A Timely Meditation: On The Uses of History
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Recently I have been brooding about Oswald Spengler’s gloomy outlook for the future of creativity in Western civilization. Henry Kissinger died a few months back, so I finally went into all of his works and I gave Samuel Huntington a read as well to see how the Harvard political theorists so influenced by Spengler sat with his ideas. I also revisited Nietzsche’s excellent untimely meditation on the topic of history, and his aphorisms from The Gay Science, to try to see where Spengler was getting his idol wrong. I came away with a conviction that probably mirrors Kissinger’s Kantian complaint about Spengler: his predictions are kind of historicism.
Specifically, as I alluded to in a previous post and have now come to total convction in: Spengler’s theory is totally at the mercy of available historical evidence and doesn’t even consistently fit what’s available. To pull this thread, I spent some time thinking in the opposite direction: what if the available evidence for formulating theories of history is actually so paltry that making any general prediction is inherently fragile? Or, more generally, what are we really doing when we build predictions from the corpus of historical data?
I went on to read couple of articles that really dive into this concern: ours, they illustrate, is a world where not only is the historical corpus fragmentary and fragile, but we can’t necessarily expect progress in the science of history, at least in the medium term or in the same cultural stream as that into which we put the labor of the projects of our lives. Spengler even nodded to this problem himself, claiming that civilizations can only do historical science during certain periods of their development after which commercial intellect takes over and history disappears in the popular imagination as merely a Hobbesian war of secular interests. So why does he fall into historicizing? And what value can historicizing actually offer us in its fragile state?
Well, I have to let Nietzsche tell us the story on this one.
The Problem of the Corpus
Let me be the first to confess that I suffer anxiety about the present corpus of history — not only is it fragile, but there’s an explosive amount of it right now. It feels like a sudden fungal bloom: we live in an era where a bewildering number of books are published every year, draining my wallet as I purchase them from Princeton University Press and elsewhere, and they all end up in used bookstores where people like me buy even more of them. Amateur historians are producing copious podcasts about e.g. lesser-studied empires like the Seleucids or the Sasanians. Of course, on top of this, in what Kissinger himself declared a “Promethean moment,” ChatGPT can trawl all the secondary sources for you. Enter into this mass and you quickly wonder if you could ever learn something substantial or think something new. We not only live in a world of real historical precarity, but also one where the powerful illusion surrounds us that every imaginable fact is available, procedurally generated on a screen at our fingertips.
However, dispel the illusion or a second and remember that much remains in the ground. You might be inclined to complain that we should dig it all up and write more research papers, but you might actually agree it belongs down there. It’s well-known that Greece and Turkey keep most of their artifacts hidden, and that Iran hasn’t even been willing to open up its National Archives. As Samo Burja notes in the article I linked above, not only is there the great possibility of radically re-understanding world history from the opening of the Silk Road through the Mongol Ilkhanate through the British incursion into the oil fields of the Middle East, it could also just burn down the way may libraries do. Parts of the past truly do go dark in ways that are terrifyingly not predetermined. The embrace of the soil might actually be the best archives. But it means that our LLM matrix is really quite limited in view of the vastness of what might go online the next time a major archive opens up. What is destroyed will never go online. Accessibility is not the same as extensiveness, and the machine is not God.
And, as Burja notes, historians have never preferred the history of previous historians. Whatever we’re producing now is unlikely to be held in high esteem by the scholars of the future, and it causes a certain Weltschmerz to watch the university presses churn out revisionist histories that will only be called drivel by our grandchildren. The anxiety strikes no only because the record of original documents is so fragile, but because exactly why we’re engaged in this Faustian project of knowledge-production-only-for-today seems to be an answer that we’ve abdicated to the market. And it’s an aggressive market that’s still dumping millions of venture dollars into LLM wrappers! We rightly consider it a national security priority to rapidly put the models into productive use.
To summarize: we live in an era where content is being manically procedurally generated to try to grow a stubborn mature economy, where the actual facts that constitute the corpus are fragile and often kept in the ground away from the matrix, and where we have no particular reason to believe that today’s critical fashion will be particularly well-received in even twenty years. And, most hauntingly, we set ourselves up with the challenge of remembering that a comprehensive search of a corpus is not the same thing as the impossible universality that is the tacit goal of producing historical knowledge. When we ask what history can be for us, we do so in view of how we currently experience it.
Spengler and Cultural Relativity
To reiterate, asking the question of what history can be for us really does presuppose an “us.” By this I simply mean the people of the Western world — ones we would call “WEIRD” in contemporary psychology — who share certain institutional and cosmological commitments as well as the intellectual inclination to study history at all. It presupposes an “us” because that “us” has a culturally specific idea of how history is even structured and we can only give an answer relative to such a presupposition.
