History/Academia/Religion/Culture/Politics/Jazz
Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

Sometimes when I'm impressed by the prevalence of a theme in contemporary culture, I find myself wondering what future historians will make of us.

There is a long-standing premise in the history of historiography that time must pass before we really can be understood. The recent past and the present, accordingly, cannot be the objects of historical investigation. A cynical reason for this belief is that we cannot write the history of the present because our subjects are still alive and all too willing to contest our generalizations about them. The dead are obliged to remain silent when we misunderstand them. As Voltaire bitingly put this cynical perspective, history must be a pack of tricks that we play on the dead. The living often don't fall for it.

But I prefer this less cynical belief: Future historians will be able to tell us things about ourselves that we were unable to see clearly while alive. Things under our noses are harder to get a clear picture of than things we view over our shoulders, even if both kinds of vision are imperfect. Self-inflated as it may sound for an historian to say, I stand by the old dictum of textual hermeneutics: when we carefully interpret the texts of the past, our aspiration is to understand the authors even better than they understood themselves. We certainly do not always achieve that aspiration, but it does make the goals of history different, by definition, from the goals of contemporary cultural studies or punditry. We cannot understand ourselves any better than we understand ourselves. It will take someone else, some future historian, to bring to light the things we missed about us, either by accident or design.

This does not make attempts to understand ourselves now, in the present, futile or worthless. But sometimes, when I can see faintly some glimmer of a deep truth about our present culture, I'm satisfied to mark it down as a hint to future historians: "I think I perceive a clue to understanding us, but you, the historian of the future, will have to put it together with other clues to figure out if I am right."

This weekend, I think I saw, dimly, something important about our culture in two recent movies. First, we finally watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I loved this film, which was romantic, entertaining, and moving in the best of ways. It accomplishes what few films do -- it makes you look at your own life, and appreciate it even more. The night before, we had watched Jonathan Demme's version of The Manchurian Candidate. It was considerably less "sunshine-y," to say the least, but thought-provoking nonetheless.

Here's the hint to future historians: Despite their obvious differences, these films share a common concern with the potential discovery of technology that can erase memories or otherwise wash our brains. That's the first clue: that we are worried about this right now in 2004. The second clue to you is this: both films resoundingly express the hope that there is something deep down inside us, something wrapped up with the core of who we are, that cannot be touched by mind-changing technologies. (Another set of films that reinforce this hope are The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, the second of which I also saw a few weeks ago.) I wonder what you'll make of this, historian of the future -- if, that is, you still remember us.