Who controls the past controls the future: A rallying cry for nerd-activist amateur historians and imaginauts

It's time to wrest history back from the Enlightenment

Some housekeeping, before we get started:

• Come to an event I’m speaking at in London on Tuesday 11th February! I’ll be one of a panel of speakers thinking through the intersections between magic, AI, science, and imagination, hosted by Hurry Up We’re Dreaming magazine. It’s at Reference Point and it’s going to be a lot of fun. Tickets cost £10 plus Eventbrite’s small booking fee, and you can nab one here.

  

• Just a little FYI for anyone who was kindly paying to subscribe to this Substack: I’ve temporarily suspended paid subscriptions. I’ll be restarting them soon, with a new suite of offerings for paying subscribers, but while I’ve been too busy to post anything much at all, I didn’t want to keep charging all those among you who’ve been generous enough to subscribe on a donation basis.

• Thank you for bearing with me during these long gaps between posts. My bind is that I want to be in regular contact, but I don’t want to succumb to what Doug Rushkoff calls “the pace of the internet”. We’ve all got too much to read anyway, and I only want to post when I’ve got something worth saying. That said, I’m slowly shifting my other, bill-paying work so that I will—I hope—have things worth saying more often. All of this is what’s going on when I go silent for a month. It’s all a juggle, and I love you all for being here and bearing with me.

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Camillo Miola, “The Oracle”

Hello,

I’m sitting in my office, in my little cottage on the southern edge of Dartmoor in southwest England. It’s a tiny room—about eight feet by six—dominated by a huge desk, a two-foot-deep oak job running down one of the long walls, whose entire surface area I somehow invariably manage to cram to invisibility even though it’s sixteen foot square (am I showing my age with these imperial measurements?). When I moved into this house a couple of years ago, I painted this room olive green—walls, vaulted ceiling, the lot. I knew when I bought the paint that I hated the colour; became even more certain as I slathered it on every surface. I don’t know what I was doing. Maybe trying to be a grown-up. Why does some part of me think that olive green is a grown-up colour? What I really wanted to do, and have since done, was paint every surface in this room a startling mint green that makes most people gasp a bit (in horror, I think) when they peek in, but which seems to hold my particular nervous system in perfect equilibrium. I think it’s something to do with dopamine.

If anyone asks me, in thirty or forty years’ time, where I spent these turbulent, transitional years, years when there is still so much to play for in the state of the world (will there always be? Has there always been?), I will have to tell them that I spent an awful lot of them right here, in my lurid green cell. I’m in here by six most mornings and often late into the night, and I’ll typically do a day or two in here at the weekend, too.

When I imagine this fictional (and, let’s be honest, quite narcissistic) conversation, I feel some shame. Shouldn’t I be out… there? Wherever there is? Doing… something else? Instead of hiding away in here, putting myself through a self-administered, totally unaccredited, mysteriously motivated equivalent of a PhD in English history?

Who knows? “Should” is the most perplexing and pointless way to live a life, after all. Perhaps a better way to frame it is: Is it possible that we are doing anything of value in these strange years, those of us who are constitutionally inclined to hole ourselves up and devour books?

It’s not certain, but it’s certainly possible. I’ve been thinking a lot about George Orwell’s famous formula for totalitarianism, as presented in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” This seems true to me, and it seems also to hold the key to an opportunity, in our present moment. Because while our understanding of the past—the version of history that is handed to us—absolutely creates and circumscribes our sense of what’s possible in the future, I don’t think it’s at all clear right now who controls the present enough to control the past. I think what we’re living through is a seismic destabilization and even rupture of old certainties, and I think that this presents an incredibly exciting opportunity for the nerd activists among us. Those of us who are interested primarily in what is known, and how, and how it shapes the world.

Maybe it seems ridiculous to say it’s unclear who controls the present, especially as all of you in the United States face the new presidency. I don’t mean to be flippant or obtuse. I know that control is being wielded with violence and a breathtaking, gut-punching lack of wisdom. But it also seems to me that precisely in this violence and unwisdom, in this absolute idiotic flap, is evidence of the instability of this control; evidence that even those who wield it know on some level that it’s unstable. I’m not a political commentator, and I don’t want to get in over my head, but it seems to me that at least in terms of the history of ideas, what we’re watching is not the dawn of a cogent new political philosophy that will bind together past, present, and future for a few hundred years. It’s the death throes of an old one—specifically, the final, fatal kicks to the worldview and the picture of history (and so of the future) handed down to us by the Enlightenment.

Who controls the past controls the future, and for centuries in the West, we have been living from a playbook of past and future inherited from the Enlightenment—from a specific moment 250-odd years ago, in which after centuries of perceived tyranny enabled by tradition and faith, academically educated Europeans set out to ensure they could be hoodwinked and oppressed no more. In the place of old, received certainties about, for instance, the authority of the church and the rights of kings, they would enshrine a new epistemology, a new way of knowing, rooted in what can be materially observed and rationally understood. An “objective” way of knowing that promised immunity to bias and the human will and other hijacks. It was understandable, but it was a reaction, an extreme swing of the pendulum that brought untold unforeseen consequences. And for centuries, this movement and its prejudices have circumscribed our understanding of what happened in the past, and so what’s possible in the present and the future. It has been the water we swim in.

