Losing Our Past Tense
It was something surreal, unnatural, like being on another planet. And yet there I was, in my youth, walking the streets of a brand-new city, inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people, all of whom came from someplace else only recently.
Brasilia was opened as the new capital of Brazil in 1960, replacing the more historic Rio de Janeiro. Its streets were perfectly aligned and its structures were almost futuristic in design. Everything was clean. Nothing yet required new painting or renovation. The inhabitants were an odd mix of professional government types and less-educated Brazilians all thrown together. The nice places belonged to diplomats, along with the extended automobiles, but the smaller residences looked pristine, nothing like the more earthy establishments in Rio.
As a student of history, I found myself disjointed, out of place. This was a city without a past – only its present was an abiding reality. I felt disconnected and longing for a world that had strings attached to it.
There is a strange sense of connectedness, of power, in possessing a past tense. That’s just as true of nations as it is of individuals. Heritage is what we build upon in the present to prepare us for the future. In fact, it’s almost impossible to envision the world of tomorrow without utilizing the skills we acquired in previous years, in different settings.
It’s one of the great oversights of our technological age that everything is lived in the present – so much so that we all too frequently denigrate the past. It is the great sin of an age that has too much information rolling around in its head and that can’t appreciate how our past developed us so we could reach this point. We are the most privileged of generations, possessing so much data and research. But we remain the poorer for not comprehending how we acquired it all and what great sacrifices were made to produce it.
Would it be incorrect to assume that the greatest part of our collective lives is our history, our heritage? I don’t think so, since that collective past is literally thousands of years old. Like the great mystery and dynamism of DNA, we arrived at this point in time through a vast array of circumstance, intention, and accident, in ways almost too mysterious to comprehend.
An aura of intellectual superiority has hung over much of social media content, as if those posting preferred to bury the past instead of acknowledging how they are creatures of it. We look at those who preceded us and demean how they endured practices we would never tolerate. Yet scientists remind us that we aren’t as intellectually advanced from our ancestors as we would like to portray. The difference between us and them is that we have benefited from the inevitable increase in awareness and understanding that they were not privileged to have. We have profited from a growing social advancement that permits us to better understand cause and effect, decline and advancement. We are not superior. We are merely the inheritors of the expanding insight into the human mind and human condition.
Our children will look back on us and face the same temptation. And they will rightly point out that this generation knew so much and yet did so little. It permitted climate change to rage through the planet, largely unchecked. It allowed a resurgence of racism, totalitarianism, false propaganda, and an entirely new tide of refugees. It used its self-importance to distill democracy into an individual preference instead of a collective necessity.
No, we’re not so smart. We have permitted our arrogance to exceed our understanding. The great lessons of history, religion, diplomacy, enlightenment, science, and social awareness were largely gained through great institutions over millennia – the same institutions we now discredit with the wave of a hand or the sending of a tweet.
The result? We are now fretting more than ever over the fate of our world, just as our ancestors did. We might have benefited from history but we’ve done little to show that we are learning from it. The past is hardly as dark as we portray it and our present is not nearly as illuminated.
“You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines,” wrote Maya Angelou, “and you may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.” We have a past tense and it’s time we learned from it.