This inherits from one of Spengler’s most poignant points: that the conception of history absolutely varies between civilizations. Much of what he has to say might sound like contemporary critical race theory, actually. In short: Western approaches to history privilege an objective and documentary approach with minimal narrative structure, places an emphasis on museums and other forms of isolated display, and takes as its goal the total description of world history including all cultures and geological and cosmological epochs. As he observes, other civilizations have never so audaciously attempted to describe every other civilization.
There are two important corollaries to this perspective, I think: one, that we should actually start asking ourselves what the various approaches to history are in order to hold a mirror up to our own project; and two, that we can afford to view the fragility of the corpus at least partially as the result of the fragility of the Western approach to documentary history. In other words, we can at least take ownership of the anxiety as our own, measured relative to our own expectations of what our civilization would achieve. Let us not imagine that we’re bearing the burden of the future of the world here, but only rather the burden of the character of our grandchildren.
To address the first corollary, take a look at some of Spengler’s examples. Because of the audacious scope of Decline of the West, he doesn’t get all of his facts right, but the notions are enough to go do one’s own investigations. He touches on how China, Ancient Egypt, the Muslim World, and the Classical World have all had their non-documentary approaches to history: none of them really created museums of plundered artifacts, every history before Hegel allows the author a certain amount of narrative trust, and only the Greeks actually tried to write the histories of other countries and did a hilariously bad job of it. Herodotus is considered “the father of lies.” The Egyptians recorded kings and astronomical events but considered the facts of mortal life to be too fleeting to bother with in the grand scope of things. The Achaemenid Persians didn’t really write anything down despite the vitality and splendor of their courtly life and the grand scale of Cyrus’s achievements. I’m no expert on the topic, but I know India has been famously described as culturally unconcerned with the keeping of documentary records — Spengler in particular credits the commitments of dharmic religions for this although I really don’t feel qualified to comment.
To the second corollary: we can probably let ourselves off the hook for answering about the possibility of having history simpliciter. Contrary to Spengler’s reputation, his argument is not at all one of supremacism but quite the opposite. How, he asks, would you objectively compare the achievements of different civilizations? Why do you believe that the Western attempt to build a historical Tower of Babel is really the best way to thrive in a world that’s always in flux? Rather, perhaps we could hope to put on the perspective of an imagined Egyptian or Third-Century Buddhist and say to ourselves: time is more vast than we delude ourselves, everything is in flux more than we delude ourselves, so why do we attach ourselves to an impossible and fragile project of constructing world history? These are the questions that frame the larger ethical question.
As a Westerner, I think it’s impossible not to believe in the basic rightness of our approach to history even if you do think the British Museum needs to repatriate lot of its collections. But instead of getting anxious about the fragility of history, please spend your time examining how you came to believe in the specific project. When Huntington says we have to stand for what makes us distinct, this is what he means.
Nietzsche and the Abuses of History
So the question has become: given the uniqueness of the Western project of history and given that it pertains mostly to our future character as the West, what can history do for us? I now have to go further and qualify: what are the good things and what are the bad things? Certainly, as I mentioned in the section about the corpus problem, it’s very easy to confuse the power of ChatGPT with a God or to inappropriately imagine it knows everything that could be out there.
This is what Nietzsche calls an “overabundance” of history and it could really do some terrible things to us. In particular, we run the very real risk of mass belief in our own futility as thinking and speaking creatures, the risk of asphyxiating ourselves with a demand to make ourselves “useful” with the technology, and the risk of convincing ourselves the way that Spengler did that we have entered the civilizational drama in the fifth act. But I do think there is some hope.
Thanks to the Internet and the growth of the American academy after 1945, I daresay we’re still in an era with a serious overabundance of history and we can see how it’s affecting us. The college degree rules the labor market in every Western country, and attached to it is the requirement of a secondary education that involves a great deal of historical education. Any specialization requires learning the history of the field to some rote level sufficient to convince the trainee that the current methodology is the best and the culmination of workers before them. The advanced degrees are so specialized and academic research is impossible without slathering credit onto a very large number of specialized scholars who probably created the field (given the speed at which academic fields are created.) Educated experts certainly suffer from what Nietzsche warned: they’re forced into the impression that the field culminates in their work, that they must be useful to active work in the field as quickly as possible, and frankly a belief in their own smallness as participants in a specialized world that just seems too vast to contain any new developments or any new great thinkers. This part of the diagnosis is quite astute, and it forces us to look at the question the other way around: what are the detrimental things our history is doing to us?
