I was musing lately about how historians will look back upon these last forty years - the biggest part of my adult, working life - and comment on it. Interested readers should hark back to a post titled 'What really mattered?' written back in 1989 and uploaded here in 2015.
Throughout many of the previous centuries, they used to painstakingly put together hard-to-find data (in the form of artefacts hidden among ruins, difficult to read partial manuscripts and diaries, rock inscriptions and suchlike) to tentatively piece together a reasonably believable picture of some bygone age, and many of those pictures are still hazy and uncertain, as well as overladen with myths and legends, such as whether King Arthur and Sri Krishna really existed, and what the Indus Valley seals say, and whether Hitler was a closet Jew. Those looking back at our times, say, a hundred years or more hereafter, will be faced with quite the reverse problem - there is such a gigantic Niagara of data available that they will be very hard put to decide what to keep, what to take seriously, and what to ignore. The internet - via a trillion bits and pieces of data being daily uploaded by several billion individuals, in the form of official communications and love letters, twitter posts and Instagram Reels, blogposts and photographs and videos, is very likely to overwhelm them. And eventually they might decide it was a very uneventful time, when nothing much that mattered happened, in terms of the progress or regression of civilization. There were no world wars or massive famines, no visits to even the nearest star, no birth of a world-sweeping new religion, no gigantic discoveries or inventions, no major paradigm shift in the arts or political ideas, no great and sweeping social reforms (in comparison to the abolition of slavery or women getting the vote and the right to property, I mean) ... and did Michael Jackson and Madonna and Taylor Swift and Beyonce and Rihanna and Shakira (or Messi and Ronaldo and Neymar) make the slightest difference, seriously? Personally, I think I lived through one of the dullest periods in history. Or am I looking at the world in a very odd way? Would some of my readers like to start a debate?
10 comments:
Sir,
Uneventful you say? Well, perhaps yes and perhaps no?
From coal chula to IH heater, from no phone to iPhone, from steam engines to bullet trains and maglev, not bad, eh? And, fear and violence in the early 90s, mRNA vaccines and iPS cells that are game changers in medical science, and, if I remember correctly, the melting of the polar ice, perhaps? LOL!
And, why not let the billionaires speculate and compete for land on Mars? That way our houses are likely to be safe and poor people can gain some respite from land grabs! And, when they go further than Mars, they will find a lot of gas on Jupiter etc.
In the next decade or so, we are looking for budding trillionaires after the world bank kindly changed the International Poverty Line from $1.25 to $1.90 per day.
We live in an exceptional world, Sir, where we can enjoy extremes of all kinds; both extreme heat and cold, and extreme hunger, misery, gluttony, and opulence, and decadence. And, hopefully extreme cruelty and love. Has there ever been such a magnificent variety of options?
Well, that's ONE comment.
Dear Suvroda
Thank you for the note. I will share something personal which my grandmother told me before she passed away just couple of weeks after I joined my first job.
I had a horrible first two weeks in office and was finding it difficult to adjust. I used to complain to her. After listening to my complaints, she mentioned to me that my grandfather (whom I had never seen) became a doctor during the British era because he wanted to help people. He did not have money and he had to fight / work hard for scholarships. When he was a student still (already married), he used to save money so sometimes he would swim a river, walk and eventually reach Calcutta to attend his classes. I am sure this story or similar is common to many families of the time. My grandmother asked me that even if I feel down, I should remember that a lot of people worked very hard for me to be where I am now. Therefore, I should work for the future generation.
Every day when I take public boat to my work, I remember this story. I still complain though - probably more. :)
Even now, when I go to the old Calcutta “para”, people know me because of my grandfather who passed away before I was even born.
I know that this story could be a very irrelevant anecdote to this post – I am sorry about that. However, I feel despite all the issues, my grandparents left a reasonably better world for me. Probably they did not think of it that way at the time.
In my personal view, even in earlier times ills existed in the society, however our access to information was limited. Now, because of so many modes of information, stupidity has gotten legitimate platform and they sadly dominate the information that we can easily access. I want to be hopeful that there are many unknown faces who are doing something to make the times better. Alas, I may not see them and the many fruits of their hard work.
Regards
Tanmoy
You NEVER write irrelevantly, Tanmoy... I have assured you again and again :)
I have written about my enormous debt to my grandfather, so I know exactly what you mean, and in what context, and I agree entirely. My only gripe (and fear) is that they might have made the world too nice and safe and easy for us, so we have become terribly weak. I often laugh that people who nick themselves with a razor make a far bigger fuss these days than people who had arrows pulled out of them without anesthesia and then cauterized with red hot brands in the days of old. And who knows, we might have in turn brought up a generation entirely unfit to stand on their own feet. See my latest post. God grant that I might be wrong.
Dear Sir,
Ram Guha (Historian) recently said in one of his interviews that as a biographer and historian, he was lucky to have access to huge amounts of written correspondence, pamphlets, letters, posters from the archives the world over. On the other hand, a future historian writing about our times (say 2000-2050) - not exactly concurrent with the 40 year period you talk about - will hardly have any written correspondence, letters etc. All they will have is WhatsApp messages, emails, reddit posts, blogposts to sift through to imagine the time it was. I agree with you that they will have glut of information and hopefully, will have tools to analyze and make sense of them. So, it is likely not a lack of information but too much of information, most of it inconsequential, the sheer frivolity of it, that future historians will have to contend with.
