{"id":73718,"date":"2026-02-25T01:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T06:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=73718"},"modified":"2026-03-03T11:29:51","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T16:29:51","slug":"qotd-the-notion-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/02\/25\/qotd-the-notion-of-history\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The notion of “history”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>“History” is itself a fairly recent phenomenon, historically speaking. As far as we can tell, all the preliterate civilizations, and a lot of the literate ones, lived in what amounted to an endless now. I find [Julian] Jaynes’s ideas [in his book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind<\/em>] very helpful in this regard, but we don’t need him for this, because whatever the explanation, it’s an obvious fact of historiography (“the history of History”; the study of the writing of History). Herodotus and Thucydides were more or less contemporaries, but what a difference in their work! Herodotus’s “history” was a collection of anecdotes; Thucydides focused on people and their motivations; but both of them wrote in the 400s BC \u2014 that is, 2500 years ago.<\/p>\n

We are closer in time to them than they were to the men who built the Pyramids \u2014 by a long shot \u2014 and think about that for a second. That’s the vast scope of merely literate<\/em> human history. Human settlement itself goes back at least another 6,000 years before that, and probably a lot longer.<\/p>\n

So far as we can tell, well into historical time men had no real conception of “the past”. Even those men who had recently died weren’t really<\/em> gone, and again I find Jaynes useful here, but he’s not necessary; it’s obvious by funeral customs alone. They had a basic notion of change<\/em>, but it was by definition cyclical<\/em> \u2014 the sun rises and sets, the moon goes through its phases, the stars move, the seasons change, but always in an ordered procession. What once was will always return; what is will pass away, but always to return again.<\/p>\n

Linear time \u2014 the sense of time as a stream, rather than a cycle; the idea that the “past” forecloses possibilities that will never return \u2014 only shows up comparatively late in literate<\/em> history. Hesiod wrote somewhere between 750 and 650 BC; his was the first work to describe a Golden Age as something that might’ve actually existed (as opposed to the Flood narratives of the ancient Middle East).<\/p>\n

Note that this is not yet History<\/em> \u2014 that would have to wait another 300 years or so. Whereas a Thucydides could say, with every freshman that has ever taken a history class, that “We study the past so that we don’t make the same mistakes”, that would’ve been meaningless to Hesiod \u2014 we can’t imitate the men of the Golden Age, because they were a different species of man.<\/p>\n

Note also that Thucydides could say “Don’t make the mistakes of the past” because “the past” he was describing was “the past” of currently living men \u2014 he was himself a participant in the events he was describing “historically”.<\/p>\n

The notion that the Golden Age could return, or a new era begin, within the lifetime of a living man<\/em> is newer still. That’s the eschaton<\/em> proper, and for our purposes it’s explicitly Christian \u2014 that is, it’s at most 2000 years old. Christ explicitly promised that some of the men in the crowd at his execution would live to see the end of the world (hence the fun medieval tradition of the Wandering Jew<\/a>). And since that didn’t happen, you get the old-school, capital-G Gnostics, who interpreted that failure to mean that it was up to us to bring about our own salvation via secret knowledge …<\/p>\n

… or, in Europe starting about 1000 AD, you get the notion that it’s up to us to somehow force<\/em> Jesus to return by killing off all the sinners. I can’t recommend enough Norman Cohn’s classic study The Pursuit of the Millennium<\/em> if you want the gory details. Cohn served with the American forces denazifying Europe, so he has some interesting speculations along Vogelin’s lines, but for our purposes it doesn’t matter. All we need to do is note that this was in many ways The Last Idea.<\/p>\n

Severian, “The Ghosts”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-05-17.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“History” is itself a fairly recent phenomenon, historically speaking. As far as we can tell, all the preliterate civilizations, and a lot of the literate ones, lived in what amounted to an endless now. I find [Julian] Jaynes’s ideas [in his book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind] very helpful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,1526,7,41],"tags":[1527,360,1617,1490,139,1462,1582],"class_list":["post-73718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-greece","category-history","category-quotations","tag-ancientgreece","tag-christianity","tag-herodotus","tag-historiography","tag-psychology","tag-severian","tag-thucydides"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jb0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73718"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101041,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73718\/revisions\/101041"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}