Jargogled Impressions.

The idea of the ‘far’ past fascinates me. I like to imagine the lives of our forefathers, the circumstances and the ways in which they lived. Whenever I do try to imagine it, the visual imagery that comes up is almost always black and white (I blame the television media for this, as growing up in the 90s, that’s what I associate nostalgia to be colored in), but it amazes me to find out that the things we take for granted today did not exist even in the near past. It still surprises me to realize that the concept of organized labor did not begin in earnest as soon as the beginning of last century. 

It also is fascinating to remember that the major parts of our history, the recorded one, is actually merely a blip in the history of our existence. That what we know about in our history, is merely an epilogue, worth only a few 10 pages in a 1000 page book. The ‘far past’ as it is known, is a magical place, the reality of which we can only scarcely comprehend. The societal tenets, the technology, the ways of living, the ways of thinking, the spectrum of our consciousness, etc. are all unknown to us, much as the vast majority of life under water is still unknown to us and the deep recesses of deep space is unknown to us. Deep space, deep ocean, far past, somehow the depth and the length has become a metaphor for putting an adjective to these space-time continuum that is a mystery to us. 

Mysteries excite us because they surprise us. We may believe that we can only be surprised about what the future holds for us, but our history has the capability to surprise us too. To find out whether our distant ancestors cared much about status anxiety is a mystery. To find out whether our distant cousins in the interspecies zone had a sense of sentience and a sense of consciousness is a mystery. To find out about the commerce and the economic systems that existed when no organized kingdom or government existed is a mystery. To find out about the pagan, the natural, the supernatural nature of the religions that existed in those distant times is a mystery. 

When we realize how far we have come, we comprehend how grateful we should be of those that came before us. We realize that gratitude towards being the lucky ones to find our place in the current epoch is natural given what came before us. We also realize how easy it is for us to acclimatize ourselves to a new reality. Today, we cannot imagine a world without mobile phones, without ubiquitous computing in our lives. And yet, it is only in the past few decades that these technologies have upended our lives. We cannot imagine a world without motors or a world without modular constructions, or a world without a healthcare system (no matter how bad) in place, a world without democracy even. And yet, these are all mere blips in the overall span of recorded human history. That’s not even accounting for the vast unknown trenches of the unrecorded savannah histories! 

A typical thought experiment in such cases is to imagine what a person from the 1700s would feel when we transport her to the current world. At first, I would imagine, her reaction would be of supreme profundity and of excitement at the things that she witnesses, and yet, I think, a mere weeks after, she would grow used to the things she sees around her. It may take her time to learn the ins and outs, but she’d come to expect many things that she could not have even imagined back in her age. She’d recalibrate her experience and her expectations to match the present environment, and in the hedonic treadmill she’d find herself in again, she would start fretting about the normal and the mundane, much as we do in our daily lives. 

Our ability to adjust to the reality around us is astounding to me. I guess it’s a defensive mechanism for the world our ancestors found themselves in and it’s embedded in our DNA to adjust to what the harsh world throws at us and make do to survive. 

I have been reading this book called The Science of Storytelling by William Storr and am struck by the common threads of narrative fallacies that bind us all humans due to the evolutionary nature of our being. We are naturally predisposed to feel morally outraged at selfish behavior, we tend to like underdogs in stories more because we feel sort of united with them, we are prone to feeling mad when those around us get ahead because we have been genetically taught to get ahead, living as we did for the most parts of our species’ existence in a world of scarcity. 

That we are now in a world of abundance is not a realization that comes naturally to us. It’s as if we live, for the most part, in a blind fold, impervious to the amazing progress we have made and that a pauper living today is much more confident of his ability to live than a king in the last millennium. And that’s part of the reason why we feel constantly stretched and burdened about our ability to survive and to thrive, even though we know we are far more fortunate to have been born in an age when the necessities of our life have been taken care of by those that came before us. 

The study of history is a misbegotten venture anyways because we know the arcs of events as it unfolds in real time is very different from the straight, often linear, and laughably simple timelines that history likes to sketch for us. There is value in the narratives that history provides us with, and nothing can teach us better about ourselves than when we observe our past more closely. But we are, and we must take history with a grain of salt. When it comes to the far past though, we can only draw crude caricatures of what it was to live in those times. The far past is and will likely remain a black box to us till such time as when we master time travel. But it still is something we should be grateful towards because the combined effects of millions of small advancements led us to the here and the now.