A Sense of the Future

In the midst of so much talk about the end of print and the decline of quality in journalism, Lewis Lapham, defiantly launched an expensive quarterly full of big ideas, curated largely from the past. The inaugural issue began with an essay about history: “Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.”¹

It may seem like a contradiction; it might seem that history has more to do with preserving the past while delaying or avoiding the future. Admittedly, this is often true: some people abuse history as an excuse to turn away from the present and the future. One of Nietzsche’s earliest works was an argument that history is often abused as a way to avoid addressing the present.

So what about the use of history? Jacques Barzun answered this question with characteristic simplicity and directness: “The use of history is for the person.” Seems obvious enough, but it’s apparently easy to forget, perhaps especially in the education system.

Studying history is about educating oneself for the present and future, not just preserving or restoring the past. Barzun wrote that history provides something that neither science nor art can: an intuitive sense for “continuity in chaos… attainment in the heart of disorder… purpose.” Science denies this sense, while “art only invents it.”²

You could argue that science does provide a sense of purpose, and that art provides it in a really genuine way as well, but consider that such ways are essentially historical. Science and art have histories (and biographies) like every other human endeavour; it is mainly through history and biography — or

simply, through stories — that they converge and become relevant in our lives.

It might be difficult to recognize the importance of history in this regard because it’s so deeply habituated in us; we tend to take it for granted, thinking of it as plain old common sense, which demands no further elaboration.

If I read it correctly, Barzun’s argument is that history is common sense which has been educated and refined through conscientious research and composition; history is common sense becoming a more comprehensive “logic of events.”

History is like science in that it involves discipline and produces falsifiable results; we can objectively evaluate the merits of historians and their works by checking their accordance with trustworthy facts and practices. But history is not as severely limited by methods and formulas as science. History relies a lot more on the historian’s sensibilities and judgement in selecting and ordering facts.

We might say that all scientific and artistic achievements begin and end as history. All scientists and artists begin with some kind of common (or historical) sense — an “untaught knowledge of how the world goes”; when this sense is violated — by some fact or event that defies it — scientists and artists are moved to make an account of it. If the account is successful, then it will occupy a place in the history of human achievement; even after it is surpassed by later successes, even after it is proved false or has been replaced by other styles, it is still potentially useful as history.

This is perhaps most apparent in biographies of scientists and artists; history humanizes what may otherwise be inaccessible or uninteresting. History reassures us that Newton and Shakespeare didn’t come from some superhuman realm, bringing fully formed talents and infallible ideas without context; it reminds us that the great natural philosopher struggled through mistakes and self-doubt like anyone else might, and even the great poet owed as much to circumstances and history as he owed to intrinsic genius.

History helps us to associate and discern. In his great essay on the subject, Emerson described history as a record of the “works of universal mind” — a continuous intellectual enterprise — access to which is available to anyone who would “read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life in the text”:

“What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. …

“So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self.”

The “unattained but attainable self” is the organ that both uses and makes history — or uses history to make history — to live more creatively and effectively.

People don’t merely live, we tend to live for something, or towards something — something we feel, think, and believe is the purpose of life, or simply some ideal sense of self we’re inclined to aspire to by way of personal narratives. People want to be remembered as good-hearted, hard-working, intelligent, popular, accomplished, redemptive, loved.³

Many people are content to live and work towards objects that already exist — acquiring prize possessions and accomplishments. As I discussed in “Common Aspirations,” I worry that our society has become too obsessed with following the crowd in pursuit of rivalrous goals that keep us on separate treadmills.

Some of us are compelled towards objects that don’t exist yet — opportunities to discover or create something new. This is the essence of the “radically creative” personality and the attitude I hope to promote. Unlike people who chase goals that are already highly recognized, radically creative people “buy low and sell high,”⁴ staying alert to opportunities that haven’t been noticed.

