Continuity & Context

Jul 27, 2025

In my last post, I suggested we need continuity with the past. That could be taken in different ways. For some, it might mean maintaining the version of the past they were taught or have come to believe. It can also mean reimagining it as some sort of fantasy - Tolkienesque or perhaps like Bridgerton (though that is continuity with something that never was and often could never have been). Neither of those is what I meant. For others, it might require a simple reevaluation based on current morals and norms. There's nothing wrong with using those as ways of looking at the past, but there's nothing simple about it. The past is every bit is complex and nuanced as our present world is. The people in it were just as much flesh and blood and imperfect as we are. They worked with fragmentary and often incorrect information as much as we do, shaping their paths and our past according to the dictates of their societies, their consciences, and their abilities. We must go beyond the simple and the easy. We need a living past, one which we can continue to explore, find our own reflections, and inform us in both policy and daily life. That is something much different. Some people might object and say it's revisionist. Those are people who truly do not understand what revisionism is. To find the past might be to understand it as a historian, as a reenactor, or simply as a person who wants to better comprehend how we got here and what it means to be human. It is important for all of us, not because we have to conform to the past, but because we have to live with it. It is everywhere around us, shaping our environment, our bodies, and our minds. It is inescapable. There are those, and they seem to be prevalent among our billionaires and tech elites, who deny the past has any relevance, meaning, or use. They reflect a very narrow way of thinking. Truly understanding the past requires the exact opposite, for it is a way of understanding the world that can change, grow, and show us both who we have been and who we are now.

The continuity of which I am speaking, cannot be limited to the past. We live in continuity with the present and with the future, strange is that may sound. I'll come back to the present later, for I think that will make more sense after discussing continuity with the future.

We have a tendency to treat the future in some specific ways. One of the oldest traditions, particularly in the Christian West, is that of apocalyptic. This is still very influential in both religious and secular terms. We seem to crave some sort of definitive ending to our history. That, of course, has given rise to the post-apocalyptic tradition as well. In some cases, this is seen as just a slow decline into the abyss, while for others, as in H.G. Wells' Things to Come, the apocalypse leads to a new rise of civilization.

We also have a variety of futures which are more frankly science fictional and fantastic. These can take many forms, though in America, at least, the most popular still seems to be Star Trek. We've also produced a number of variations of futurism. Some of those seem like straight-line predictions from the present. If you go back to the New York World's Fair, or later ones held in the US into the 1960s, you get a real sense of industrial-age America seeing itself continuing indefinitely and triumphantly into the future. It was also the future that Disney projected for us in the 1950s and '60s. More recently, Vernor Vinge, in the early 90s, forecast a coming technological singularity, which he predicted for this decade, and which is most often seen as the emergence of super-human AI that would transform everything. We have a number of similar visions of the future that have taken off from that, that now seem to see the infinite expansion of capitalism, of post-human humans (either completely machine intelligences or human minds living in machines) expanding infinitely across the universe. You may have gathered from what I've just been saying, I think most of what our future holds is simply fantasy. Even the straight-line projections we thought we saw in the past have proven delusional.

As with the past, we need a living future. That may sound strange, as many of us think there is no livable future for humanity, or maybe even for any biological organisms on this planet. It needs to be an exploration, but it also needs to be grounded in sound science, human nature, and an understanding of what has happened in the past, not as a predictor, but to help us think about how humans and their world evolve. It cannot be rooted in any given ideology. It must be flexible, recognizing that even minor changes in conditions will result in vastly different outcomes, and it must be diverse. I do not mean that simply in terms of gender, ethnicity, or any of the other diversities of which we speak on a regular basis. I do agree that we need those. Even if we ignore morality, the lack of genetic and cultural diversity is one of our greatest possible threats. Humanity simply cannot afford a genetic bottleneck, nor a monoculture. I mean, we have to have a diversity of thoughts, ideas, and ways of exploring the future. We cannot settle on one. It's too dangerous. In fact, settling on one pretty much ensures that we will lose continuity with the present. That seems to me the way to ensure the sharpest break with the present, simply because striving to have a specific future is fragile.