If you ask me (and I know nobody did), the present moment is, in myriad ways, one giant rebellion against the Enlightenment. Pankaj Mishra has been saying so for years. In his 2017 book Age of Anger: A History of the Present, he traced the anger and resentment that fuel today’s far-right movements and militant violence (the ressentiment, in the Nietzschean vein) back to the Enlightenment. It was the Enlightenment, after all, that made such a song and dance about all men (yes, men) having rights and being individuals with status at the very centre of political and social life, not to mention at the foundation of newly conceived nations like the United States. I’m not being flippant, by the way, about the infinitely complex question of human rights. I’m saying “song and dance” because this promise of the individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was always empty. Wealth and opportunity were only ever truly available to the few, and everyone else just had to eat the fumes of the lie they’d been sold, for the sake of which, by the way, they’d also lost the old structures and supports of tradition, community, and faith. If that ain’t a recipe for rage, I don’t know what is. It’s this brewing discontent that Mishra traces right down to the present moment.

But it’s not just the violent far right that’s kicking at the corpse of Enlightenment promises. A version of that very same thing is also happening in circles that might be much closer to home for the people reading this essay. Many of us here in this corner of Substack have set out on paths of spiritual seeking that rebel against the rationalist materialism we were raised in. We’re exploring esoteric philosophies and alternative medicines, astrology and the occult and, shock horror, even resurgent religion. (And yes, I know, this kind of seeking has always taken place. But it’s clear that we’re in A Moment; that it’s happening more widely now than at many times in the past.) We are done, so many of us, with the disenchantment of the world that Max Weber identified as a consequence of the Enlightenment. We are done with rationalist materialism, with suppressing our instincts and intuitions, with leading half-lives, with ending each day yearning for deeper meaning and a connection to some quality of this world that we know, in our bones, exists before and beyond inert matter.

It’s uncomfortable to admit it, but this means we have more in common than we might think with those who are acting out in rage against the broken promises of the Enlightenment. We’re all, in our very different ways, fighting a ghost. Fighting this philosophy that was injected into the air we breathe hundreds of years ago.

As an aside (bear with me), there’s a weird thing that happens in nations that have had a populist government at some point. Maybe political philosophers write about this extensively and I’m pointing out the obvious. For me, it was simply something I noticed it when I lived in Argentina, back in 2010–11. After populism, it seems a country really has no such thing as a political right or left anymore. Everything becomes either populist or anti-populist; the particular brand of the country’s populism becomes the new yardstick of meaning, and traditionally leftist and rightist stances are cherry-picked in ways that feel very confusing if you arrive in the country without context, decades after the populist government has left.

In the same way, our culture is arranged around and railing against a movement from the past that has become invisible, but which skews everything we do. We’re fighting a ghost, and the ghost is the Enlightenment. And for my money, this is why, for instance, we see the seemingly strange alliances and emergences charted in a podcast like Conspirituality, which highlights the specific spot in our culture where New Age and alternative lifestyles join up with the kind of conspiracies once associated with the rage-filled far right and libertarians. If you’re looking at this phenomenon through the lens of left/right, or progressive/conservative, it’s very confusing. But when you realize that it’s all united by frustration with Enlightenment convictions, it makes much more sense.

My friend Aaron, who if he’s reading will hate that I’ve named him here (hi, Aaron!), has pulled me up in the past on my sometimes lazy rejection of Enlightenment principles. And I am the first to admit that I too often come out swinging for intuition and imagination and the subtle ways of knowing that the Enlightenment rejected for being possible sources of tyranny or delusion. So I want to be clear that I’m in no way rejecting science or the intellect or even the rational mind. I am simply saying that the Enlightenment went too far. That that’s where all this disaffection comes from. That we need a balance in our ways of knowing; that whatever future we’re moving towards, it needs to make space for intuition, imagination, ritual, faith, and tradition as well as the intellect, scientific investigation, and rigorous reasoning. If you insist too strongly on one or the other, you’ll always end up with a painful counter-movement that throws the baby out with the bathwater.

What might this balance look like, in practice? Honestly, I don’t know. Again, I’m not a political philosopher; I’m just an idiot with a Substack. I’m not about to start writing Utopia over here. And in any case, I think attempts to shape the world to come will always be heavy-handed. There’s so much that’s out of our control, not least because there is a great consciousness shaping events in our world that is infinitely more imaginative than I could ever hope to be.

What I’m more interested in than designing a future is, as the title of this essay might suggest, reappraising our past, to shift the parameters we unconsciously place on the present and the future. The Enlightenment handed us a restricted picture of history, and that restricted picture made this strange mode we call modernity feel utterly inevitable and inescapable. So what if we remember all the things that were left out of that picture? What might that open up?