As to your larger question of whether this was really an interesting time or not, I would reserve my comments though one is tempted to say that invention of internet, once-in-a-century global pandemic, 2008 financial meltdown will probably worth recording alongside other great inventions since the beginning of industrial age, 1918 Spanish Flu and 1929 Great Depression, respectively. May be I am getting ahead of myself.
With best wishes,
Rajarshi
Good to see you writing in after ages, Rajarshi :)!
That is exactly what I meant, a super-humongous GLUT of information, most of it silly, trivial, vulgar and inconsequential, which might lead them to conclude that it was on the whole a very uneventful age.
As far as my standpoint is concerned, I shall stick to my position: nothing much happened in terms of the progress or regress of civilization, which has been my prime concern all my thinking life. I think most sensible people will agree that smartphones, or even the pandemic, made hardly a blip in that regard!
Dear Sir,
I agree with some aspects of your observation. I agree that information and data, in all their forms, surround us now like a dense fog. I imagine this as humans standing amid numerous Ghazipur landfills. There are occasional treasures to be found when one decides to go 'dumpster diving' there but everything else is garbage. The Signal-to-Noise ratio for useful, pristine and relevant information is abysmally low. But it is a by-product of the democratisation of the internet and is unavoidable. A historian/sociologist from the future has a mammoth task cut out for him/her. He/She would have to choose between representing either internet trends as the 'history' of our times or digging really deep and presenting a thorough investigation of the past. If I were to mentally extrapolate the general trend of our species' dwindling interest in research and scholarship, I think it would be safe to say that the historians and social scientists of the future would actually go for the former. Technological advancements, progress in medicine etc. would mean little because, for them, it would have always existed.
Truth has already fallen victim to this abundance of information. This 'super-humongous GLUT of information' that you refer to has already pushed us to a post-truth society and I fear that things will only get worse with rapid growth in the abilities of AI models and the penetration of social media deeper into our micro-societies.
I fear that things that have never happened, will become a part of and influence our future just because a group of college-degree-holding hairless advanced chimpanzees have access to the internet.
My thoughts are currently disorganised because this is the first time I'm thinking about this interesting topic and I hope to debate this with friends someday.
Please excuse any mistakes.
Yours sincerely,
Aditya Mishra
Dear Sir, and my fellow commenters,
Thank you for this interesting chain of conversation. I will be honest in saying that I have been reading and re-reading this post and its comments, but have been finding it hard to take a position that is categorically for or against regarding the progress or regress of our civilisation. I like the fact that we are having more of a discussion here than a debate; which is how the nature of most gentlemanly conversations should be. Hence I trust there is no expectation that those commenting need to take a strict position. At least I believe, as far as my standpoint is concerned, that we have always been progressing and regressing at the same time; almost living a paradoxical reality throughout history.
Considering the vastness of human history, I will not draw upon any particular human figure or non-human artefact to justify which times were better or best, worse or worst. Partly because I am not so well educated in historical facts as some of you already are. But more so because I believe there is no single incident (or individual) in the history of our civilisation that surpasses the significance and impact of the death of Jesus Christ; no matter whosoever one may refer to. And mistake not that as a species we are insignificant in the infinite expanse of space and time; even our little pale blue dot outlives us. I will not spend time comparing nobles and plebeians of any given century; as I am not sure what purpose does it serve.
We do not have many of the evils and discomforts of the past, while still retaining some of them but in different forms. We have many of the pleasures, opportunities, and comforts of the present that our ancestors were not fortunate to have. Are we not collectively working towards the future while building upon the values, ideals and institutions of the past? I think we are and any generation would do that. Are we doing it well enough? Well, some of us are failing in that while many of us are doing better and in many ways, big or small. If we can treat cancer with technology and give safe birth to more children across the world, are we building a better world? Yes, we are. And if that technology is only for a chosen few and still we have millions of babies left to save, are we doing well enough? No, we are not.
Let us appreciate and be thankful for all the good that we have today and all the evil that is behind us, and pledge to make the future world a better place for our children and those thereafter.
I will be happy to see this thread of discussion continuing!
With best regards,
Subhanjan
Dear Sir,
I can hardly disagree with anything that you mentioned here. Maybe a major "contribution" of this period is the sixth mass extinction event!
Probably the hardest part of remaining sane in this period is in cultivating the ability to sift through this human banality.
With regards,
Saikat.
I logged into blogger after a gap of several days, and was pleased to find several comments waiting to be posted. Thank you, all who wrote in. And sorry for being late.
In connection with this particular post, I would like to agree to be optimistic about the way we are going, like Subhanjan, and I certainly agree that some great steps have been taken in the past (last 250 years) towards civilizational progress - such as the gradual reduction of of the worst kind of backbreaking, soul destroying poverty. But I expressly do think that increase of material comforts and luxuries does NOT conduce to real progress; indeed, it weakens us physically, mentally and morally: I can see that all around me. Moreover, the way things are going, and rapidly (climate change, imminent exhaustion of fossil fuels, looming water famine, overpopulation beyond control in several parts of the world, overall decline in all kinds of abilities among children, revival of atavistic and violent religious ideas and authoritarianism in politics, the serious threat from AI, extreme economic inequality...) I cannot rationally look forward to a lot of good things in the near future, meaning the next fifty years :(
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