Creative people are drawn to fill perceived gaps in fields of research, markets, communities, or realms of aesthetic experience. These “gaps” might be revealed by conflicting sets of practices, such as the tension between old and new media, or gaps might occur as scientific anomalies and inconsistencies such as the theoretical differences between quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity.

The key is that radically creative people ultimately define their own opportunities, articulating what was once ambiguous rather than accepting given frameworks, motivated by what Michael Polanyi described as “heuristic passion” demonstrated by scientists as they pursue what are essentially hunches.⁵ He suggested that scientific discoveries a begin with “solitary intimations of a problem, of bits and pieces here and there which seem to offer clues to something hidden. They look like fragments of a yet unknown coherent whole… its content is undefinable, indeterminate, strictly personal.”⁶

That’s how scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs work. Creative opportunities don’t stand out like trophies or rise like mountains to be conquered (these are more often results of creativity). Rather, creative opportunities begin as openings — like doorways, or like the mouth of Plato’s allegorical cave, opening out to an unknown world — or a water well that needs to be dug, or an unsightly city block that can be turned into a park or community garden, or an algorithm for organizing information that scales with the Web, or a new platform for keeping people connected and up-to-date with each other’s activities and interests.

A lot of creative projects are disruptive — taking relevance away from older means of conceptual consumption, undermining established social and conceptual frameworks. This is inevitable. Economist Joseph Schumpeter called it “creative destruction,” an essentially evolutionary process conducted “not merely due to the fact that economic life goes on in a social and natural environment which changes,” but more importantly via the constant regeneration of “new consumers, goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.”⁷

The most resilient elements of humanity aren’t things held rigid for their own sake, but things that are dynamic and adaptive. Even the most apparently permanent human creations — conceptual and architectural structures — decay over time, and become derelict if unused for too long. In other words, they exist for the sake of what we can make of them, not for their own sake. Though we might preserve them for the purpose of nostalgia or narrative historical reference, eventually everything is succeeded via generative cycles, as the young replace the old.

It’s essential to appreciate that this process is generated from the bottom up, or through a flux of personal choices. You don’t have to be an Enronian, “greed is good” capitalist to recognize that people’s individual needs and desires change over time — because as long as time exists, things will continue changing — and we’ll continue changing. As we each seek new experiences, more information, improved health and well-being, stronger relationships, more sustainable communities, and a more vivid sense of autonomous selfhood, we’re constantly rewiring the webs of social and conceptual relevance through which people find creative opportunities.

Even people without any especially creative aspirations feed the process. Everyone is engaged in telling a story, cultivating relevance, and “placing one’s self in relation to others” by means of conceptual consumption, even if only by using and endorsing (essentially voting for) the ideas, practices, and goals that others have made. Through this process, dissipative social structures emerge — not as fixed foundations, but rather as dynamic systems that conduct and regulate life’s temporal aspect, as characterized by our aspirations and our need for a sense of personal efficacy. Everything begins and ends with our personal choices and the sense of self we generate through stories incorporating the people, objects, and ideas around us.

In this way, Emerson’s “unattained but attainable self” is like Polanyi’s “unknown coherent whole.” The future is a kind of problem (or opportunity) to be resolved and accounted for. It doesn’t have to be a ground-breaking scientific problem; sometimes we’re simply trying to define who we are — i.e. you might just care about what the future will be for you. Even people who “leave it to fate” by saying “whatever happens, happens,” aren’t avoiding the problem; they merely resolve it in an uncreative way, by filling the gap with a conceptual dud.

In a way, such people actually aspire to be ineffective and ungenerative. They generate a passive ideal from their intuitive sense of life as having no purpose — or at least not enough purpose to be willingly and responsibly engaged — and this becomes their main assumption about life: their horizon of attainability stops at perceived helplessness.

But a more active and conscientious exposure to history, which goes beyond immediate experience and common sense, introduces many facts that contradict and challenge the notion of helplessness. History provides examples of great accomplishments and accounts of how they occurred, which invariably involve some combination of active attention and personal will.

