012: Our Role in History and Unprecedented Amnesia

Aug 19, 2020

Hello friends!

I hope receiving newsletters two days in a row isn’t too exhausting for y’all. I feel very silly about writing yesterday’s article and then not checking to make sure it sent for two weeks!

In any case, it’s been an intense few weeks. I’ve begun a new job and found a new home, though I’m not moving until the end of September. Then over at Go Fund Bean, we just closed our first grant applications, and going through them has been really challenging. People in coffee are suffering so much right now. If you have your normal job and normal income, consider donating $10 to any of the many tip jars supporting hourly coffee workers in need. Many of your local coffee workers have had their hours cut, their wages cut, and have seen drops in tips. They need help!

Okay, on to this week’s letter. Last time I wrote about psychology and now I’m thinking about history, and all our places in it.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’re living through Pretty Historic Times.

There’s a pandemic on, for one, which will always make history books. The Black Lives Matter movement is driving real change, a Black and Indian-American woman is running for Vice President of the US for the first time ever, unemployment is at nearly record highs and (for the first time ever) that’s not impacting the real estate market or the stock market. The phrase ‘unprecedented times’ keeps being thrown around. Everything feels upside down and backward and like maybe it all changed color overnight.

Which is probably why I see, on a nearly daily basis, a tweet or Instagram post saying something like, “Remembered precedented times? Those were the best.”

Ah, precedented times. When we knew what to expect. When we thought things progressed logically. Things may not have been easy, but we knew what to expect on a general day-to-day basis. Thirty years from now, when we’re the ones saying “The good old days,” life pre-2018 is probably what we’ll all be referring to.

But (and I wish I could insert a record scratch here)—is the time we’re living in really so unprecedented? If unprecedented means ‘never having happened before; unmatched; unparalleled,” is 2020 really unprecedented? I mean, is any of it really such a surprise?

First and most obviously—COVID-19! We’ve never in our lives been in nationwide quarantine like this before. But it’s really only North America, Europe, and Australia who can say that. When SARS ripped through Asia in 2003, thousands of people were quarantined. In 2014, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone enforced mass quarantines as the ebola outbreak worsened. I think due to racism and nationalism people thought that infectious disease spread was a “developing nations” problem and that it could never happen here. But, with the ease of international travel and a culture based around freedom of movement and expression—wasn’t it only a matter of time before this did happen here? Wasn’t it short-sighted of successive federal administrations to reduce our ability to respond to this sort of problem? (Trump has been the worst about this, yes, but every President before him also reduced our ability to respond to an outbreak like this with one exception: Obama was the only president since the 1970s to expand our ability to respond to epidemics, largely based on what he saw happening with ebola.)

Having a worldwide outbreak is arguably unprecedented, but only because international travel used to be so difficult and slow. If disease broke out on a ship in 1850, the passengers either died or survived it by the time the ship made port again. Ships were customarily quarantined for forty days at port anyway, so disease wouldn’t spread to the city’s population. (This is where quarantine comes from, actually!)

Maybe I’m being pedantic here, but talking about all this like it’s never happened ever in the history of the world has to be adding to all our stress. This pervasive idea that we’re the first group in history to experience this reduces our ability to fall back on the wisdom of previous generations.

The fact is that it’s just not true! The world went through the Spanish Flu in 1918-1920, and things were bad but humanity got through it. History is full of these lessons that could teach us how to get through and move forward if only we would stop acting like we’re the first people to ever do something. We’re not that special! We’re making it so much harder and more stressful than it has to be, which is exhausting us all, which is why so many of us are going through these emotional ups and downs and intense swings of energy that we don’t suffer from normally (what I’m un-affectionately calling 2020 Brain).

This shortsightedness is true of almost everything else we’re talking about being “so unprecedented” right now. Kamala Harris is not the first Black woman to run for US Vice President—Charlotta Bass ran for Vice President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1952, more than a decade before the Civil Rights Act was even passed. Also, she did it less than a hundred years ago! My grandparents remember her! Harris has the honor of being the first Black woman on a major party’s ticket, but I think this would be less mind-blowing if we acknowledged that Harris and the results of the Black Lives Matter movement are the outcomes of generations of work. Millions of Americans have been working toward this moment. They very much dreamed about it and expected it and it all. has. precedent.