There have, of course, been some trends since Nietzsche’s day that seem to move in the direction of the antidotes he prescribed. The boomers did rise up in 1968 and make a bunch of unhistorical demands. They did attend to the needs of life as such rather than the burden of an onerous classical curriculum. It’s turned into a giant housing crisis and gerontocracy, but there was a thrust to the spirit of the era that really believed in the capacity for more great things in the future. As Nietzsche points out, the reason we read about the Florentine Renaissance is to remind ourselves that Western culture was hoisted up from the Gothic by only a hundred men and that it could happen again. If you’re Peter Thiel, you’ll point to the kids in Silicon Valley dropping out of college or pursuing alternative routes that don’t involve regulatory capture through universities. There does seem to be an increasing sense that apprenticeship is not something that needs to be done through Arizona State University, and an increasing demand that cost of living for the youth be a more serious concern. I reserve my optimism about how much this will show benefit outside of the ruling managerial class, but to be fair Nietzsche wasn’t really concerned with equity as much as not stamping out the possibility of genius.
Thus, the question has become the following mouthful: in light of our unique commitments to building history a certain way, and in light of how becoming too fascinated with the project can cause total malaise, and in light of the terrifying fragility of the project, what can it be for us?
The Project
I can attempt a personal answer, since I do believe it’s a question that requires serious introspection.
I’m definitely guilty of staring too long into the matrix and worrying about the futility of my own writing. It’s easy these days to worry that culture itself has come to a digital standstill. It can actually be quite freeing to think about the archives out there — in Iran, in China, wherever — that could radically change up the scholarship and free me and others from the feeling that it has all been written about and commented on. This is to say, answering the question will at least improve how one man participates in Western civilization.
It’s also quite terrifying to think about the true oblivion that has eaten entire would-be corpora. Ruiz’s article above talks about how the civilization of the Amazon Basin is simply gone into the darkness, for instance, and this makes me puzzle. Indeed, there’s a theological thought this all inspired: the religious (particularly Christian) motif of the world created out of darkness basically gives symbolic expression to this terror. It’s usually hard for us to imagine a world simply created by a man in a beard, because we can go look at the dinosaurs and many illustrations that natural historians have made of all the animals we’ve found fossilized. But even this is totally fragmentary. The tectonic plates recycle themselves eventually, after all. There truly is no complete record, and we have only managed to forget this in the past two hundred years of Western science.
Take a step back and think about the truly vast, indeed, infinite dark ocean of what has ceased to be. How many cosmological epochs and cataclysms and splendors are gone truly without a trace. This is what the Christians have been warning us about for a long time: science, including history, is created by man. We know less about the whole universe than an ant knows about the plundered collections of the British Museum. Of course, as a Nietzschean I’d go so far as to say that our image of God is also created by man — please don’t go running to the nearest megachurch and please don’t take this as one of those strange young-conservative cases for converting to Catholicism and pretending you’re T. S. Eliot. Simply put, take Nietzsche’s critique seriously: there’s no good reason to believe that we are the culmination of history, or “late to the show” or similar. We could indeed be quite early in human history!
Now, you say, we’ve been trying to relieve ourselves of having to answer of the whole show! We only care about where we place in Western history because that’s what Spengler told is the the full horizon of our concerns. Doesn’t he explicitly say we’re late in the Western project? Can there be any useful answer about what our grand objective history has yet to provide?
Well, I don’t think that one’s own civilization is the “full horizon of one’s concerns” and I also don’t think that Spengler correctly lines up the lifecycles of each civilization he investigates. Moreover, I would turn Nietzsche against him: yes, there are these physiognomies of civilizations, but the achievements of a civilization result from people living and striving. And to live and to strive is to do so with a sense of forgetting and a belief (or at least hope) that the next twenty years could wreak justice from the past millennia. Every artifact we have comes from a life lived, not spent moping about a theory of the futility of history. We have to forget and imagine, like Rilke encourages us with Polykleitos’s fragmentary statue.
I reach a conclusion that I believe I share with Noam Chomsky: history can have its effects on you, it can make you feel futile, it can make you feel late to the game, but you can remember that it progresses because people have always found the willingness to fight it and to strive for extraordinary things. Their feats live on not because we have the complete record, but because we care to remember these feats and that’s the true value of the labor of the historian. As Nietzsche says, go and read Plutarch again, and try to remember that the greatness of the past can only be appreciated from greatness in the present.
You must strive to be great.
