Chronology

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Anthony Grafton’s Worlds Made By Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West. Among other themes, Grafton’s essays consider the wide intellectual interests of Renaissance figures, interests that they believed were not particularized and distinct but integrated and closely related. In one essay he discusses, Johannes Kepler – the brilliant scientist who introduced the idea of elliptical orbits of the planets (pgs. 114-36). Kepler, it seems, had a passion for chronology, not quite what we today would call “history,” but rather the dull, plodding ordering of people and events. Why? Because Kepler knew that knowledge was constructed over time in a particular order and that that order was critical in discovering truths and dismissing myths about the natural order and the universe.

Kepler was battling what modern advocates of evolutionary science have to fight – opponents who find the hand of God in creating complex things out of nothing, or find God intervening capriciously in the evolution of knowledge, or those who think that the past is made up of quixotic jumps from one particular set of circumstances to an utterly different set of circumstances. Evolution is about the order of things, and getting that order of things right. Whether evolution is gradual or subject to surges (à la Stephen Jay Gould), it is a matter of chronological order.

My son, Ike, and I were discussing this on the phone the other day. When I told him that I was struggling with writing a little essay on this subject, he got enthusiastic, saying that he, too, was frequently troubled by the realization that most people have no idea about “what followed what” in history. Ike was an anthropology/archaeology major in university and thus may feel Kepler’s concern more intimately than even I do. (I say this because my interest in history is less with chronologies than with asking relevant questions about some period in the past so that the answers might enlighten us about who we are in the present). Chronology is more dogged (and I might say more boring) than that, even though it is an absolutely essential underpinning in order to address the things I think need to be considered in history.

After reflecting on this problem more, let me pose this issue of chronology in two ways – one way that is essentialist and the other way that is relativistic.

1. We need to understand how one thing necessarily follows another in time.

2. We need to realize the relative nature of time in regard to different aspects of the natural and social world..

By now you are saying, these are trite truisms – as perhaps they are. But, do you have a firm and extensive grasp about how things have evolved over time? Do you understand the necessity of Greek and Roman philosophy to the evolution of early Christianity, to the Renaissance, to the emergence of the modern world? Do you know when the modern world began, and what the chronological landmarks of increased modernization and modernism are? Do you understand the necessity of the long evolution of Catholic doctrine as a condition for the emergence of the Reformation? Do you understand that the Enlightenment was built on a broad foundation of ideas that emerged in the 16^th and 17^th centuries? Do you realize that the rise of a “national people” in the American and French Revolutions was not some idea that suddenly came to everyone as just common sense but was built on foundations that included, for example, Bolingbroke’s reflections about what made a “patriot king”? Do you remember that Marx called the rise of the capitalist “bourgeoisie” the most revolutionary thing that had happened in modern times, and then suggested communism was simply a logical and inevitable response to that radical development? And, so it goes – on and on – in a correct order.

Those who do not realize how things evolve chronologically from the past to the present allow themselves to believe several preposterous and false things:

1. They may believe in inexplicable divine creation and whimsical divine intervention.

2. They may believe in something historically akin to “immaculate conception,” “spontaneous combustion,” or fate and chance; things just happen, in no particular order or with no particular meaning. Thucydides wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War because he knew that when and how one thing followed another in time produced critical consequences.

3. They may also believe that “now” – the present – is the only reality, and that the past is “dead” and gone; the modernist (and false) corollary to that is that the present is superior to the past in all ways, the past being just a collage of inferiorities and failures. This latter is also intimately tied to the rise of technology. People know that the discovery of electricity preceded their laptop computer, and therefore the present is always superior to the past because it is always technologically more advanced (many individuals deny this but their implicit behavior shows that they indeed embrace this false concept of past and present).

In other words, those with little respect for and knowledge of chronology can be characterized as either blissfully arrogant in their ignorance or suffering from a kind of subconscious vertigo when viewing the world outside their immediate home and locale.

But in fact, of course, all people do have some sense of time passing and of events following one another, and “home and locale” provide their understanding. They get their sense of time from the family and from the small events immediately relative to their lives. This substitute for a broader knowledge of chronology prejudices everything in favor of the individual and the family. If we do not know anything about how our culture and society evolved over time we discount the profound importance of that broader world, even if and when our well-being and very lives may depend on a knowledge of events in time.

Time as relativistic and not meted out in even measures can be seen by the false categorization of time that we all participate in and falsely promote. This is seen most prominently in our depiction of decades – the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and apparently on and on for the rest of the modern era (an era which may, in fact, be nearly over). But the 20s might be seen as 1922 to 1929, and the 50s as 1948 to 1963, and so on – all depending on understood perspectives. We historians commit the same error in regard to centuries. We glibly say the 18^th century was this, and the 19^th century that, and the 20^th century something else. Chopping up the passage of time into decades and centuries ignores the fact that some time is measured in very long paces (geological time, for example); that some foundations of society and cultures are tied to a longue durée of time (which Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, Leroy Ladurie and the Annales school of history has presented as more important than mere surface events [histoire évènementielle]); and, finally, that some historical events have sped up time (the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, the two World Wars, the introduction of moveable type and the rise of the internet).

Like serious music, historical time is not merely the matter of whole notes held over several bars but rather the interplay of whole through 64^th notes (the speed of time) played in varying time measures (the different pace in the march of time depending on place). It involves melodies (prevailing historical tendencies over a long period of time – e.g., modernization) answered by counter-melodies (resurgent traditionalism – e.g., reborn evangelicalism or rediscovered ideological capitalism). And, it hosts new themes suddenly and dramatically introduced which throw earlier themes akimbo (revolutions -- quiet or violent).

Ike and I share a kind of quizzical interest when we meet a new person, quietly wondering just where this person places herself in time and the universe. The result can be like giving a lecture to a class of immigrants who have a limited knowledge of the language; just how much vocabulary can I use that makes sense to this person?

At its worst, in a democratic society, large numbers of people having no sense of historical time can lead to some bad consequences, as we have experienced again and again. A majority may subscribe to static religious answers to who and where we are, and force the rest of us to accede to their solutions to what they see as “our” problems. Not knowing the long evolution over time of human and civil rights, still others might re-institute restraints that the rest of us thought had been sorted out in an earlier era (or earlier century, more likely). The same may be said of those who have resurrected unlimited free-market capitalism, apparently oblivious to the fact that we already went through that cycle more than a century ago, and that over time we learned what was wrong with unyielding implementation of that ideology (did Milton Friedman know nothing about the past, nothing whatsoever?) We need to know what about the past is irrelevant or truly “past,” and we need to know what about the past persists and is relevant today (this is my nod to George Santayana). We can still respect the ordered events of the past as different from today, as a distinct “other time,” without considering the past to be a time inferior or irrelevant to our own. Insofar as possible, we need to know chronologically “where” we are; historians can add the ingredient of analyzing “how” we got here. No one can provide a full and satisfying answer to “why,” however.