Maintaining One's Berings in Icy Waters

There's a very famous saying,

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.

That, far from enlightening, is even less memorable. But the second part will probably strike a chord:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
— George Santayana

As separated as these sentences may be in your memory, they are intimately linked. The first reaches to our past, the second looks to our future.

They remind us that one does not exist without the other.

Have you ever been frustrated when someone talks about something very familiar to you and thought "Well, I've heard all this before."

Although it's a thought that comes – quite naturally – more and more often with experience, this quote reminds us that frustration is the wrong response.

There are a few schools of thought about what forces shape history. It's useful here to look back to some ideas from the 18th and 19th centuries. There was a divide between a strain known as uniformitarianism and the other known as catastrophism.

The first long word underlines how gradual change can, over time, have remarkable effect. The second about how sudden, short-lived 'catastrophes' can change the world.

Looking back now, it seems ridiculous to think that such sensible, benign ideas could have drawn such heady debate. Actually, even now, people are still pondering the divide, albeit in slightly different guise.

Both ideas are important, and for much the same reason, and the quote beginning this conversation leads us to it.

Memory.

Memories reside within our tiny heads, and on the larger scale of the world as a whole. We combine old ideas to create new ones, organisms evolve and – like our ideas – may go on to prosper or to perish.

Just as a tsunami can strike, volcanoes can erupt, earthquakes can shake and fissure, and all of them rapidly devastate environments and populations, people can join together to form movements, exhibit immense wisdom, and quickly go on to achieve things previously unimagined. The complexity of our technologies, the dense structure of our societies, and the speed that they allow us to spread information, all at the same time, bless us with delightful innovations, and (usually) curse us through stock market crashes that take everyone by surprise.

Some memories are more elusive than others; natural disasters can form based on processes we don't fully understand, and the ideas embodied in our technologies and carried by individuals can combine in ways difficult to see in advance.

To look to the future with certainty is to deceive ones-self, and uncertainty forbids intent. Although change has beginning and end, without clarity it can have no direction.

...memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.
— Isabelle Allende

While nature's memories persist for eternity in stone, it is human nature to forget.

What many in the West like to call 'progress' owes much to our increasing capacity to remember. Much has been ascribed to Gutenberg's development of movable type and the printing press, and more recently similar sentiments surround web video. Both provide accessible and, more importantly, durable ways to record ideas for later readers or viewers.

It's worth noticing that while we first had oral and graphic culture, followed by literacy, we have come full circle with print – a written medium – followed by video, a very graphic and oral medium.

But there is something much more fundamental grounding these two pillars of 'progress' – language. It is the common ground for all the ways we communicate ideas.

Just as land bridges have historically allowed the migration of peoples to now divided areas of the globe, language bridges our minds, and new technologies allow this exchange at ever greater speeds and distances.

The exchange of ideas is one of our most valuable assets, not only to allow them to combine together in innovative ways, but also to make them more durable. New minds bring new, more diverse backgrounds. Diversity breeds fresh ideas and fidelity of ideas. Ideas are only of value when they are remembered, and memories fade. Although time may displace old ideas, with the new taking center stage, it need not replace them. When reminded of past thoughts, reminiscence trumps recoil; bridges crossed, not burned.

"Why didn't I think of that?" is a too-common rejoinder to innovation for very good reason.

All the non-fiction material I have read, viewed, or heard over (at least) the past three years has been tightly intertwined, and not by any intent of mine. The works may be separated in time, but their ideas are always acutely connected. Each creation relating – in its own individual, unique ways – the thorough web connecting all that is. The more diversity I seek out, the more its strands draw me back.

The only relief I've found is fiction. It's not lack of connections, for its narrative binds more tightly than any other. Non-fiction has direction, it seeks our understanding and so must be reductive. The turbulent territory of fiction appeals to our inner explorers. It thrives on complexity. We don't understand, we must discover, we must imagine. Ignorance is bliss, for it demands that we imagine.

Everything is connected. You could wonder, with all this material, why we haven't got the message.

Maybe it's just important, and instead we should remember it.