding of the world and maybe we struggle to imagine living without them. But, of course, we must. Our survival depends on it.
The more things change
Climate change threatens human flourishing on Earth. Yet, when you consider the degree to which scientific analysis and species-level thinking it requires to conceptualize it, it is, in the end, a very abstract threat. I am not suggesting that it’s not real. Rather that our knowledge of climate change is contingent with the historical conditions of that knowledge. People five centuries ago would not have been able to measure scientifically the changes that we can which indicate a potential future collapse. But, then again, there was no need to measure, that was before the industrial revolution and capitalism.
Technology has opened new possibilities for what being human can mean. The abstraction of our own subjectivities through digital media has provided a new perspective on our own identities, allowing us to understand what once seemed essential and permanent as malleable. Transgender experience is one example, and the history of transitioning between or out of gendered identity will one day be a record of our progress to a new horizon of how we, as individuals and as a society, collectively define and practice sexuality. Other possibilities for what being human means are also emerging, like AI and robots, which confront essentialist assumptions about who and what we are. All of this was once science fiction, imaginary fancy. Today it’s materially real and possible.
These new possibilities scare people like Dad from Ghost Wall. But they scare a lot less violent, awful people, too. We’re a culture that has become incredibly adept at changing, just not to changes that we choose or decide to take. They are forced upon us by the mystical weather of the economy. We know automation is coming and need to reskill now so we have work tomorrow. We worry that not having a smartphone means we’ll miss out, so we get one. We know homelessness and failing schools are a growing problem in our cities, but we watch blocks get cleared to build a new casino that won’t pay a dime in taxes. (Yes, this last point has happened—in Springfield, Mass.)
Understanding yourself and your situation enough to be able to decide to change and how, whatever that change might be, expresses the better principles of contemporary Western civilization. But changes that come from unknown, god-like sources like the market, that we’re powerless to converse with, these, to my mind, are remainders of the Spooky, Inhumane Back Then. I look to a future when we, as a society, can understand change and embrace possibility, and decide what needs to be changed, what doesn’t, and why.