Yesterday I wrote about tribal people, and it is easy to think that we have little connection with them, except as some sort of genetic link. From the modern perspective, this is true; but if we step outside this perspective we can get a greater and more legitimate view. In fact, the primitive for most of us is only a wisp of time away.
In my graduate years, I spent a summer on an archaeological dig in northern Michigan. The point was to prove, or disprove, the idea that corn agriculture extended that far north in pre-Columbian times. We were on a large lake and we got thousands of artifacts, from about the time of the mound culture's collapse in the 12th century to nearly the time of Christ - exciting stuff, really, with the best thing I dug up being a nearly intact tobacco pipe from about 500 AD. I do not know what the final analysis revealed (we did find evidence of corn kernels, though - although these could have been taken north), but only that the past as revealed under the earth seemed so long ago - but not. For instance, we were able to tell by dark spots in the dug "floor" where tent posts had been placed for tee pees or an equivalent. Evidence of a tent campsite dug up 1000 years later!
Spooky, really - that someday someone might find evidence of my post-constructed wood shed, the chicken yard, or my bones. But we tend to judge great age in different ways. In our current world- culture of constant change, a few hundred years seems tremendous because so much has changed in that time. In the Americas, that sense of age is even greater; for instance, less than 400 years ago, the pilgrims and others settled my native southern New England. At the time, the tribes still ruled in what is now Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania - in fact, almost all the areas of the the eastern US outside of small colonies in New England, Virginia and Florida. And yet, there are still houses intact from that time in my home town, all made of wood, and many people alive who can trace their ancestors back to that century. It was not long ago - it only seems that way because of how life and our environment has changed.
I have gone to the Southwest quite a bit in the past 20 years, and I love visits to the old Anasazi ruins the most. There is such a sense of presence there, even after 900 years, and such a feel of the "other," of people so entirely different from us. And yet, at the time of their final days as a culture in about the 12th century, Europe was entering its classic Gothic period, with many cathedrals from that era still intact and waiting for the tourist's camera. We know of their lives, their thoughts and their wars, for they were written down not only in languages that we can still understand, but with a sensibility that we can still understand. They were, as historian Barbara Touchman put it, our "distant mirror:" a recognizable reflection of Western European culture. To many in Europe, they do not feel that distant at all.
To people of the Italian Renaissance - begun more or less at the end of the 14th century - the ancient Greeks were as relevant to them as 19th and 20th century novelist are to us, or more so. This "rebirth" was built on the revival of Greek and Roman authors dating back to Homer and, most importantly, to the Greek golden era of around 500 BC. Thus 2,000 years did not impede them from drawing conclusions from the Greek thoughts to remake their society. They, these philosophers, were in many ways not only current, but ahead of the times. And it is easy to see why: the past thousand years of the "Dark Ages" had seemed to hardly move at all (which was its purpose), and 1000 years had meant much less to them than we can imagine.
The Australian Aborigines think (or thought) in terms of the "Dream Time," a time that goes back to the beginning of time, but is remade in the present through ritual - a logical thing, as time to them is cyclical and endless. And until the European presence, many or most of the societies of the island continent may have changed little in 40,000 years. 40,000! What would a few thousand years be in that context? To us, that time span is almost unthinkable in human terms. There was no civilization as we know it, no agriculture, no husbandry, nothing of that sort at all anywhere. To us, an undefinable ancient time - but to the Australians, the time of the ancestors, progenitors just like themselves.
When we now think of, say, 200 years into the future, our minds are boggled. The Wisconsin (my current state) of 200 years ago was almost entirely of native culture; now it is almost entirely used for agricultural and other commercial purposes, with a population 50 to 100 times greater than it had been. Things are moving faster now - what could we possibly get from another 200 years? Star Trek? Post-apocalypse Zombie cannibals? (HG Wells wrote of that more than a century ago, even before the A bomb) But in real human terms, not geological but human, 200 years is nearly nothing. Still, look at what is coming: even now, our society is trying to press outside the boundaries of nature, with things as prosaic as gender identity to things as scary as genetic modification through direct manipulation. Our populations grow, many believe our industries are altering the climate, nuclear technology expands, societal norms of centuries or millennia are destroyed almost overnight, sometimes by the stroke of a pen. Looking from a more objective real notion of time, what is happening is beyond (known) precedence, and we know - we KNOW - it cannot last. Either, we must become "evolved" as they say in Star Trek:The Next Generation, or we must collapse. That is why we are filled with anxiety about the future, and have dreams of alien worlds for our future. As Yeats said, "things fall apart; the center cannot hold," and it can't, not as it has. The center must either be remade, or things will indeed fall apart. If we judge from the past, things WILL fall apart - we are not made for such rapid change. But there are the dreamers, and there are those who believe we have a guiding hand that will not allow a true collapse - a hand that might guide us to a greater, unthinkable destiny. But neither those who fear the apocalypse or dream of a new world are fringe elements - rather, they are working from a more realistic sense of time. 200 years - it is nothing, but somehow we have so compressed it that it might mean anything. FK
In my graduate years, I spent a summer on an archaeological dig in northern Michigan. The point was to prove, or disprove, the idea that corn agriculture extended that far north in pre-Columbian times. We were on a large lake and we got thousands of artifacts, from about the time of the mound culture's collapse in the 12th century to nearly the time of Christ - exciting stuff, really, with the best thing I dug up being a nearly intact tobacco pipe from about 500 AD. I do not know what the final analysis revealed (we did find evidence of corn kernels, though - although these could have been taken north), but only that the past as revealed under the earth seemed so long ago - but not. For instance, we were able to tell by dark spots in the dug "floor" where tent posts had been placed for tee pees or an equivalent. Evidence of a tent campsite dug up 1000 years later!
