Why Must the Past be Remembered?

This post is in "essay" format where I try different things, some successful and some unsuccessful (which I guess at this point, to be honest, is what I am choosing because I think there might be some value in the parts that I would otherwise cut, but I'm too tired to figure exactly what's good about them).

I will try to answer the question "why must the past be remembered?" by considering how it might constitute who we are, and also how it is part of the truth. Also, how it might in large part constitute the present.

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In Size of God, Part 2, I wrote that what makes a person who they are includes their life history.

Is this true? In what sense of "life history" is it true?

It certainly is the case that cultural memory is part of what makes a nation "who" it is. Cultural memory is an account of the past which may or may not be what literally happened, which forms part of a culture's identity. Individual people are like nations with a population of one, and there is a kind of "personal cultural memory" to each person.

How thick is this? (How much memory does it take to store it, for instance?) In my case, it's pretty thin. I don't have a strong sense of personal history or identity. However, I suppose there are a few things I can say about myself if I'm explaining my life and who I am, which I think are important to say.

These things present to me as being the truth about my past. But, what is the whole truth about the past? Doesn't it include many, many more details than I can remember? Even people with a thick personal cultural memory remember far less than what actually happened.

So if my personal cultural memory claims to be about the past, can it be correct in making that claim if less than the full past informs it?

For me to be a completely legitimate being, perhaps I need to be able to tell the truth in all things, and so I could only have a personal cultural memory if there was a complete record of the past, not necessarily consciously possessed by me, but at least by God, who could validate it by apprehending all things and affirming me when I say that what happened happened.

In order for me to be anyone at all, I must claim "this is who I am" with 100% definiteness -- it's part of what I sense when I say "I", is implicit in my saying "I". I make this claim during my life, but I'm sometimes wrong, because I can't access my past. My concept of my past does not line up with God's concept, both because of this ignorance, and because I have not fully come into tune with him, so that if I look at any part of my past, I do not judge it the way he would. (I'm guessing that the Millennium is a time in which people face their pasts.) But once I have come to terms with my past as it actually is/was, I will be able to say "this is who I am" with 100% definiteness and 100% truth, and thus 100% legitimacy.

I think part of who I am is accessible through what I intuitively refer to when I say "I". That "I" contains my whole past. "My whole past" refers to "every decision I've made" and "that I failed to choose to make decisions over stretches of my life", among other things.

It could be the case that God's personal cultural memory requires that he remember everything that goes into us becoming ourselves. We can construct a simplified cultural memory, but he has to remember the truth as it actually happened. I have some awareness of the history of England and can form a rudimentary identity of the country. There is an "American's identity of England" in me, and perhaps similar but different ones in other Americans. These have something to do with us Americans, and something to do with England itself, and how English people see themselves. God has such cultural memory / identity for each of us, and he has to see it according to his character, which is truthful. It was part of his life that we went through all the things we went through, and those events were significant to him, because they were part of how we came to be... whatever we are going to end up being, but hopefully to become completely legitimate like him.

Is the truth something that is inviolable, such that to delete it is to falsify something and break legitimacy? This makes some sense from a Biblical Christian perspective. God wants to forgive us, so he must send his Son to die. But, why not just delete the past, if that's an option? But he had to send his Son to die.

I think the above reasons are satisfying enough for me for now, to basically say that the truth makes up who we are and is also inviolable.

But, this raises a question for my concept of heaven given the possibility that the "size" of God is finite (see here). How can we have eternal life if God will run out of memory to store the truth? I had thought that the answer was to keep all the memories that go into who we are, but that since in heaven, nothing affects who we are, God could delete memories formed in heaven from time to time.

Wouldn't this introduce falsehood? Maybe it would be okay if God intended to keep all the memories, but ran into one of his own limitations, and so took the least-falsifying route, which would be to leave our earthly and Millennial histories untouched, but delete some heavenly history to allow us all to keep living. God must intend the best, but can be kept from doing the best by some limitation or other.

But then, why not just delete all of our pasts, to have even more people in heaven? From the reasons given in the post, this would make it so that we couldn't truthfully say who we were.

