The Apotheosis of Now

The only time I read Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was in the context of a philosophy class when I was an undergraduate. Alone out of everything we read from and discussed about that text, all I remember years later is that there’s a very good reason why the granular details of concepts like evolution can be difficult to wrap your brain around: the human brain has never adapted to handle the mechanics of such things. Imagining how one gets from step 1 to step 2 is easy enough, but how do you get from step 1 to step 4,933,182? What do each of those steps look like? Hand-waving and eliding is easy enough: “the human eye evolved over time.” But what sequence of events occurred over millions of years, what adaptations needed to happen, and what traits had to get weeded out, for biological organisms to look the way they do now? The question seems insoluble because we are not that good at historical thinking. For whatever reason, imagining how something gradually changed over long spans of time, especially when each step might have been imperceptibly small at the time, is just something we aren’t good at. And it makes sense, in a way. Most of us are lucky to make it past the age of 90; there has been no need for the human brain to think effectively in terms of spans of time that long. We would have a hard time imagining how something could change over a thousand years, let alone millions, and thus it is hard for us to imagine that the world looked, or ever could look, different from how it does now.

The same is true of phenomena in human affairs. Keeping some kind of historical perspective on the world is challenging because looking at the world any differently from how we experience it is contrary to our custom. This is what I like to call “the apotheosis of now,” the unconscious belief, common among the young, that all of human history has led inexorably to our present moment. Our world looks the way it does because this is the way that it must look. Everything behind us is some kind sign-post along the way. Related are the similarly erroneous beliefs that all of our solutions to our problems are unique, that the struggles we face are unique, and that we and our compatriots have a unique providential relationship to world history.

But reality is a harsh mistress, and she furnishes us with many examples of the same things over and over. The wave of monument destruction in our own time has its precedents in revolutions the world over including the Reformation and countless other conflicts. Debates about social policy often recapitulate centuries-old Christian eschatological controversies. Invective leveled against bankers and financiers read as if lifted from the 18th century with only some of the words being changed, and the way we deal with allegations of wrongdoing has its roots in ancient Germanic compurgation rituals. Seldom does it occur to us to look at the example of the past, and see what the consequences of people’s actions actually were. Few iconoclastic movements, for example, have aged well in retrospect, and few have brought about genuine good. Because we are always the victors in our own fantasies, these problems go by the wayside. But the Apotheosis of Now brings with it a curious myopia that convinces us, forever and always, that This Time It Will Be Different, but only in exactly the ways we want them to be.

This myopia, easily adopted and only cast off with effort, prevents us from seeing the world as it truly is. Few problems are genuinely new, few solutions sincerely untried, and few ideas actually original. The erstwhile revolutionary of the year 2020 may think she has struck upon a radical new position: wealth inequality is a major social problem which only the party state can ameliorate. If she reads Teen Vogue, she may know of fellows like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Rarer still, the individual who has read enough to know that questions of property have been debated since the days of Plato and Aristotle, if not before then. Few revolutionaries are actually that original. They are, in fact, too reactionary for their own good.

But the human mind will do as is its wont, and anoint its preoccupations with the sacred chrism of presentism. The revolutions of old were not true revolutions. Now we know better and now we can bring about justice. Eschatology is one heck of a drug; we can ignore the past because we already know what the future holds.

Looking at the present historically is not an easy thing, but it is eminently doable. It is not some superhuman skill available only to those inducted into the Thuycididean Mysteries, but I would be lying if I said I was always good at it. To look at the present historically requires that we approach both present and past with the humility that comes from knowing that our moment is not as special as we may want it to be, and that we do not actually know what the future holds. It is this confession of ignorance that we find so scary, and this is why we fall back on our own present as the universal reference point for everything. Like the eye, the present is what it is because it is as we see it. To truly appreciate what these things are, we have to look deep into past, and that is why human history will always fascinate me.