For instance, in their 2021 book The Dawn of Everything, David Wengrow and the late, great David Graeber trace back to the Enlightenment the simplistic trajectory that we moderns impose upon the deep history of humanity. Our earliest hunter-gatherer ancestors, this story tells us, lived in primitive, politically unsophisticated tribes. Then, with the advent of agriculture, humans began to settle and develop increasingly complex social and political structures, which inevitably, we’re told, led to rising inequality.

Wengrow and Graeber point out that in fact, there was a remarkable degree of complexity and imagination in the way the earliest hunter-gatherers organized themselves. Some seem to have employed entirely different systems of government depending on the demands of the season, and been able to shift seamlessly between these different systems. Meanwhile, networks of trade and communication suggest enormously wide-ranging and cosmopolitan peoples. But Enlightenment thinkers, they suggest, were coming into contact with indigenous peoples whose quality of life outside of European “civilization” threatened the Enlightenment idea that statecraft in the very fixed European vein is the necessary and only way to create conditions of liberty, equality, and fraternity. So those Enlightenment thinkers, whether deliberately or not, misrepresented the “primitive” nature of life outside of modern European civilization, handing us a fiction about what a human actually is, and how imaginatively we might be able to live together, as a simple facet of our human nature.

Then there’s the way the Enlightenment represented the classical world of Ancient Greece and Rome, widely seen as the dawn of European “civilization”. The most famous work of history from the Enlightenment is probably Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a majestic undertaking in which Gibbon draws clear links between the Enlightenment era and the Roman age. Writing at the height of the age of reason, when, as we’ve seen, Enlightenment thinkers were keen to overthrow faith and tradition and their potential for tyranny, Gibbon tells us very clearly that the adoption of Christianity played a large part in the fall of Rome. He writes:

Faith, zeal, curiosity, and more Earthly passions of malice and ambition kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country.

There’s an indication here that faith was somehow aberrant in this world; that the superstitions and heightened passions of religion were infecting an otherwise rational society, bringing about its downfall.

But this is a very selective picture of the classical world. Let’s consider what was going on in Ancient Greece, which in so many ways formed the prototype for Ancient Rome. (As an aside, it’s telling that Enlightenment philosophers were generally more interested in Rome than in Greece. What I’m about to share might shed some light on why.)

It’s common these days to think of the dawn of democracy in Ancient Athens as some seed point of earthly, materialist rule; to draw a straight line from Athens to the governmental buildings in London or Washington DC. I’ve been guilty of doing something similar on this very Substack.

And yet when we actually look at Ancient Greece, even after the dawn of democracy, we find practices that are absolutely baffling to our modern sensibility. In his book Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle, Hugh Bowden writes:

In modern discussions, “democratic” or more properly perhaps “Western democratic” regimes are assumed to be liberal, individualist, capitalist and secularist. Democratic Athens was none of these things.

My dear friends, the truth of democratic Athens is so much stranger than we allow ourselves to believe. Difficult decisions depended on sending ambassadors to oracles like the one at Delphi, where the priestess proclaimed the divine will from a trance state enhanced by drugs. And that was only on special occasions. Every single day in Ancient Greece, animals were sacrificed so that the marks of the gods could be read in their entrails; these markings would dictate policy and other critical decisions. Battles were sometimes held up, leading to great loss of human life, because the signs of the entrails weren’t clear enough yet. And here’s the orator Aeschines describing what went down in a typical meeting of the Athenian assembly in 345 BCE (as quoted in Bowden):

After the purificatory victims [that is, sacrificed piglets] have been carried around, and the herald has said the ancestral prayers, the law commands the proedroi [the presiding magistrates] to proceed with discussion concerning ancestral sacred matters (hiera), heralds and embassies, and other matters of civic concern (hosion).

Sacrificed piglets. In the assembly! Now, I’m not suggesting for a moment that the key to our future is to introduce sacrifices into the halls of congress. Jesus, that’s the last thing we need right now. But let’s soak in for a second just how ritualized and reverent those early democratic processes were. Let’s recognize that even if Christian factionalism had something to do with the fall of Rome, that’s far from the full story of faith and its role in the classical world.

Humans have always been guided by beliefs and behaviours that anchor us in something meaningful and nonmaterial. And while those beliefs and behaviours were vulnerable to hijack and corruption, they also created space for imagination and intuition and a sense of belonging to each other and the world, and a sense, too, that some great story is playing out. That there is a point in waking up every day besides paying your credit-card bill.

I’m rubbish at endings, and I think I’ve already laboured this point enough, so let me leave this here, with a reminder that whether we like it or not, many of us are grieving a common loss and fighting a common foe. And with a warm invitation to blow the fucking walls off everything we think we know about the past, present, and future.

Love from me, forever nerding out in my lurid green cell,

xx Ellie