Shallow Time

"If I had to do the same again

I would, my friend"

 

ABBA - Fernando

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"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded - here and there, now and then - are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.""

 

Robert A Heinlein - from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

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Mentioning my mother and collections of fiction reminded me of struggling to find a few flicks we could both watch and discuss last year as family bonding. She being more diplomatic than myself picked a fair smatter of scifi, anime and other stock geek staples whose plot twists I dutifully predicted. Until, that is, we hit an Agatha Christie adaptation. Long story short, if you want your ass kicked in a trivia/trope contest try quizzing a sixty-something woman on Agatha Christie. There Will Be (tastefully minimized) Blood.

 

But then I've never been a fan of mystery/police/spy genres in the first place. Not even E.A.Poe's Auguste Dupin stories, prototypical as they're viewed of detective fiction. (Well, I tried leafing through The Purloined Letter in high school. Didn't grab me. Don't remember it.) Going through Rue Morgue and Mystery of Marie Roget the "proto" to the typical becomes fairly obvious, with much page space given over to superfluous details or bloviation which modern readers simply would not now accept in any genre except perhaps high fantasy. "Ripped from the headlines" had a long way to go to the now painfully familiar "bing-bong" of Law&Order.

 

Or maybe not that long when you think about it. One of those superfluous details concerns much of Marie Roget's plot happening along the Rue Pavee Saint Andree. Few hiways or byways retain such names now, but it sounded authentic in 1842. Not even two centuries. How short a time ago, historically, it was yet noteworthy for a road to be paved, and in the world's most famous and modern capital to boot! Even that doesn't imply a familiar environment (admittedly I'm also playing loose with a bit of linguistic ambiguity) as the "paving" at the time would've meant cobblestones. The smooth dark-gray roads so familiar to us now mostly proliferated with automobiles over the last century, and may or may not survive that shift to clean energy we won't be making anyway. From my understanding, a big reason we have so much asphalt is that the petroleum industry produces massive quantities of otherwise useless tar as a by-product of drink cups and fidget spinners.

 

"History" sounds long - especially in high school. But as I age I grow more aware of just how feeble a blip civilization has charted. We've all seen diagrams like this attempting to convey the minuscule sliver it occupies in geologic time, or heard the clock metaphor in which all recorded history occupies only the last split-second of a universal/planetary day. But maybe you could more fruitfully compare that duration instead to your own lifespan. Taking Hammurabi as rough milestone (~1800B.C.) you can round off to 4000 years of anything resembling sociopolitical thought as we'd understand it. By the time you hit forty you will have lived through 1% of it. If you're twenty, that's 1% since Jesus and the establishment of the Roman Empire. Even if you stretch history back to the agricultural revolution, retirees can claim 1% of that.

 

Does 1% not sound like much? But what other axes of human existence are only a hundred times greater than you?

If you're 1.6m in height, the Earth's equator is ~25 million times as long.

You are one in soon-to-be 9 billion naked apes on the planet.

Should we even try to compare how much of the extant (and ever-increasing) supply of fiction you've experienced? Or how much of the body of physical science you grok? Or how much of the world's GDP you've got cluttering your apartment?

1% is massive!

 

As a result, history sits less incomprehensibly beyond human experience than other fields of study. Many now laugh at such a passe fad of yesteryear as fidget spinners, but it's almost literally yester-; the population which spun them in grade school has not even hit voting age yet. Randall Munroe runs occasional xkcd gags making you feel old for how many memories (film releases, etc.) happened closer to your birth year than today... but simply finding so many within a single human lifespan says something about the length of our experience relative to cultural shifts, which are themselves anchored to their time and place. Do Agatha Christie stories sound dated with their interwar railcars and corded telephones? But then the entire crime mystery genre may well become 20th-century period fiction given how smartphones have narrowed and invalidated its gamut of plots.

 

Continuing that train of thought, how many of the institutions and ideas you've always taken for granted as permanent fixtures of human life are in fact spring chickens? I don't mean just the obvious ones like teh internets, but literacy, mass production, mental health, or even something as basic as countries. Not that republics of one form or another did not exist here and there, but the tipping point where they became the accepted norm was the wave of revolutions which swept Europe in 1848... and even then it didn't immediately stick. You can argue just how far a head start France, Switzerland, Britain or the U.S. got in such matters, but the world as a whole lived and died more for the country's king than for other permutations of the two.

 

If your great-grandparents are still alive, ask them for stories from their own great-grandparents about it. Peoples, tribes, kinship were acknowledged, sure, but the idea of a nation being based, bottom-up, on its inhabitants' perceived similarity was generally ignored for most of history. Land was owned by nobles and anyone who was not a noble got bought and sold with the land, or died on behalf of the nobles to decide who would own them. For all the the jabber about "pro patria mori" it was not nationalism or patriotism which defined honor, duty et cetera but fealty to a ruling autocrat or oligarchy, and oaths were sworn to rulers instead of abstract borders on a map. That borders defined rulers and not the other way around was still a novel concept by the time asphalt started replacing cobblestones from 1900 onwards. That would be in your grandparents' grandparents' time. In that same timeframe Communism rose and fell as ideology and practice. My own grands were born swearing fealty to The King, spent most of their lives pretending not to hate The Party and died cursing the omnidirectional grift, graft and cronyism of modern multi-party politics.

 

For much of the world autocracy never stopped being the norm, even where pretense of elections is staged.

 

So how confident are you that the era of nation-states, younger than even Poe's invention of the detective, will persist for the rest of your 1%? Here in the U.S. at least there is no devil more reviled by the hillbilly right wing than "globalism" (which is to say anything not wrapped in an American flag) except perhaps those damn dirty liberal elites. The yokels would facetiously cite nationalistic devotion as a primary motivation. Yet they've elected a would-be theocratic emperor to tear the nation down. Maybe you never had a choice in preserving nations past their bicentennial expiration date, but only deciding what came next: an open world in which ordinary citizens have access to global culture and trade, or regression to a neo-feudalism in which everything must go through His Majesty Trump I and Tsar Putin making common cause against their carefully corralled peasantry, at least until Emperor Xi once again claims the throne above the intersecting axes of the universe.

 

And what comes after that... is sticks and stones, because with every 1% energy and material reserves deplete, the biosphere degrades, and history slides back full-cycle toward prehistory. The next 1%, or the 1% after that, appear less and less likely to be recorded.