These facts thus poke holes in idealizations of helplessness, creating new problems to be resolved, which hopefully lead to a more vivid sense of purpose: How can you say that whatever happens, happens, when history demonstrates that what happens largely depends what people do?

So history can be used to demonstrate that life means the purposeful act of living, not merely something given to passive recipients. As Barzun said, history’s use is to provide an intuitive sense of purpose, or “attainment in the heart of disorder.”

José Ortega y Gasset, a philosopher who was obsessed with history, calls this notion of personal becoming a “vital project.” Unlike something inert like a stone, which “is given its existence,” a person ”has to be himself in spite of unfavourable circumstances; that means he has to make his own existence at every single moment.”⁸ In other words, each person is “something which is not yet but aspires to be.”

Steven Pinker has used these statements by Ortega as an example of the “blank slate” argument,⁹ which he opposes — and which I think Ortega would oppose too. Ortega was writing metaphorically; he was exaggerating to make an ambitiously metaphysical point about the creative aspect of human nature, which distinguishes us from the rest of nature.

Ortega wasn’t afraid to amplify some claims for literary effect. As with Nietzsche, it is fairly easy to find a few quotes and phrases in his work to give colour to all kinds of radical positions, without bothering to read more deeply for his underlying message or purpose.

Now it strikes me that this itself is a demonstration of our relationship with the world, and thus our sense of the future. You can’t get a fair account of Ortega’s purpose from the few phrases that you might receive from people like me and Steven Pinker, just as you won’t get a fair account of life’s purpose from the few impressions you might happen to passively receive. We must continually work it out for ourselves.

Life presents a lot of information — far more than we could ever actually recognize and address — from which we select only what interests us, or what concerns us, or what threatens our existing knowledge. From these limited selections we compose our stories and conceptual accounts.

The most accurate scientific accounts tend to be generated from the largest and most diverse samples. A survey that carefully selects 100,000 people from a representative cross-section of society will be far more useful than a survey of subscribers to a special-interest magazine, or an arbitrary survey of people who happen to be walking through the local mall on a weekday.

As in science, an effort must be made to generate fair and diverse samples for our historical or common sense accounts of life. In some cases this calls for restraint, cutting off impressions that might be too biased or unrepresentative; in other cases it means going out in search of new impressions to help fill in gaps — and studying history is one of the most effective ways to find more facts and impressions. Above all it involves active attention and personal will; care and conviction; discretion and aspiration; responsibility, respect, resourcefulness, and resolve.

The analogy with survey samples isn’t quite accurate. Historians don’t actually use their entire “sample” the way statisticians do; even after a first round of selections, there’s still far too much information to cope with, so some facts and impressions are selected again to be brought into the foreground of the account.

We do the same thing through common sense. The mind naturally selects some impressions for the foreground, tacitly ignoring the rest. Even someone who possesses vast knowledge — a “broad sample” — doesn’t actually use much more knowledge in specific situations than someone who has much less to select from.

But a large supply of knowledge increases the quality and relevance of those few facts and impressions that can be brought forward and used. Here a better analogy might be a person’s wardrobe: people with a lot of clothes don’t actually wear more at any given time; the benefit of a large wardrobe is to have just the appropriate piece for any occasion.¹⁰

Another version of that analogy is that a person with more clothes is better able to incorporate new articles into their wardrobe:

“The more historical knowledge we have, the more we can learn from any given piece of evidence; if we had none, we could learn nothing.” So wrote R. G. Collingwood, another philosopher of history, who went on to claim that “historical thinking is an original and fundamental idea of the human mind” — something innate or a priori — “an idea which every man possesses as part of the furniture of his mind, and discovers himself to possess and in so far as he is conscious of what it is to have a mind.”¹¹

For both Collingwood and Ortega, it isn’t just the past that compels us to study history, but the present and the future. For Collingwood, the study of history begins here and now — or at least we begin by “using the present as evidence for its own past… and any imaginative reconstruction of the past aims at reconstructing the past of this present, the present in which the act of imagination is going on, in which the here-and-now is perceived.”