I’m not trying to say that it’s not important that Harris is now one of the most visible members of the Democratic party. That’s incredibly important. But to erase history and forget Charlotta Bass and SARS and all the rest not only undermines our ability to understand who we are as a nation, as a culture, and as a world: It also means we risk going down in history as the people who couldn’t remember. We’ll be remembered as the culture of people so busy celebrating “first-time accomplishments” that have already happened and being toppled by “unprecedented problems” that generations before us already solved that we risk never making real progress.

Because the thing is—we are living in historic times. And not just because (pandemic aside) this is the healthiest time in world history and people are across the board doing better than they were a hundred years ago. People tend to think of ‘historic times’ as single moments, single events that are marked as important. The end of Tsarist Russia and the rise of communism, the assassination of JFK, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, etc. But history is every day. It’s all around us—it’s every word we write down, it’s every creation we make. Not to get too Butterfly Effect on a Tuesday morning, but history is every choice we make. We can’t predict how deciding to get your morning coffee tomorrow will change the course of your life and maybe the lives of a dozen people around you. History is not just world leaders or geniuses or criminals with delusions of grandeur or revolutionaries with a cause. History is you and me.

Thirty years from now, your major history surveys will mark the elections of Obama and Trump. They’ll mark 9/11, the invention of the internet, probably COVID-19, and maybe SARS as precedent. But the people in between those events don’t get forgotten, even though they may not make the cut for major surveys. History classes don’t stop after your high school World History class, and historians dig deep. Take it from me, a person with a Master’s Degree in history: Everything matters. Historians care about it all. Maybe they didn’t a while back, but the Great Men myth of history has been well destroyed. Historians might take major events as their starting points, but they radiate out, they look at what people were saying and how they lived to understand a much fuller picture of what was happening. And that includes what we (yes, you and I) do today. Historians may not be able to read every tweet and look at every meme (the impossibility!) but the ones that were repeated, that gained traction, that “went viral” (oof, what a phrase in These Times)—those will get remembered. People will study what we do on the internet as means of communication, as new forms of collaborative Dada-esque art, as sources of misinformation that turn elections, as ways that we coped with something that scared us. Because the internet allows us to document everything without the traditional barriers of wealth keeping people from writing things down, everyone can be remembered. Maybe this article will be forgotten, but other people have written similar things to what I’m saying and one will be remembered. Historians will know that we knew they were watching. (Cue History Has Its Eyes On You swelling in the background.)

If, like me, you care about legacy and our place in the world, sometimes knowing that feels like a lot of pressure. History is the ultimate parent looking over your shoulder to see who you’re texting. It’s impossible to know whether we’re on the right or the wrong side. (It depends on how you define right and wrong, and how long it’s been.)

Right now is the best time to be alive in world history. That is why today is so unprecedented. It may not feel like the best time. That’s partly because our brains are wired to look for problems, but it’s also because we keep forgetting what life used to be like. In a letter to a young climate change activist, Rebecca Solnit called it “naïve cynicism,” when people don’t remember history, so they think today is new and awful:

Naïve cynicism is the offspring of amnesia. Amnesia says “the way things are now is inevitable, change is impossible, change for the better is beyond our power.” Memory says, not so fast: ordinary people massed together have changed the world again and again.

Here’s a dare: Go read something about history today. Pick a number and google “What happened in ___” that year. Go to History.com, pick a topic, and start reading. Spend five minutes remembering we’re not the first group to go through hard times, then tell a friend about what you learned.

Things I’ve Read and Loved Lately:

As always, thank you for reading. If you want to respond just hit reply. Your message will get to me (and only me). If you like this and think your friends might too, feel free to forward it on.

I’m focusing all the energy I used to focus on freelance writing on my brand spankin’ new Patreon! Just yesterday I published the monthly article about playing The Great Game—something Holmesian fans have been doing for generations. Want to find out what that means and how to play? Subscribe! You can support my project to finish my MA research and publish a book for less than the cost of one cocktail. All donors get access to my research, and higher-level donors get access to book reviews, behind-the-scenes stuff, and more.

I keep these newsletters free by not worrying too much about typos and flow. But if you want to you can tip me, as a treat.

Stay healthy, friends!

xx,
Valorie

Image by 132369.

Collected Rejections

Discussion about this post