People tend to use the question of “what will people think when they look back on this moment?” for one of two reasons: (a) to reflect upon how this might seem to distanced, alien eyes or (b) to gain some kind of leverage for their own viewpoint, with the idea that, in the future, people will have come to their senses. It’s a powerful tool for cowing those around us with the weight of the greatest and most final societal judgement. However, it’s often misused, with an emphasis on exaggeration and emotion which do not reflect how we ourselves view the past in our own time. I thought, therefore, that it might be useful to dig into some of the ideas and assumptions at play in judgement, and usage, of our past.
The biggest contrast between how we present those in our future judging us and how we ourselves judge our own past is the sense of expectation, of doom and gloom, of how we are in the wrong and the future will know better. Essentially, we imagine those in the future (a) having the same depth of emotional involvement and experiential understanding as we do now and (b) that those in the future will have learned from our mistakes and will know better. We therefore imagine that they will look upon us with either pity or scorn as they exist in their utopian society.
When put this bluntly, the idea is patently false – it is far too idealised. However, it is important to understand why this is the case. When we put it this way, we make the same mistake we make when judging social situations in our own times – we assume that we are the stars of the show, the centre of attention, and that everyone has a detailed opinion on our appearance or our actions. At the same time, most of us only hold that detailed an opinion about ourselves. Rarely do we realise that we alone are quite so interested in ourselves, and this perceptual fallacy extends into our interpretation of future people as well as those in our own time.
Contrast this with how we see our own past. One of the most popular phrases for summarising our connection with former times is the notion that the past is a foreign country. At the heart of this is not a sentiment of profound connection, but one of profound distance. Whilst one might dispute the accuracy of the statement, it is that sentiment which is relevant here. Inherent to the idea that future peoples will hold such damning judgement of our times is that they feel a personal and intense interest in it. Yet, when we ourselves look upon the past, we feel inevitably distant precisely because we feel permanently cut off from ever connecting with that bygone time or place. Hence, whilst in the future we see potential for change and improvement, in the past we see something which we can never reach – and which, perhaps, can never reach us.
Also important to understand is the idea that past, present and future are not permanent but relative states. The moment in time exists at some point on the spectrum, but whether it is past, present or future is entirely dependent on whether the point from which one is describing it is before, at or after that moment. Each moment is past, present and future, but exists most fundamentally as a present. To understand how our future will judge us, it is important to recognise that our society, with all its strengths and flaws, is a future. It is a future inhabited by people with the same benefits and inhibitions imparted to us through human nature. The limitation of perception that is the star of the show is but one of them. Hence, when imagining how those in the future will judge us, it is crucial to realise that they will do so from a flawed and emotionally distanced perspective.
Lastly, it is necessary to realise that we, as a future people, have not learned from all of the lessons of our past. We have made progress, both technological and societal, but we have not solved society, nor have we solved humanity. Each generation of people experiences the same flaws of perception and needs to learn the lessons of a good life anew. We build a slowly increasing body of permanent knowledge, but our valuation and application of that knowledge is entirely dependent upon the current dominant generation finding it useful and valuable and on them making the effort to learn from it. In turn, that new generation will have its meaningful knowledge base directly impacted by what the generation teaching it found most significant.
Having established the definition of a ‘future people’ from which to look back, the actual judgements made bridge into the even more complex area of historical memory and usage of the past. Our relationship with our past is and will continue to be the subject of many books and other research projects, but the core threads for our interest are these:
- (a) political usage (e.g. the idea of the English as “Anglo-Saxon”);
- (b) personal usage (e.g. my grandparent experienced this, or where I live experienced that);
- (c) objectified usage (e.g. sympathy at or analysis of a situation or path of actions);
Each of these distort the past in their own ways.
Personal usage is, in essence, a variety of micro-history: it focuses very narrowly on one person or small group of people and tells their story in a narrative, personal manner. This is most commonly experienced as someone describing a significant story from a family member’s life. It may be completely contradictory to the wider historical trajectory or narrative, but remains powerful because of that compelling sense of an individual’s life made manifest and personal.
Political usage is usually the most distorting, as it tends to retrospectively alter the past to fit the political ideas (sometimes certainties) of the present. It tells a different narrative by exaggerating the aspects of a past event to show that it fits, even where this is completely unrelated or the motivations, meaningful context and processes are entirely different. Most recently, this involves ideas of political entities or national identities. A particular event, such as a battle, might be pointed to as an example of an inherent national character, or indeed even as evidence of a manifest destiny, despite the context, mechanisms and people involved being entirely different from today. We might relate to an imagined version of an individual historical figure, recreating them as an idealised or demonised beacon for our own times.
What distinguishes these first two is having a reason to identify that person or time for deeper narrative investment, either through family connections or through political necessity. This is a connection bestowed upon very few people or moments in history, especially by a people as a whole. Each of us has one or two relatives of note whom we might point to and there are a few moments which have been selected as key steps in our national histories.
However, most people and moments are viewed through the third path: objectification. When we imagine people from the past, from any era, we do not tend to instinctively imagine them as fully realised people. It is difficult to ascribe any sense of free will or agency to a setting which has already been fully determined. It is also difficult to imagine a personal connection to something which instinctively feels so distant.
Neither the idea of distance or of an absence of agency holds water when we remember that each moment in the past was once the present, but this is not how we usually relate to the past. Instead, we ask questions like what it was like to live in that time, or how they experienced situations which we encounter in our own lives. We wonder how they achieved life through the alien methods they used in that time and how they managed to get through the day. We are curious about how they achieved the same aim, such as laundry, travel or food, through different methods. More academically, we look at the strategy of the choices made and which paths led to which outcomes. We look at paths taken not with emotion – for what emotional connection is there? – but with analysis. Alternatively, we dismiss the past as irrelevant to our own present; as something of no value for learning how to approach the challenges of today. Fundamentally, without a reason to connect with the past, it is incredibly uncommon for us to invest the emotional energy of judging a situation simply for the sake of it.
Therefore, when imagining how a future people might see our present, it is most telling to observe how we do so today – from what is, in the end, a perspective focused largely on ourselves. We connect to our past through a narrow personal connection, through a selective political parallel or through objectification, itself leading to either curiosity, pity, strategic analysis or dismissal. What we do not do is spend attention on an aspect of the past which does not merit it – particularly where the moment has passed from living memory.
Those in the future will, most likely, be as varied as we are today in the usage they make of the past and of their attitude towards it. They can most be expected to look not primarily to judge, but to explain what led to this scenario and to consider what alternative paths were available to us. Ultimately, they will do so from a position which is neither idealised, nor omniscient, but from one of that same, perpetual, human effort that is to learn from our past in order to attempt to do better in our present.
Global Retrospective 