Spooky, really - that someday someone might find evidence of my post-constructed wood shed, the chicken yard, or my bones. But we tend to judge great age in different ways. In our current world- culture of constant change, a few hundred years seems tremendous because so much has changed in that time. In the Americas, that sense of age is even greater; for instance, less than 400 years ago, the pilgrims and others settled my native southern New England. At the time, the tribes still ruled in what is now Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania - in fact, almost all the areas of the the eastern US outside of small colonies in New England, Virginia and Florida. And yet, there are still houses intact from that time in my home town, all made of wood, and many people alive who can trace their ancestors back to that century. It was not long ago - it only seems that way because of how life and our environment has changed.
I have gone to the Southwest quite a bit in the past 20 years, and I love visits to the old Anasazi ruins the most. There is such a sense of presence there, even after 900 years, and such a feel of the "other," of people so entirely different from us. And yet, at the time of their final days as a culture in about the 12th century, Europe was entering its classic Gothic period, with many cathedrals from that era still intact and waiting for the tourist's camera. We know of their lives, their thoughts and their wars, for they were written down not only in languages that we can still understand, but with a sensibility that we can still understand. They were, as historian Barbara Touchman put it, our "distant mirror:" a recognizable reflection of Western European culture. To many in Europe, they do not feel that distant at all.
To people of the Italian Renaissance - begun more or less at the end of the 14th century - the ancient Greeks were as relevant to them as 19th and 20th century novelist are to us, or more so. This "rebirth" was built on the revival of Greek and Roman authors dating back to Homer and, most importantly, to the Greek golden era of around 500 BC. Thus 2,000 years did not impede them from drawing conclusions from the Greek thoughts to remake their society. They, these philosophers, were in many ways not only current, but ahead of the times. And it is easy to see why: the past thousand years of the "Dark Ages" had seemed to hardly move at all (which was its purpose), and 1000 years had meant much less to them than we can imagine.
The Australian Aborigines think (or thought) in terms of the "Dream Time," a time that goes back to the beginning of time, but is remade in the present through ritual - a logical thing, as time to them is cyclical and endless. And until the European presence, many or most of the societies of the island continent may have changed little in 40,000 years. 40,000! What would a few thousand years be in that context? To us, that time span is almost unthinkable in human terms. There was no civilization as we know it, no agriculture, no husbandry, nothing of that sort at all anywhere. To us, an undefinable ancient time - but to the Australians, the time of the ancestors, progenitors just like themselves.
When we now think of, say, 200 years into the future, our minds are boggled. The Wisconsin (my current state) of 200 years ago was almost entirely of native culture; now it is almost entirely used for agricultural and other commercial purposes, with a population 50 to 100 times greater than it had been. Things are moving faster now - what could we possibly get from another 200 years? Star Trek? Post-apocalypse Zombie cannibals? (HG Wells wrote of that more than a century ago, even before the A bomb) But in real human terms, not geological but human, 200 years is nearly nothing. Still, look at what is coming: even now, our society is trying to press outside the boundaries of nature, with things as prosaic as gender identity to things as scary as genetic modification through direct manipulation. Our populations grow, many believe our industries are altering the climate, nuclear technology expands, societal norms of centuries or millennia are destroyed almost overnight, sometimes by the stroke of a pen. Looking from a more objective real notion of time, what is happening is beyond (known) precedence, and we know - we KNOW - it cannot last. Either, we must become "evolved" as they say in Star Trek:The Next Generation, or we must collapse. That is why we are filled with anxiety about the future, and have dreams of alien worlds for our future. As Yeats said, "things fall apart; the center cannot hold," and it can't, not as it has. The center must either be remade, or things will indeed fall apart. If we judge from the past, things WILL fall apart - we are not made for such rapid change. But there are the dreamers, and there are those who believe we have a guiding hand that will not allow a true collapse - a hand that might guide us to a greater, unthinkable destiny. But neither those who fear the apocalypse or dream of a new world are fringe elements - rather, they are working from a more realistic sense of time. 200 years - it is nothing, but somehow we have so compressed it that it might mean anything. FK
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