That brings me back to the present. In some ways, the present is harder to talk about than the past or the future. I have seen people suggest that it does not really exist, that as soon as something happens, it is past, and the present is simply the line dividing past from future. There's some truth to that. But indulge me for a moment when I suggest that we treat the period within living memory as the present. Yes, it is past, but so long as any human being is remembering anything, they are reconstructing it, and in a sense, reliving it. Memory and imagination are closely tied together. Each time we remember something, we alter it slightly. So in a sense, anything that has happened in my lifetime is still being reworked by my mind, and by the minds of everybody who is alive and experienced it. So I guess I am treating the present as a period of about 100 years.

In many ways, that's unsatisfactory. We could also think of the present as, for lack of a better phrase, a perpetual state of breaking news. I think a lot of people would really prefer that. They don't want us to be able to put together what is happening in our lives with what is happening right at the moment. They want that break. Either because they themselves do not wish to remember, or because they're threatened by people being able to put together what they have experienced with what they are experiencing now. Context is a problem for many people who want specific futures and specific pasts. Everything I'm talking about in this essay is context. When I speak of continuity, I'm speaking of continuity with multiple contexts. And these need to be broad as well as deep. That's hard when we have limited attention spans, and our attention spans seem to be getting more limited. How many events can you keep track of on an ongoing basis? How many different areas of life can you track? What do you really know about what's going on in the world today? Do you understand the history behind each of those things? How about the technology, do you understand how digital technologies, or biological ones, or any other sort of technologies affect those things you were watching, hearing, or reading about? Do you know what the ecological and climatic impacts are? What does psychology tell you about those events? What's the role of religion, of culture, a folk belief? Every one of those is important, every one of those helps connect one event to another, one trend to another, and could be traced back into the past and could be projected with some thought into the future. This is what I'm talking about when I mean continuity with the present. It's about the ability to tie everything that's going on to everything else, and to bring our own experiences to it.

It cannot be about any one group, or any one way of being. If we have people who want it to be about exactly one group and one way of being, they may want it to be about one possible future and wish to exclude all but a narrow tunnel vision of the past. Context frightens them. Context is their enemy. We don't have time for this. We are in a desperate situation as a civilization and as a species. We have to be able to make these connections to survive.

Let me go into some detail. I made the rather odd statement above that we should regard the present as not just the moment, but also the era comprising living memory. We could think of that in terms of personal memories or of collective memories. We could also deal with the epigenetic "memories" of trauma that are encoded into the bodies of descendants, which would extend the range, but recent research indicates that even more complex than we previously thought so that I will leave it for now.

If we are speaking of personal memory, that will obviously vary greatly with age. In my sixties, I am discovering the truth of Douwe Draaisma's observations that older adults typically remember their twenties and thirties more vividly than more recent events. (That is not true for everything.) For me, the present often feels like a continuum between now and my college years four decades ago. I, of course, have earlier memories, but most are not as vivid. My mother, by contrast, had vivid and fairly continuous memories from about age 4, with some dating back to age 2.

As I read, I am constantly aware of things I read around 1980 that commune with my current and recent reading. (Oddly, many of my most pleasant and frequent memories are of things I have read and where I read them. I seem to have a strong place memory associated with reading.) My political memory was formed earlier by 1968 and then Watergate. That remains my primary political context to this day. That's enough of personal examples, but there are many more I could add.

When we think in collective terms, we have lost the living memory of WWI. Perhaps a handful of supercentenarians might retain childhood memories of it, but their minimum age now would be about 110. While there are still plenty of people alive with childhood memories of WWII, or who even served in it, many of its events have now slipped away. (Wikipedia has an interesting page devoted to the last known survivors of many events during the War.) Increasingly, we rely on nostalgia for a past we did not experience. (See Grafton Tanner's books on nostalgia for some useful observations on their use by politicians and the entertainment industry.) The distortions this allows may have a major role in how our politics and society are developing now.

On the one hand, this may allow a clearer and more objective understanding of the World Wars, but on the other, it means that hardly anyone has a direct experience of their sacrifices and horrors, while allowing outrageous claims and elisions to be made. While there was some continuing embrace of fascism and nazism after 1945, it remained slight compared to the 2020s, when the generation that fought the War and survived the death camps, massacres, forced removals, other atrocities, and starvation began to die off. As Americans defined generations, we are now beginning the sixth generation since 1945. Each of these has had a different view of the War presented to them. A decreasing number will have heard personal recollections that are not recordings. I grew up hearing plenty about the home from t from my parents. (My mother's class was the last to see any combat, so I mostly heard stories of what life was like in Missouri then. My father was three years younger, but gained direct experience of combat in the trenches of Korea in the artillery, which, curiously, seemed to make him identify with the experiences of the First World War.)

