Seven Epochs of the Past

The Tense Collective Case two: Seven Epochs from the Past.

Personally I doubt it is true, that if you control a county or individuals history then you control their future. It strikes me the future has a habit of flying off the handle and developing its past any which way it wants. Likewise the first Seven years or months or whatever are no doubt vital years (but then so is every epoch of our life). What is I do not doubt that those years lay down the memories upon which we then draw for the rest of our lives. What I would debate is the predestination that would rivet certain memories to certain behaviour. On the contrary it always seems to me the it is more likely the needs of the future that dictat the memories that are retained and the effects they have. That is it is the here and now that makes me look back into my mind and dig up this memory – it is the future that makes the memory important or relevant. It is always then the future, which bring memory into play. The same event need not mean the same to both of us, or even to myself across time.
Possibly the best that might be said about ‘know they self’ (know the past ) type mantras is that they highlight the fact that certain futures are far harder to escape from that others. To not have one parent or to lose them or to be abused is to have in the world we inhabit to have a difficult hand. One lacks what others have and will need to make up the difference. That is one lacks some of the intricate subtleties (say the relations of parents to each other and to oneself), which one needs to remember, and build upon, as one works out what one is, and as one tries to have ones own life. To lack a history in society as rich as ours, is to necessarily be at a slight disadvantage. Which does not mean to say that anything necessarily follows from that set back. It remains at heart merely a probability and no binding certainty. More importantly what one lacks is actually rather subtle. Perhaps one might say it is not a lack so much as a lose of complexity. Relations between humans, lose a little of their sheer nuance, and are reduced by lack of experience into lightly (and the move is slight) base thoughts. Flirting becomes sex, and friendship destabilises involve whatever. One looses then a little of the bottom of the mind – or at least their is a tendency t do so.
What is lacking is any real binding power of the past. And yet this is not the way we want to think about it. On the contrary there is clear and marked tendency to look to the past to find strong narrative to bind the present with. One might understand this quest in two way. On the one hand this tendency to rummage around in what we wee for what we will become, is one of the ‘left overs’ of religion. We might not have faith in a God (who used to handle his kind of stuff, and do it probably much better). But we still like a good myth. The past our past or nations or species, real or imagined, the allows one a mythological base, a set of stories to comprehend the world by. On the other hand we are clearly wanting to use the past for overtly political reasons. We want to take a hodgepodge of differing thoughts and feels and capture them in a single past, with an implied future stuck upon it. The past then becomes a future grab. Or perhaps better a way of setting the present, so that it appears to imply one particular set of futures. The past then makes mystics and Fakirs of all of us!
Moreover the past we use is clearly not all of the same kind. We have clearly rather different epochs of the past, different ruses of capturing the present in past tale and implied future). Each sites of a certain kind of capture, which signed to make our lives just that little bit more easy, and our selves feel that little bit more clever in identify them, and ‘knowing the future’. In the rest of this essay will consider perhaps my 'favourite’ seven.
First and foremost of these motley Seven, in Britain least, is our current obsession with the ‘eighties’. For which read the last time one had a conservative government with a economic problem. No matter that this appeal to the past is clearly misplaced. The world has changed so very much in the last thirty years. Trade unions, the powers of the government and the individuals are simply different, and so there can be no straightforward comparison made; and yet this does not stop it being made. This does not stop the very idea of it being very convenient to politicians and pundits alike.
The politicians get a free plot line. Perhaps it started with Gordon Brown who wanted to prove that the Labour way of handling recessions was the right way. That is, he was going to show us why we should have followed the Labour party n the early eighties and not Thatcher. We lowered taxes, and allowed a deficient to grow. And yet in his appeal to he past, he forgot the world as it emerged after (and during) the Thatcher ears, a world which in spite of its clear failure, still lauded the free market and deficit reduction, and the credit agencies and banks who were its overlords. These overlords (IMF and all) howled and waffled in fury, and voters (remembering other promises Brown had made) simply, did not belief him. The result was of course that this plotline played into the troy plot line, that is was indeed a return of the eighties, and the Labour party has once again ruined the economy, and the Tories were once again going to safe the day. Union were again attacked (inspire of the fact that it was to their responsibility) and massive cuts in public spending announced, and the poor hit (in spite of the fact that their greed was only a very small part of the cause of the problem).
Likewise the eighties return of course flatters journalist and pundits. That is it supplies them with a simple Dog tag, ones most of us recognise and polarize around. On can then make prediction, and sell news, based on this appeal to the past. It makes commercial sense. Additionally the moment the spectre is raised then it works its polarizing magic. The contours of society start to pull with way and that. Different conflicts differing debates are set in the language of the eighties, the past is recreate in the present before fatalistic eyes. The past that might not repeat itself, but we can sure make it feel like it does. Finally this conjuration of the past has the advantage that it stops of having to worry about something. Tory government (or labour government) do expose different fractures in our society, fractures between poor and rich, drivers and non drivers etc at are actually rather worrying, and they lack all real reconciliation. These conflicts tare then wrapped up in the language of the past, in want of a solution and made palatable.