Ortega goes further, claiming that “life is an activity executed in relation to the future; we find the present or the past afterwards, in relation to that future.” More specifically, “it is when I find in the past the means of realizing my future that I discover my present.”¹²

Returning to the wardrobe analogy, imagine finding a cool new pair of shoes (or a jacket, or a hat, or suspenders, or whatever) — they seem to be what you’ve always been looking for. But before making your purchase, you’ve got to think back to what you already have in the closet that might match. If you don’t possess anything that works with those green shoes or pink suspenders, then you lack “the means of realizing your future,” and the transaction comes to an end.

Remember that I began this essay with a quote from Lewis Lapham about “defending the future against the past.” By claiming the past is something we need to defend against, I take it he’s referring to ideas and habits we inherit blindly — the rigid conventions, misleading assumptions, outmoded methods, and ungenerative ideals that promote ignorance, passivity, and helplessness.

These ideas probably exist (and persist) because they’ve been useful. At some time they served a purpose, or helped people find “attainment in the heart of disorder.” But ideas, like everything else, have limited lives; eventually they need to be managed, updated, or replaced.

When ideas persist beyond their original purpose, they don’t just become useless, they become worse than useless: they’re an additional burden or constraint, making it even more difficult to make sense of present problems and opportunities.

Arguing this point, Ortega wrote that we grow into a “network of ready-made solutions” before we’re even aware of the problems they’re supposed to solve. As a result, “when we come to feel actual distress in the face of a vital question, and we really want to find its solution… not only must we struggle with the problem, but we find ourselves caught within the solutions previously received and must also struggle with them.”¹³

The best way to avoid this is not with less knowledge, but rather with more (or better knowledge) by studying history — events we can actually understand — to place ourselves in perspective of a bigger narrative, to think critically about the complex ways in which our biases and assumptions have evolved, and to endow ourselves with richer metaphors and images with which to intermediate past and future ideas.

Apart from getting us out of the “zone of imperfect visibility,” thinking through history is a way to cope with our brain’s lack of an OFF switch. It’s a practice that helps us regulate conceptual consumption, exercise humility and respect life’s inevitable anomalies and vicissitudes.

Barzun wrote that history’s greatest weakness, “its uncertainty and inability to put things into neat bundles,” was also its greatest strength, “its great advantage over ready-made systems.” History keeps thinking alive: “Its difficulties force the student’s gaze to discern in each event and person its unique character, to mark and remember its own shape. It is a discipline that strengthens individual judgement and keeps bright the points that connect imagination with present reality.”¹⁴

Emerson, as we might expect, was more poetic in expressing this need: “What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events? In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man.”¹⁵

That “light by which man is truly man” is the sense of life’s incompleteness, by which we define our aspirations. It selects and brings into the foreground those “solitary intimations of a problem… fragments of a yet unknown coherent whole,” a compelling mystery which we call the future.

1“The Gulf of Time” in Lapham’s Quarterly (Winter 2008).

2Clio and the Doctors (1974): p. 124.

3Unfortunately, as discussed in “Will to Relevance,” many people live through negative stories of helplessness and victimization.

4“Investment theory of creativity” is borrowed from Sternberg & Lubart, Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity (1995).

5See Personal Knowledge (1958) p. 142 – 145.

6The Tacit Dimension (1966): p. 75 – 76. Also in Meaning (1977): p. 193.

7Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942): p. 82.

8José Ortega y Gasset, History as a System (1941/1961): p. 111.

9Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (2002): p. 24.

10Borrowed from Emerson’s essay on Plato in Representative Men.

11Collingwood quotes are all from the chapter on “Historical Imagination” in The Idea of History (1946).

12Ortega y Gasset, What is Philosophy (1964): p. 225.

13Ortega y Gasset, Man in Crisis (1962): p. 26.

14Barzun, Of Human Freedom (1939/1964): p. 181.

15Emerson, “History” from Essays: First Series (1841).