I also grew up with a steady diet of war movies and television programs. Twelve O'Clock High was already almost twenty years old when I saw it (through the TV series based on it was a big part of my young life). For my friends and me, living near a SAC base, it was a big part of our imaginations. The Longest Day, Is Paris Burning, and other war movies were often replayed on Kansas City stations, and new films like The Battle of Britain and Tora, Tora, Tora appeared, becoming parts of a seemingly endless stream of war movies, telling us how to think about it all. These still glorified it in many respects but also showed an awareness of its less glorious and seamier sides as well as being analytical in various ways. (Twelve O'Clock High was used for many years by the Air Force Academy as a case study in managing men in war, while Tora, Tora, Tora and The Longest Day were both dissections of the events they describe.) Later decades seem to have shifted uncomfortably between fantasy and realism (though I suppose there was plenty of that in the sixties as well). For a time, there was more attention paid to the Holocaust in film and television, but that seems to be in decline today - again, perhaps significant for the rise of Holocaust Denial and the strong echoes of the Nazi rhetoric we hear today.

What of the past and future, the pre-living memory and the unrealized future? For one thing, the past will continue to grow. How things turn out today will help determine the way those wars will be understood, and, in a reciprocal movement that will influence our future. It certainly influences the present - the breaking-news present - where too many Americans seek to recapture the moment of our seemingly greatest triumph and the prosperity that followed, while ignoring the conditions that shaped and made that triumph possible. There is a narrow focus on events and a complete misunderstanding of the causes driving them.

The situation, as far as the US is concerned, is even worse for the US Civil War. Every aspect is hotly contested and deeply tied to identity politics for tens of millions. Central to this is the vital political importance of that history for the Right and Far Right, as well as for African-Americans, for whom it is as critical a moment as 1619. The objective history of the War (as far as one may know it) makes nonsense of many of the claims of the Right and Far Right and is a potent resource for their opponents. They largely cling to the thoroughly discredited Lost Causes narrative and its later developments to support their own beliefs and actions. Once again, control of the past is shaping present politics, which in turn shapes it, and the result of that shaping helps form and inform the future.

Past, present, and future are complex with material and non-material components. They may have causal and acausal relationships. The present has the function of mediating past and future. Our beliefs about the past and the future shape our present, which in turn shapes our experience of both past and future.

An alternate way of thinking about his is that we have a series of "pasts" and "futures" - not in an objective sense, but in terms of how we understand or experience them, so that they way we reinterpret the past in the light of our present experiences spawns a new past, call it Past' and Future'. Future' becomes our new present, Present', which interacts with Past' to create Past" and Future", and so on.

For instance, if we believe the future will be transformed by AI, then we might see the principal importance of WWII as accelerating the development of computers and schools of thought, such as cybernetics, that contributed to the origins of AI. We might be led to focus more and more on these technical, scientific, and philosophical aspects while neglecting the Holocaust, environmental damage, the horrors of combat and occupation, the social and cultural transformations the War created, etc. So, in addition to working to make that future happen, we will also come to see it more as a logical, or even inevitable, consequence of our history. That can continue in a self-reinforcing cycle, allowing us to filter things out (of the past, present, and future), things like environmental damage, climate change, and biological extinction, as being extraneous. Thus, we transform our consciousness with these filters. I believe this is related to how hyperstition works.

I need to wrap this up for now. While we like to divide up past, present, and future, almost walling them off into separate spaces, I am arguing that, given the nature of human minds and cultures, they represent an uninterrupted flow of ideas, emotions, and actions. I do not know if I have done a good job of explaining this, but I would recommend two wonderfully written books by Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg's Curse and Smoke and Ashes. These do an excellent and often lyrical job of explaining this interplay, and also of that between humans and other organisms. I doubt that Ghosh would agree with everything I have written, but these two books are a major inspiration for me.

Much of this post is prologue to what I want to write in the coming weeks and months. I apologize for the long wait since the previous post, as well as the intrusion of personal examples.

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