The Death of History
"Modern people don't need history. Even the black-swan events from 2019 to now are merely records. The events of the past seem to us no more real than Aurelianos and Arcadios. Ueno-gawa Rin will write her own chronicle of the nude artist."
People today differ profoundly in their cognition from ancestors over the past several thousand years. The information age and the torrents of data the internet brings have surely influenced not only popular culture and ideology but also the very structure of the human brain. The leap in living conditions over the last thirty years has raised the moral level of the new generation simultaneously above all previous centuries. The Zuo Commentary says: “Those who are intelligent, clear-sighted, upright, and direct become spirits.” By that standard, most people in this era can be called spirits.
To be sure, works like Linggao Qiming do not believe that modern people are cognitively superior to the ancients. We are merely dependent on industrialization. Yet industrial-society humans and agrarian-society humans are also completely different. The gap is so vast that one wonders: did the ancients truly exist?
Science reigns over the earth; everything has an answer; we don’t even question the reality of things. When we point casually at fossils in a museum, the most we doubt is a Fujimura Shin’ichi-type fraud, not whether the fossil itself can prove the truth of history. We don’t doubt for a moment that we are part of history, yet simultaneously we don’t doubt that history exists.
In the Liezi, Tang Wen, Tang asks Xia Ge: “Was there anything at the very beginning?” Xia Ge replies: “If there was nothing at the beginning, how is there something today?” But Tang and Xia Ge are themselves “nothing”—entirely fictional. This almost brings to mind super-metaphysics, Hume indexes, upper-level narrators. Yet when we read the Twenty-Four Histories, reading their detailed biographies; when we climb to old ruins and sigh “the generations of humanity have no end, yet the river-moon year after year looks the same”—don’t we sometimes feel a faint unreality—as though none of our past eras existed, and human history began in the year 2000? Even if we know this is an illusion, how do we verify it is an illusion?
This is of course because we are immersed in too much information, inhabiting different worlds simultaneously—from the tavern at the end of the universe to Genshin’s Realm of Humans, from the Wall in the North to Mordor. What’s more, we have learned about a nation of 9.6 million square kilometers, a planet 40,000 kilometers in circumference, while personally experiencing nothing more than the high sky and thick earth above and below. Spiritual experience and reality have split apart; modern people can live without living.
Modern people don’t need history. Even the black-swan events from 2019 to now are merely records. The events of the past seem to us no more real than Aurelianos and Arcadios. Ueno-gawa Rin will write her own chronicle of the nude artist.