So some memory is off-limits for deleting, the memory having to do with who we are. So once we are in heaven, who we are can't change.

This is not too big a deal to say with respect to our characters, how we are aligned with God. Once our hearts are like God's hearts, we can't change and wouldn't want to.

But who you are involves more than just your character. It also involves identity.

I am (more or less) an American. Let's say, in the following hypothetical, that I died without ever having eaten Mexican food, having heard Mexican music, participated in any Mexican holidays, and so on. And I continued through the Millennium somehow without ever encountering a Mexican person or a Mexican thing. In heaven, let's say I spend 20,000 years with Mexicans, eating Mexican food, dancing Mexican dances, visiting heavenly replicas of Mexican ruins and of what those ruins were in their unruined state, speaking Spanish to Mexicans and listening to them talk about things in Spanish in a Mexican way. I fully immerse myself in Mexican culture. At the end of the 20,000 years, am I at all Mexican in who I essentially am? No. Those were just interests I had, choices I could unmake.

"Having interests" in a temporary and non-essential way is different from something being part of who you are. Those 20,000 years will fade away as God (and everyone else) forgets them. We all know that they will go away, so we don't hold onto them. For 20,000 years I can be a Mexican, and perhaps I can be a Mexican for all time, cycling through temporary years. But I could always cease to be Mexican -- but, whether I like it or not, to the extent that being American has already seeped into who I am, being American will be with me at all times now and forever.

The freedom to forget these phases or their earlier parts allows us to keep existing. But the memories that make up our character as aligned with God have to be protected. Was it we who really decided to follow Jesus? Whoever it was who made that decision, it had better be us. All the steps of repenting are decisions that we made, in the past. How was it that we, in all our particularity derived from everything we have experienced, including the memories we had in the past, come to choose to trust and obey God? God has to remember this to know for certain that it was we who repented, and not someone else.

Perhaps God could look on us in heaven and see that we never sin anymore. Was it the case that we chose to be against sin, or was it rather the case that we were given a sinless nature? How can we know a person if not to observe their behavior? If we could simply be given good natures, then God would have, and we would never be subjected to life on earth, only granted life in heaven. It is our decisions that make us who we are. God can know that it was we who decided to become who we are, if he remembers the moments in which we made those decisions, and everything that fed into those moments.

If God doesn't know who we are, he can't trust us fully, and must make us make all those decisions over again, to prove that it wasn't just that we had good natures.

What if God deleted the memories of the pasts that led to our salvation, but kept a note to himself saying "I can trust myself, and since I had seen how these people were as good as their behavior, I don't need to remember the decisions that went into that."? But those memories make up part of who God is. How could God know who he was without them? Without the memory, he couldn't be certain that he was legitimate, and thus he would cease to be legitimate and cease to exist. If legitimacy can't trust itself, it is not legitimate, because what is truly legitimate is 100% trustworthy to legitimacy, and legitimacy itself must be truly (100%) legitimate. His own legitimacy comes from his decisions.

But he could infer from the fact that he was able to delete the memories that he was trustworthy and legitimate, because if he wasn't legitimate, nothing would exist anymore. He had been 100% legitimate up to the point in time when he deleted the memories.

So perhaps God can delete the memories of our past.

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Another argument for why our memories must be preserved: While in one sense, the only thing that exists is the present, in another sense, the past exists. It's like if you have a book that exists only in the present, but the pages store the memories of the past. In the world of the pages, the past exists. We live in the world of the pages, and what makes us who we are exists in the world of the pages. I suppose the pages make God legitimate, which enables him to validate the book that stores all experience, including the pages.

If the past really exists, then I "currently" (book perspective) exist in the "past" (pages perspective), as much as I do in the present. Thus, who I am depends on who I was and how I became who I am now. My present depends on a chain of past selves, experiences, and experience bodies, all of which (book perspective) currently exist, written on pages. For them to be deleted makes it impossible for me to be who I am. But, once I have fully become who I am, to delete subsequent pages does not threaten my legitimacy, and I can safely exist, though pages are forgotten. Maybe it's like the author has fully developed the character's perspective, and after that, everything is fan fiction. The fan fiction can explore all kinds of possibilities, but can never change the canon interpretation of the characters. In this fan fiction, the characters always act in character with the canon version of them, but are in all kinds of other scenarios. This fan fiction can be periodically deleted when the server runs out of storage space.

If my present self in the book requires all the past pages to be what it is, then I suppose in heaven, when the pages are cut from the book, they must be pared back from the latest pages back to some earlier point, perhaps to the beginning of God's rest (heaven) (if the book ends at p. 3,502, and heaven begins on p. 2,580, pp. 2,581 - 3,502 are all to be deleted), rather than, as I originally thought, leaving a gap between the last remembered page and the beginning of heaven (there can't be a gap, leaving any later page unsupported by all the pages leading up to it).

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Does the past cause the present? I suppose the only thing it doesn't cause in the present are the decisions being made in the present. If the past causes (most of) the present, how can it do that if it (the past) doesn't exist? Maybe it does exist. It could be a "page", still in the book, still existing, and cause (most of) the present.

I am aware that there is quite a bit to the philosophy of time, but I'm not aware all of what has been said there. I like the image of, everything exists in the present, and the past is simply a feature of the present. This preserves the past while sticking to my preference of "the only thing that exists is the present". I think the "pages in a book" theory of the past is possibly true.

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So overall, I think that the past must be remembered by God, and thus take up space in his memory -- or, it's possible that that is true -- I feel, right now, that it likely is true. If God is finite in "size", there is a limit to how much memory can be stored, and a certain amount is needed for each of us to develop to the point of being able to live with God forever.

Book Review Preview: Holy Resilience by David M. Carr

See also the review for Holy Resilience.

In 2018, I wrote a book called Patience. It's a sort of strange book, most of which I can't remember right now. I've tried to re-read my old books in the last few years, but I haven't gotten around to reading that one. But I am aware of one part of it that opened up a big new area in my thinking.

Someone I knew back in the middle of the 2010s was a secular Jew around my age who was a history student. He pointed me to a book by Yosef Yerushalmi called Zakhor which claimed that "history was the faith of fallen Jews". What impressed me was a claim that Yerushalmi was using as background for his argument, which is I would guess not original to him, that the Hebrew Bible was the "cultural memory" of the Jews, and not history.

It struck me that the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament was something "remembered from" a position. Even as a non-scholar, it really looked to me like a lot of the Old Testament was written down in captivity. That's when the history books (1 Samuel through 2 Kings / 2 Chronicles) leave off. My naive theory is that a lot of the content of the Old Testament was oral tradition, and the editors or canonizers of the Old Testament chose which oral tradition to preserve and trust. The Old Testament could be historically accurate, but it's more like the past of the people in captivity, which makes them who they are, and only secondarily history in a secular sense (what literally happened in time). I don't think this takes away from the possibility that they are inspired. Maybe God wanted his people to remember their past a certain way. Maybe the events of the Old Testament literally happened in a kind of spiritual world, which is somehow in parallel with our own and which we have lived and will live again in our own secular way.

I thought that the Jews ended up being admirable because they were losers when they wrote down the Old Testament. They were losers who survived.

At the time, and still to this day, I don't feel a strong sense of identification with a people group. Some people are very nationalistic -- some in ways that seem good, others in ways that seem bad (like the Nazis). Nationalism is a great way to start wars; motivate genocide and ethnic cleansing; suppress, shame, or dehumanize people; or waste time getting and feeling angry. Nationalism (as I used it in my book) doesn't have to just be about nation-states, but could operate at different levels -- it operates at the level of the individual with his or her own personal nation, as well as in the family or friend group, and in the church or workplace, and in various identities (races, sexes/genders, and sexual orientations as identities rather than as accidental physical facts, political or religious affiliations, fandoms), all of them nationalisms. The love that we have for ourselves and others is often (or usually?) nationalism. So every affiliation that draws persons into distinct people groups (one meaning of "political"), we could call nationalism. So that "nationalism" (which can include nation-state level nationalism) can make people brothers and sisters of each other, emotionally bonded, can give them spiritual nourishment, can give them a sense of being a person, can motivate whatever it is that causes people to help each other.

I don't think that that "good nationalism" is a good god, in fact, I think it is a tempting idol. But, "bad nationalism" is an obviously bad god that can also be an idol. And good nationalism, like all really good temptations, is a good thing in itself. Perhaps we need good nationalism (of a sort that is really good and non-tempting) so that bad nationalism or bad anationalism doesn't cause us to get desperate for good-nationalism-of-whatever-sort, leading us to idolize good nationalism.

So there are two questions: can we split good nationalism from bad nationalism, and how? And, can we make nationalism an inherently God-worshiping thing instead of a very good thing which turns us away from God? I don't know the answer to the second question right off the top of my head right now, but I have a suggestion for the first, based in the sort of notable moment of insight or inspiration I had when I wrote Patience.

Being ignorant of most of Jewish history, I saw the Jews as being the people group who wrote and remembered the Old Testament. So what kind of people wrote and remembered the Old Testament? Losers. So I thought, if I'm going to be part of a people group, part of a chain of cultural memory, if I'm going to adopt an identity as a person who belongs to other people based on their collective self-concept and "past", and in this way become a "thick" person who connected with people, what group should I choose? The Jews (the people who wrote and remembered the Old Testament) have claim to being the people of God's word. They certainly have a "past" (the Old Testament itself), which I could adopt. But, notably, they are also the losers of history, dispossessed, looking back on how they messed up, how they fell away from God, how they mistreated each other. I thought that if I intentionally identified with this, even strongly, I would not fall into the temptations of bad nationalism.

At that point I thought that if I was ever going to join a people group, for real, on the level of "rootedness", it should be to the Jews who wrote down and remembered the Old Testament, or people who could be considered sufficiently like them, although not necessarily to the Jews in general.

Recently, I heard on this episode of the Israel Bible Podcast an introduction to David M. Carr's Holy Resilience which claims that the Bible (both Old and New Testament) came out of response to trauma, and that that origin enables it to speak to people in difficult times. This is why it has staying power over time, where more triumphalistic texts have failed. (At least, that's what I remember from the episode -- I may have misinterpreted or misremembered it.) If that is Carr's argument, it's akin to what I believe, but also maybe strangely askew to it. It sounds like maybe Carr will have the people of the Bible be winners after all, the winners who use non-triumphalism about their failed "battles" to help them win the longer-term "war" of survival. Survival is good, and "pays the rent" for the truth, but survival itself isn't the point -- it's a very good thing and therefore a very compelling temptation to idolatry.

I expect Carr to have interesting arguments, some of which may support my own point of view. I'm also perhaps expecting that he could say things which flesh out his point of view in a way that makes my own less attractive to me. (Sometimes seeing your reflection in a mirror does that.) So, I've bought a copy of the book, and intend to start reading it soon.

(I read the preface and it somewhat makes me think that Carr will not be in favor of triumphalism, but will also not be arguing for exactly what I would argue for.)

Book Review Preview: X-Risk by Thomas Moynihan

See also the main review.

I got my copy of Thomas Moynihan's X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction in the mail today. I may start reading it soon.

Here are a few things I'm interested in from this book: 1) general intellectual history; 2) the history of existential risk; 3) a chance to meditate on history / civilizational development in general; 3) a chance to meditate on existential risk; 4) engage with Moynihan's "seeing existential risk is a sign that we are mature" idea.

I don't think I'll try to read it twice, unless it seems like a good idea once I get through it once. It's a history book and not a philosophy book.

Death in the City

(a book review)

One thing that Simone Weil, Ramon Llull, and Francis Schaeffer all have in common is an emphasis on holiness, more genuine Christianity, and also, that they're obsolete. I think obsolescence and holiness are inherently related, because to be holy is to be set apart, somewhat set apart from history. The Old Testament is a work of holiness and conservatism.

It feels kind of strange, kind of deliberate, to be reading and promoting people I feel in my flesh to be obsolete, but when I actually read them (at least, Weil, and more so, Schaeffer), I can feel myself connecting with what they talk about as though it's current. Quickly after putting the book down, I find myself back in 2019, but life was more true when I was in the book.

Holiness movements don't have to be obsolete. John Wesley had a successful one, which led to the Methodist church. The effective altruists are rather like an atheistic, humanistic holiness movement. (The effective altruists love (no, "do good to") those who are distant as well as those who are close, and they set themselves apart from climate change to focus on more neglected existential risks. If the ethos of humanism is "humans save humanity by their efforts", then they live that out in a genuine and distinctive way.) Schaeffer had some limited success with his L'Abri center, and had some effect on the political sphere. Non-Christians tend to think of him now as an architect of the Christian Right, if at all. But Schaeffer was not as fortunate as Wesley or the EAs in riding the vital wave of his culture. Wesley was a progressive. There was a time when orthodox Christian beliefs could be progressive, instead of having to split off really Christian thinking from really progressive thinking. Schaeffer seems to be trying to hold together truly Christian thinking -- attempting to stay true to Christ as revealed in the Bible, independent of human pragmatism -- with the spirit of progressive culture, the spirit of caring about people and the world. He didn't want the church to be intellectually split off from the world, but rather to be able to speak in every area, as God had spoken in every area already. But he was conservative in outlook at the same time, seemed to see himself as fighting a losing battle that had to be fought.

I read Francis Schaeffer mostly when I was in college, and there was something in the reading that said: "there's a way to reform human culture to become actually good, and the way to that is through Christianity." It was an exciting thought. I turned away from him after a while, but recently read a work I had missed, Death in the City. Here are some ideas in it:

People are taken more seriously when they are seen as capable of doing real wrong. (People are more significant.) Compassionate Christianity sees people as real and in need of salvation. Doctrine without compassion and reliance on God in daily life is dead, fake, ineffective. Through ongoing relationship with Jesus, over time we are "impregnated" to bring fruit into the world. Reformation (return to source doctrine) and revival (new work of the Spirit, new turning of hearts) go together.

If you know that God exists and has absolute standards, you care more. The stakes of life are higher, and you have to depend on him for salvation, because the standard matters and you can't make it without him. If there are real standards, then people can really be lost, and you can really care about their well-being. Being really Christian (really taking people seriously) causes people to love more genuinely and with more passion and holds society to a higher standard. A coach can get you to try harder than you would yourself. You'll set a goal to try 20% harder and only go 15% harder, but the coach will get you to try 50% harder because she knows you better than you know yourself, and after several failed attempts, you'll make it. A God outside of human pragmatism, or a standard not up for negotiation, can be that for people. To me, this sounds progressive, and in my younger days, more in the phase of life of seeking progressiveness, I saw Christianity as more progressive than secular thinking.

(A few weeks after first drafting this, I am struck by another point from Death in the City, which is that Schaeffer wanted people to have a personal relationship with God, which in some ways is like having a personal relationship with the standard. Personally-relating is the way to live all of life, including the life of bringing things up to standards. Schaeffer would say "personally-relating because of the 'God who is there'", I think, and a God who is present in your life protects you from the natural tendency toward "I'm a survivor, will think whatever I need to to survive, will write off whoever I need to to survive, will cease personally-relating mode of life, will reduce all things opposed to my survival as means to my ends.")

But even in college, I was able to tell that Schaeffer was writing to a much different world than mine. I think our world has a certain innocence to it, believe it or not, an innocence with respect to sin if not to anything else. I hardly have an inherent sense of sin. I know that many Christians still do, but my "flesh" is more secular, even if my will (perhaps my true heart), tries and tries to be Christian. But I can still see some of Schaeffer's vision, the vision that might never be, because we'll never go back to the old days of believing in real sin, real guilt, as opposed to guilty feelings or thoughts, back to real standards.

It's strange. If you look close up, people do seem to care as much as they ever did. And yet, I don't see very many people caring as much as Schaeffer did. If you don't like conservative Christians, you should read Schaeffer just to see a "steel man" of their position, perhaps in his ideas, but more essentially in the kind of voice he had. I don't know too much about his life, so I won't comment on that, but a writing style isn't nothing as far as indicating what kind of person someone is.

Overall, our culture feels bustling, alive, active -- on one level. And played out, over, feeble -- on another. In the political sphere, there is militancy (godless mob absolutes), but not real love, and no guilt, no absolutes that can implicate both the executor of mob justice and its victim into a brotherhood. Opposed to that is an enfeebling blunting of absolutes, a distrust of our moral motions. (Maybe I'm caricaturing the left and liberals, respectively.) The biblical position is that we are all under God -- Schaeffer would say, "under God's wrath", but that doesn't work nowadays, but still, under God.

People nowadays who care as much as Schaeffer did tend not to be Christians (that I know of -- I think if there was someone like Schaeffer nowadays among Christians I would know about it, but maybe not). These more secular caring people seem to be putting out fires rather than thinking of the long term. It's natural during traumatic times to focus on the immediate threat and then its recurring aftershocks. Culture is something way behind the problems we have now. We want to deal with climate change now, but wouldn't it have been much better if we could have gone back to the early 20th century when we first knew the threat and adjust civilization back then? But then maybe there were many cultural reasons why we wouldn't have done that then. So then to go back to the early 19th century and deal with those 20th century cultural reasons upstream? If we could reform the culture, then we would have a base to respond to geographically distant problems (distant people), or looming threats, as one people. Most of our existential risks come from human activities. If we had a really good culture, we wouldn't have anything to fear as a species, except from the natural world.

I realize that at this point, it may be like saying to the captain of the Titanic as it goes down "You know, if you had chosen a different route a week ago, none of this would be happening." Could any of this cultural change have possibly worked in the past? Or is human nature too hard to change? Was Christianity tried and found wanting, as some would allege? Or was it not even tried, as both Gandhi and Chesterton alleged? Schaeffer quotes the book of Jeremiah in Death in the City, and Jeremiah is an interesting book because it starts off with one of my favorite writing quotes (1:9-10):

Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth. And the LORD said to me, "Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant."

It seems like Jeremiah is going to be a powerful person. But nobody likes what he has to say and he gets thrown in a pit. The king burns his prophecy rather than heeding it. It looks like Jeremiah's just telling the truth, to no further purpose. Maybe his words brought on the judgment they foretold (in some way helped God bring the judgment), and maybe future people have been inspired by Jeremiah to "build and to plant" from his words. But Jeremiah's reality for many years would have been one of "I am saying what I'm supposed to say but there's no apparent power in my words."

Maybe you just have to say the truth as the ship goes down -- the truth is a good in itself. But maybe there will be the future generations who can pick up the message and apply it, and so vindicate God and Jeremiah. We live in an analogous time with climate change. We don't know how bad it will be. Our best messages probably won't turn the ship around. Perhaps only a remnant will survive, who will then have to put together a new world. What will they remember? The Israelites kept Jeremiah in mind, for generations down to this day. What is worth remembering?

One reply to Schaeffer would be: "What you're saying isn't true. You don't know that God exists." Schaeffer engaged with the people of his time and obviously was able to remain a Christian throughout (although I remember he had a period of doubt sometime during his adult life which led to him understanding Christianity better). But it's a fair point, and one which many people have tried to answer without enough success to create an actually good public religion. But another reply is "Even if what you're saying might be true, we don't want to hear it. Liberal humanism is good enough for us. It's too risky to listen to what you have to say. We like vagueness. Vagueness is peace. Absolutes lead to fanaticism and psychological distress, so don't even try to have a better approach to absolutes. Having one God is bad, too coercive. Liberal morality is a better thing to have be coercive. And isn't life beautiful? There isn't enough time to be ugly to each other. People are good and should not be made to feel bad. Let's all be one as we wait for the end."

Maybe we are on the Titanic going down, the embodiers of a dying culture. But I want to bear witness to the possibility that if we could just believe in God, a God who cares more than Schaeffer did and asks more of us than we ask of ourselves, we could have an actually good society, and that this possibility is a good thing, and we can recognize that even if we don't think it can be realized. In other words, to become agnostics who are no longer comfortable in our agnosticism, or even atheists who regret that the best of the "widely-believed fairy tales" can never be true. If they were true, all the causes humanism concerns itself with could be addressed, with no more miracle needed than the change in heart and outlook of those responsible for human society -- all of us. All this to say that a proof of the existence of the right kind of God should be a welcome thing to a humanist.

Some cultural changes seem impossible. We can't even imagine them. To imagine them would be a cultural change. And yet cultural changes occur. More so than Schaeffer did, Llull and Weil both tried to imagine ideal societies. I can't imagine any of their obsolete visions coming true. But I am part of this culture. I realize now that I'm more likely to believe a professor's tired, off-hand comment than a homeless person's passionate, well-thought-out theories. When I was younger, I tended more to the reverse. Our civilization is old, but after it dies, there may be a younger one to replace it.

Conservatism

Some people don't like the word "conservatism", but I can give it a meaning that might be acceptable to some who find it distasteful.

In Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, the main character goes through stretches of his life, one time as a very serious ascetic, and then as a businessman-of-this-world, and on to other roles. It seems like he used up the "life energy" of each phase and then moved on -- perhaps if I re-read I'll see that he had to move on and had little to no choice.

We find ourselves bending toward pragmatic considerations, even believing things that help us to survive. The winds and the waves are very strong. But is there anything that we hold onto with persistent, sometimes unrewarded, even sometimes bitter effort? That would be one of our "conservatisms".

A man and woman might make each other their conservatisms, no matter what changed around them, their relationship a good thing they hold onto out of the past. They might have children and hold onto them (those links to the future) as conservatisms. The family might hold onto their allegiance to God all together, as things change. There could be other conservatisms than those -- vocations, hobbies, perspectives on the world, remembering past experiences or past relationships.

The energy for progressivism comes out of the far-reaching outworking of some conservatism. A conservatism plays itself out in how we live our lives and what our lives are, in the long term. You can sometimes see someone's conservatism written into their face.

Sometimes we are able to ask ourselves "Should we continue in this particular conservatism?" and choose one way or the other to keep it or let it go.

Orthogonal to History

"King Emeric's gift has thus played an important role in enabling us to live the monastic life, and it is a fitting sign of gratitude that we have been offering the Holy Sacrifice for him annually for the past 815 years."

(link)

I saw this on Twitter and wanted to retweet it, as a strange orthogonality to the mindset of climate activism. Are the monks bad for not caring about climate change (assuming from this one tweet that they do not)? Can they be allowed to look at time so differently?

In a sense, the monks are much more connected with history, with past events. But there's another sense of "history", that of "the cumulative development of human civilization or decline, worked out in world affairs". The monks (from this one tweet) seem to be very disconnected from the latter kind of history. To clarify, we could say that the monks are connected to the past, but not to history.

I think about my own writing, which is often about what I know: interpersonal relationships and the inner life. I'm not quite as detached from history as the monks appear to be, but aren't there bigger things to worry about than trust and trustworthiness, sensitivity and being true-hearted? In the short run, probably, in a way. In times of war, you have to fight. But we lose wars because of the times of peace before them. And whole generations grow up and die in the midst of the end of the world. The end of the world has been on the table, in a way, from 1939 to the present. "All times are now": we live part of our lives in the long-term life, or even the post-scarcity life, and this informs how we are overall. Children grow up without being aware of the end of the world and how it's ending right now, and how they grow up affects how they participate in history later in life.

To an extent, the long-term view of life is a self-fulfilling prophecy, just as the short-term view of life is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

None of the above assumes that the monks are right about there being such a thing as eternal life. If you are connected to the eternal, you can be orthogonal to history. History is about how human desires provoke a reaction from other humans, based on their desires. Or how human fears react to situations, producing new situations. Maybe it's too late for orthogonality to save us from history, but perhaps we have only made it this far because of it.

"All Times Are Now"

Someone I know observed that in Africa, every stage of development exists at once. There are traditional cultures in the Congo Basin, artisanal gold miners in Mali, all the way to technology start-ups in Rwanda and South Africa.

We don't have as much range in the developed world, but we do have, for instance, both scarcity-based and post-scarcity lifestyles. Many people have to work to live -- scarcity. Some people are NEETs: Not in Employment, Education, or Training, and effectively, they're living in the post-scarcity world. When a scarcity person gets off work, they no longer live in the world of scarcity as much, may be able to disconnect themselves from concerns like climate change or global poverty -- not as much living in the world of scarcity.