The loss of history has been a major blow for any useful politics. For millennia, human culture was largely defined by our history. Ancestors actions, the past was held sacred, more or less universally among cultures. Stories of the past defined the culture of the present. This changed radically with the beginning of the great scientific revolution starting in the 17th century with Copernicus and Kepler, exploding exponentially with Newton's publishing, PhilosophiƦ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
Newton's laws set in motion the technologies of the Industrial Revolution. Over a relatively short time, industrialism fundamentally reshaped human society and the face of the planet. Instead of being anchored in the past, industrial culture became defined and continually redefined by ever evolving technology. Speaking on cultural values in 1955, physicist Robert Oppenheimer defined this process quite well,
āThere's an enormous role played by tradition. The world we live in is a world where change is so great that tradition is emptied of much of its content. Emptied not because the tradition is not solid, but emptied because it has nothing in it to correspond to the questions, the problems, and the realities which erupt partly because we know more, partly because we do more, partly because we act differently.ā
Many industrial values have little meaning outside industrialism, even though their proponents, economists particularly, promote them as universal truths. Production and consumption became the all encompassing values of industrialism, completely overwhelming past or alternative values. However, this value system ignored the actual day to day price of sitting in an automobile for hours or in front of a screen. Now, a new technological revolution based on the sciences of quantum physics and biology revalues life once again in the 21st century.
Born into a given technological era, it is difficult for any person to understand established values are largely relative to the technology itself. Funnily enough, this is different from the past where greater ecology defining life was better understood. Traveling in South America at the end of the 18th century, seminal ecologist Alexander von Humboldt states, āIn the Tropics everything in nature seems new and marvelous. In the open plains and tangled jungles all memories of Europe are virtually effaced as it is nature that determines the character of the country.ā
With industrialization, nature quit providing āthe character of the country.ā The adoption of industrial technology globally homogenized human culture. This was accomplished at massive and still largely unaccounted costs to the greater environment from which we evolved. Despite our technological prowess and industrial values, we remain completely reliant and entwined with the larger natural environment.
A century ago, in his magnificent work on the Roman republic, The Greatness and Decline of Rome, Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero sublimely and succinctly writes how industrialism changed human history. Specifically, he notes the difference in how Rome and the United States came to power. Ferrero writes,
āThe mercantile democracies of our own epoch depend, like all communities, upon sustained effort; but they depend upon an effort in which the struggle of man against nature exerts a more powerful leverage than the struggle of man against man. They depend, that is, upon industry: and the object of industry is to make the forces of Nature subservient to human use. But in the effort which brought a mercantile democracy into being in ancient Italy, the struggle of man against man was far more powerful than the struggle of man against nature. In the face and in defiance of all tempting analogies there remains this great and essential difference between ancient and modern life.ā
āThe object of industry is to make the forces of Nature subservient to human use,ā sums up the processes of industrialization. However, in ignoring the costs this subservience incurs and its ultimately futile end, we arrive back to the past. We need once again look not to subdue nature, but live within it. This requires a completely different value system, valuing human life, all life, beyond its capacities for production and consumption. A radical restructuring of values, culture, and physical infrastructure necessitates a revival of history to help grasp who we are as a species on this small planet and how we've come to where we are.
Beauty