Post 15: Anxiety vs. History
For various reasons, I decided to take a moment to remind myself of the power of history in the face of the anxiety of the moment today and say something about it. (Apologies, I promise not to do this very often).
Some of my favorite works of fiction, (I think of Anathem by Neal Stephenson for example), focus on societies, or subcultures, that seem to have a mechanism built into their. . . collective psyche? (I’m not a psychologist, sociologist, or anthropologist, forgive me for not getting the term right), that helps to inoculate them against the madness of whatever present they inhabit. In Anathem, for instance, the society of that world is segregated into those who live in the everyday world, and a monastic order that lives separately, can not interact with the “secular” world except on special occasions, (this includes no access to electronic or physical communications with the outside world), and does little more than study. . . well, almost everything. (Imagine all the Universities completely segregated from the rest of society and you will come close to understanding the concept). There is a lot more to it than that, but I don’t want to give any more spoilers if you haven’t read it, (I highly recommend it!)
Anyway, the way Stephenson portrays the monks is that they are extremely unaware of what is going on in their world at any given moment, whether cultural, technological, or political. But. . . one of the things they are VERY aware of is their place in history because of all the time they spend studying, and by extension, ironically, because they do occasionally interact with the outside world on special occasions and receive sort of “snapshots” of the outside world, they are also extremely well equipped to withstand the anxiety of the moment. They almost instinctively compare the snapshots to the thousands of years of history they are intimately familiar with from their studies. (In some ways because of their monastic lifestyle they are more familiar with the histories they study than the present they inhabit). With exceptions, (again, no spoilers), this leads them to a sort of place of peace with the present. When they do get the snapshot views of the world and something terrible or terribly stupid is happening outside their monastery walls, they have the knowledge to say, “Oh, this is like when the Martusians tried to influence the Plebiscite on Public Hectoring 567 years ago. . . that sure didn’t work out for anyone. . . and yet here we still are. . .I wonder what the monks in 100 years will say about this.”
(Note there are no “Martusians” nor “Plebiscites on Public Hectoring” in Stephenson’s book or our history so far as I know. . . although now that I am thinking about it maybe we should have such a Plebiscite about some people’s online behavior. . .I made those up to illustrate, but since we were talking about a work of fiction and our history, I thought I should clarify. . .).
So, I guess where I am going with this is that I wonder how I can get my mind into a space like that. Build a monastery for my mind? We’ll see, I’m not there yet, but still, I do think it helps me to keep historical context in mind. . . and not just by jumping to the worst historical parallels I can imagine. . . or at least to remember that those times passed and here we still are. . . I wonder what the monks will say about today in 100 years?
Here is a conversation I had with ChatGPT along those lines and relating more to how others in our world think of the past versus the anxiety of the present:
