The Past Is A Foreign Country

As time changes, so does the nature of reality

Studies show that in northern Europe starting around six thousand years ago the elite members of society had their own removed luxury dwellings, artificial islands called crannogs, whose construction and maintenance required not only the subservience of many but also the pollution and corruption of the surrounding lands and waters.

You look at stories like that and it becomes easy to think maybe things never will get better because they never could have—that human nature is dominance, is corruption, is the liquidation of some souls to feed the ravening maws of others. “Even angels have a hierarchy,” Mary Oliver said. But that’s no argument for things having to remain in this state of immiserating domination. She also said “Everything’s mortal; it dies. But its parts don’t die; its parts become something else. We know that, when we bury a dog in the garden and with a rose bush on top of it; we know that there is replenishment.”

This transmogrification is not always a blessing. (Just look what we’ve done with fossil fuels.) But if the body of a dog can nourish and strengthen a rosebush in time I see no reason why we can’t break down the matter of this broken world and make it into something different.

A major obstacle to this reimagining is that the structural reasons for the horrors of our society—the fundamentally exploitative nature of capitalism chief among them—are reified at the personal level. We are atomized, we are mistrustful of strangers,¹ we are alienated from the very idea of community.

To wit: 92% of American households own a piece of heavy machinery that can kill a person even when operated at “safe” speeds, and it is entirely commonplace for Americans to intentionally use that same piece of machinery as unsafely as possible to retaliate against real or perceived slights from other operators. The list of places where it is possible to just exist in public without spending money grows smaller with each passing year, as library funding is slashed and policies targeting the homeless render benches and transit stops unusable. Our society has always been more hostile to some groups of people than others but neoliberalization has woven hostility into the fabric of just about everything, now.

Still it is difficult to see our way back from our present state of affairs, or forward into something new, because our material and social circumstances condition our perception of reality.² If you watched The Northman, you saw the scene where Amleth, as a member of a troop of warriors, participates in a “transformation” ritual where he and the other men don wolf skins and work themselves into a howling frenzy around a bonfire before pillaging, massacring, and burning a village. The story is fictional, but the ritual—and its consequences—are pretty well agreed-upon as fact. Berserkers (bear warriors) and Ulfheðnar (wolf warriors) appear in the legends, poems, and historical accounts of Scandinavia dating back to the ninth century. Popular speculation holds that the Berserkers used amanita muscarium, the fly agaric mushroom, to help drive them into this state of killing frenzy. Other ethnobotanists disagree, citing the much more regionally common henbane plant as the source of this altered state of being.

However they got into it, they, and their witnesses and victims, believed that the warriors had truly transformed themselves. The 800s AD were not a time like our time. Science and magic were overlapping concepts, and many things we take as fact today were the great questions of the age. Answers and theories to respond to these mysteries were local and cultural; in those conditions, there was little distance between belief and fact.

But for all our advancements and discoveries, the same is true today. See the cultural belief of American conservatives, held with religious zeal, that our cities are lawless and dangerous places. This belief has had very real social, political, and economic consequences; money has been divested from the inner city, the terror of suburbanites has caused them to vote for people who promise to wage even more efective structural violence against society’s undesirables, and it seems each week we hear a new story about a disaffected young man convinced of these “truths” shooting up a new soft target. And these zealous beliefs do create their own sort of truth: it turns out that when you strip people of their safety net, of their homes, of their ability to find education and gainful employment…well, yes, those people will often turn to what the comfortable call “violence” just to survive. Reactionaries seem like prophets if you ignore everything they’ve done to create the social conditions they claim to abhor.

It occurs to me that all this makes even more pathetic the growing subset of Americans who try to claim the mantle of Vikings or Spartans or mammoth hunters. This is as fantastical as wearing a football jersey to the bar and thinking it puts you on the team—it just has a body count. These losers claim the aesthetics of these dead cultures in service of white American nationalism, in service of fascism and racial purity. Ascribing any of these characteristics to those groups, including “whiteness,” is not just profoundly ahistorical, it ignores the truth that reality itself, as experienced by human beings in those places and times, was so essentially different as to be inconceivable to people living today.

The past is a foreign country, one whose borders we can never truly cross. How could we? Those borders are not lines but gradients, stretching from the dawn of the universe to the present.

Of course, this doesn’t prevent conservative politics and culture from trying, or pretending, to do just that.³ Much ink has already been spilled about another iteration of this roleplaying by reactionaries who yearn for a largely imaginary past, the self-styled “trads.” Few of these people have ever done a day’s manual labor in their lives, yet trumpet a return to a culture where they might lay claim to a plot of earth and a dutiful wife. Like so much of conservative culture it would be funny if it weren’t all so deadly serious.

Interestingly this worldview seems rooted in a premise that I also believe: that we are not just alienated from other people,⁴ but also from the land itself. Nature itself is something we’ve lost touch with even though we are creatures born from it and bound to it, whatever technological advancements we make. The author Kim Stanley Robinson describes that tension in a way I quite like:

The evolutionary forces that pushed around our brains as social primates are still the same. There will be fundamental pleasures that can’t be replaced by their technologically sublime substitutes. They can’t be augmented or virtualized in any meaningful way without taking away what was essential to their pleasure.

But the “trad” idea that the solution to this is to get yourself a smiling and submissive blonde wife who will give you 3.5 children named like Maysyn or Braylynn or whatever, and a few dozen acres that you can patrol with an arsenal of war weapons, and ideally some leisure time for posting memes about how Joe Biden is Mao and Hitler rolled into one, is ridiculous. (When the potatoes get picked and cows milked is something of a mystery. Maybe Braylynn does it when she’s old enough.) To the extent that there can be personal ways of approaching a structural problem like “all of modern industrial capitalist society,” I enjoy Robinson’s prescription:

I’m thinking that in our technologically augmented and virtualized lives of sitting and looking at screens, a lot of people are performing the addictive mistake, doing more of it thinking that it’ll make them happier. At a certain point, if you break the addictive cycle and realize the addictive activity is never going to do it for you, you can try something more basic...You can start living a primate’s life and pretty soon you’ll find satisfactions.

…Fooling around with stones, running, throwing things at things, those are all on the Paleolithic list, everything we did to evolve into what we are. You do them now and there are parts of the brain that just light up, like a light’s gone on in a room. Even looking at fire, which is a very basic thing. You look at a fire and a part of your brain is just going, “Right on,” and loving it.

This is no substitute for the massive structural overhaul that our society so desperately needs. Things are getting worse all the time in just about every measurable way and there is really only so long that we can all keep up the polite fiction that this isn’t true. But in the meantime…yeah. Hard to think of what might feel nicer than to go tromp around in the woods and throw rocks at logs and tell stories around a campfire. Maybe grow some fragrant herbs and flowers in your garden or on your windowsill, or cultivate mushrooms to eat on some logs in your yard. Turn the dog into the rosebush and be reminded once more than things can change and that every living thing can nourish something else.

I realize this is my recommendation for most ailments of the soul and maybe you’re sick of hearing it but everyone is who they are after a certain point and this is what I have to offer you.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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1. The meteoric rise of the True Crime genre is both a product of this phenomenon and one of its biggest drivers. If TikTok is to believed, every woman in America is in imminent danger of being human trafficked out of the Target parking lot at all times.

2. This is something like a crude explanation of dialectical materialism: our material and social conditions inform our perception of reality; that perception of reality influences the actions we take to try to change our material and social conditions; those changes in turn affect our perception of reality…and so on in a neverending spiral of contradiction and resolution.

3. William F. Buckley said that conservatism “stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” which I’m sure sounded very cool to him but sounds to me like the ravings of a lunatic. You might as well yell “Stop” at the sunrise.

4. Trads also seem to think this first part is a positive thing.