The second type of past that is doing the repeats, is far older tale, and one we all know. We all know - don’t you know- know what it is to have Brothers (well many of us do). More importantly we all know how bothers behave when the stake are high, and there is the quasi-mythic power of been prime minister at stake. The behave like Esau and Jacob or Cain and Able, they revert to elemental rivals caught in a passion of power; or at least they ought to rival the jealousies of childhood, thought in their fratricidal intensity, and so had to matter. The relationship between the Miliband Brothers in the transfigured into this old tale, and their slightest cross word becomes a sing for hidden jealous and power. Passion becomes the order of the day. The trouble of course hen is that others, the ‘allies’ of the political reveals gain by the conflict and magnify the conflict. A conflict that is all he more ludicrous because it is so one sided. It is the common fate of elder brother to be beaten by their younger one ( I for one was often outwitted by my younger brother, and outwitted my elder brother in turn). It happens, and one learns to deal with it ( I also felt fratricidal for other reasons, not because I was beaten, and dealt with that to)- life is like that!. It is of course different then being beaten by stranger, but different is neither fratricidal or essential domestic. It is then nothing to do with their mother. Standing in direct competition is difficult not doubt, and yet that difficult is likely to be very complex, and utterly irresolvable into the host of platitudes and archetypes the pundits want to foist upon it. The trouble of course is that once again the politics of a political parties risks being mythologies, and becomes the psychodrama of collective media fantasy. It is no wonder then that one brother hand to bow out.
The third main myth of the past we use and misuse of case studies and ‘lessons of history’ Such Pilot projects are very sensible in the realm of statistics, where one wants to always worry about the effect of asking questions. It also makes some kind of sense to trial a special policy. The trouble is of course that the very fact that on is doing a trial is usually enough to query the result r at least not make them representative. The knowledge that this is a trial and that we are going to be judged by it, makes it to represent what actually happens when the thing is unwound. Likewise if we look to the past of other nations and even our own past guide us to what will happen in the future, we invariably loose sight of the difference between then and now, as our brains get caught up in the joy of finding and inhabiting connections. We then want to relive the past or use somewhere else as the example and that is enough to strength the connection and affinity we feel, and blind us to the reality. The past becomes even as it is transfigured into a model or a norm, a dangerous and problematic friend. Torn as it is from the actual welter of experience that supported and created it, it becomes as a principle, always likely to be unstable and unpredictable (it might even be so much better than we thought).
Fourthly there is the domain of the Genetic and the appeals to a ‘biological story’. Genetic is clearly one of the great terminal points to thought in our society. There is an easy (and ultimately commercial) myth that finds a genetic cause is to uncover a truth. Our biological history is then riffled to learn things about our present and in the interest of making drugs). The great gap between imprints for certain protein molecules (which has all DNA allows), and actual behaviours is then drowned out in the song of hope and drugs. We turn then our behaviour into a matter of switches and histories, of predispositions and solution. We thereby ignore the clear fact that actually how the world is into within the small protein molecules falls matter probably more that the molecule itself. The ’Environment’ and the Gene are not then separate factors, but rather are caught together inn making ourselves. Solutions then are always more complex than this simply rummage through the draws of our collective biological (or sociological for that matter) past to find quasi-mythic one off switches. This is a fact that is not on most scientist, physical biological or social.
Fifthly it is cleat we endlessly draw upon the past for verity and certainty. If something feels like it has always been there, be that nation, or political party or fancy dress or whatever, we feel safe: it will always be there (in some form of other), and we can relax into the identity it allows us. The past then becomes the mythic point for identification with a land mass or a nation. Its very irreducibility becomes them political. To question the mythic the makes a state becomes seditious, and certain truth thereby become in effect sacred. Certain tawdry facts, or past conflicts, become the great lighthouses of centuries who draw upon the same events rather different). From which the sixth point follows, the past is then gloriously political. To rework what we think about Cromwell or Ludlow or to forget the influence of the great Earl of Shaftsbury, is in effect to make endless little complex statements about the politics of the present, and where one wishes to do with those politics. We then as a nation (or as the [people, our mythic past makes u out to be), use our history both identify and to challenge one another. We become what we are but also look to become something else through it.
Finally there is a clear problem when we do not realize how mythic this political posturing through the past really is. A mistake that has one take a very late Bronze age story, and set it up as ‘Gospel’. A move that then allows one to too easily assume the people who were the badge of these bronze age folk (for whatever reason rooted in the long history between then and now), are one and the same folk. What is more they have the same rights as the bronze age folk, the same land claim, the same wars and basic (in)justice. A claim made of course all the more urgent because the wearing the badge of the past has been associated with persecution in the West. We then assume it is right to support a land grab by a folk (who to put it kindly) have had no claim to a land mass to two thousand years or so, and what is more support it right or wrong. That is we support not merely the and grab but also the quests for water and farmland than followed upon from it (and made the piece of mouldering rock that is Historical chosen land) valid. In short we allow the persecution of the West to be moved out to the middle east, and the roles reversed (Arab who never persecuted Jews become now the victims), and for this to happen in the name of a past. It is then no wonder that bloodshed follows. In short we hit real problem, the minute we stop this game of the past being mythic. That is the minute we allow it far much reality.
The Past then overseas us, for it the land modern of myth and legend. We do not do Gods or even A god, and certainly do not belief fairy tales, but we do to the past. We can allow thoughts in the past that become difficult in the present. We use our pasts then to understand things we cannot gasp in (and about): or even use this myths and legends to set the present: Our historians are then whether they like it or not our modern myth makers and priests. The only problem is that the religion we thereby create need always to be seen fro what it is – myth, and not confused with vivid reality. The problem being that if the myths slips too far into assumed reality (which must be alright) it pulls a world that as changed and that is do different to the mythic world, violently in a way and complex direction. The past is a world vital to the myth makers, without whom politics would be impossible, and yet toxic to politics itself.