Yesterday I cited in annex to my post on Sex at Dusk what is a very handy summary of the post-structural turn in the social sciences. Do check it out: it is a comparatively accessible explanation of what is wrong with how most of us view the world. To summarize it in even fewer words: social categories (like “gay” or “straight”, “handicapped”, “sick”, “mad” etc), don’t exist “out there”, they are made up and in constant flux, on the one hand socially negotiated and on the other subject to individual agency. This field of meaning both transmits and transforms culture intergenerationally. The world is the product of our thoughts, and our thoughts can change it; which of course does not mean that absolutely anything is possible, but it does mean that social institutions are a lot more fluid than we are in the habit of thinking, even when their design is not explicitly addressed in the public debate.
It usually astonishes people when I point out how few human generations separate us from what we are used to thinking of as inconceivably remote historical, or even prehistorical, events. They haven’t done the simple math. So here goes: take your pick*.
|
French Revolution (1789): |
9 |
|
Trial of Galileo (1633): |
15 |
|
Excommunication of Martin Luther (1521): |
20 |
|
Coronation of Charlemagne (800): |
49 |
|
Sack of Rome by the Goths (410): |
64 |
|
Julius Caesar’s first invasion of Britain (55 BC): |
83 |
|
End of the Minoan civilization (1420 BC): (Approximate end of the Bronze Age) |
137 |
|
Great Pyramid of Giza (2560 BC): |
183 |
|
Foundation of Byblos (approx. 5000 BC): (The world’s oldest city) |
280 |
|
Earliest settled agriculture (approx. 8000 BC): |
400 |
It’s nothing, guys. A drop in the ocean. Each of us has only to go back a few dozen generations, if that, before we find officially pagan ancestors, and only a few more before some of them would have been hunter-gatherers. Even if all of your ancestors were agriculturalists, over 95% of your family line as anatomically modern humans were hunter-gatherers.
Every generation recreates for itself the patent illusion of living in a socially stable world. But on Chris Ryan’s most recent podcast, historian Thaddeus Russell mentioned that a number of historians would qualify middle Victorian England as more oppressive than contemporary Saudi Arabia. The same guy managed to get himself fired from Columbia for not much more than applying modern social theory to the history of the United States: analyzing it on the basis of the conflict between individual drives and the norms of the social elite, rather than class struggle or the progress of liberal enlightenment. This is a world that changes at a helter-skelter pace, in ways which of course are both good and bad, but on the whole I doubt if any of us would, if he or she were able, voluntarily choose to live at an earlier period of the history of our culture. I know I feel born too early, and certainly not too late. History is going in the direction which I already manifest in my life. There are certainly major ecological challenges, but socially, what basis is there for anything other than optimism?
So we really should cut out the endless droning on about the supposedly catastrophic destination towards which we all are hurtling and, especially, our supposed inability to do anything about it. By writing these words, which seems a solitary, even solipsistic act, I am already doing something about it. Ultimately, it is words and concepts which generate culture and society. This is a missionary endeavor in which each of us imagines the future into being, as it were colonizes it. We are not powerless at all: and frankly it is both intellectually misconceived and cowardly to imagine we are. As Martin Luther King said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Notes
(*) I have assumed for the purposes of the calculation that the average age of ones parents at birth over the period is 25, which seems a conservative figure, as it is the average over both parents and all children