Book Club: What Shape is History?

An extract from The Cultural Tutor: Forty-Nine Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School, by Sheehan Quirke.

This month's book club extract comes from Sheehan Quirke’s The Cultural Tutor, which publishers Penguin describe as an "all-encompassing cultural primer, a rallying cry for autodidacticism and an antidote to doomscrolling". This extract concerns the shape of human history…

“I tell you/someone will remember us/in the future”

From the Fragments of Sappho¹

In the far future an alien scholar writes a book called The History of Humankind. It begins in 300,000 BCE, when Homo sapiens first emerged, and ends with the death of the last ever human. I ask: on which page would you find the year 2025? Are we in the middle or near the beginning?

Maybe we are still on the first page, or even the first line. Perhaps the twenty-first century will be so distant to our descendants 10,000 years from now that the things we hold most important, which seem so permanent – our religions and sciences, Shakespeares and Napoleons – will be completely forgotten, no more relevant or comprehensible to those future humans who colonise the stars than the fi reside chatter of our hunter- gatherer ancestors is to us. Or maybe we are in the last chapter… on the last page? Perhaps this is it, and everything that has happened thus far represents the total sum of what humanity will achieve, because tomorrow some catastrophe will precipitate our demise.

With this zoomed- out perspective in mind, I ask another question: if you were to draw a line charting the human story, what shape would it be? I offer six options. Decide which, if any, you think is correct. As the American composer Leonard Bernstein once said, “I reserve the right to be wrong!”

1. Progress

In material terms the human story has clearly been one of constant progress. By every metric there is simply more of everything – and more of good things. There are 8 billion people in the world; we only crossed 1 billion in the year 1800. We are richer, healthier, and live longer than ever before. Our cities are bigger and our buildings taller. We have cars and aeroplanes and we have strolled on the Moon. We have anaesthetics, the internet, air conditioning, artificial intelligence, and nuclear reactors. Billions of people today lead a life of greater luxury and comfort than any medieval king, and this process shows no signs of slowing. The veil of human ignorance is being lifted.

What wonders will be invented next? Surely the human story is one of progress, perhaps with moments of decline but marked by an irresistible upward trajectory. Work remains to be done – a third of people alive today do not have access to a toilet, for example – but there is a general belief that we can and will set things right. To give you some sense of this pattern of material progress and its ubiquity I offer two statistics:

2. Decline

Most people care about family more than phones and believe love is more important than money. If we are speaking about the things that truly matter, the human story might have been one of decline – even as we become materially richer, we are becoming poorer in some more fundamental way. Think of Adam and Eve in a state of pure bliss, who ate of the Tree of Knowledge and were exiled by God. As Milton wrote of their banishment:

Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon;

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:

They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.²

Are we like Adam and Eve? In some real sense we humans were once in harmony with nature. Then the cognitive revolution happened. We invented language, law, and politics. We built walls, forged swords, and started slaughtering one another, thieving and committing genocides, plunging millions into squalor to raise up a lucky few, lusting after fame and gold, and destroying this once-green Earth in the process. Maybe there was a time of spiritual perfection, a time we have long left behind, sailing further every year from that island of natural harmony into a manmade ocean of blood. All the features of modern life – fashion, social media, careers, TikTok – might be signs of our regression. Every generation since the dawn of civilisation has believed the old days were better; are not “golden ages” always in the past?

3. Cyclical

Certain scholars say civilisation follows set patterns of rise and fall, marked by the same signs of growth and symptoms of decline. Just as the Roman Empire turned to “bread and circuses”, so too will the United States. Another power will emerge, enjoy the limelight, and collapse, before another rises, thinking “This time it will be different!”, only to fade. We, like the seasons, revolve in an endless cycle.

Philosophers and sages have also wondered whether the whole universe is eternally recurring. Some say that everything now happening has happened before, and will go on happening in exactly this way, forever. Others say the universe, though cyclical, never contains quite the same events. Think of it as like playing a video game half a dozen times. The story always concludes the same way even though no two playthroughs are identical. In Hindu cosmology the lifetime of a universe is called a kalpa. Each kalpa lasts four and a half billion years, after which comes pralaya, the destruction of that universe, followed by the creation of another universe.

Has science done away with this sort of ancient speculation? No. Big Bounce Theory posits that our expanding universe will eventually contract and, upon reaching a state of near- infinite density, explode outwards again, in another Big Bang. According to Heat Death Theory the universe will go on expanding until energy becomes maximally distributed. Stars go out and black holes fade. All is darkness… until, after enough time has passed, quantum tunnelling leads to the creation of another universe.

4. Nothing Changes

Maybe all this talk of “progress, decline, and cycles” is misguided. Maybe there is no change whatsoever. Human nature has not altered one whit in the last 300,000 years. Some graffiti scrawled in the bars and bathhouses of Pompeii does more than a library of books to prove this.³

Romance:

Methe, a slave of Cominia from the town of Atella, loves

Chrestus. May Pompeian Venus be propitious in her heart to

them both and may they always live harmoniously.

Ribaldry:

Secundus likes to screw boys.

And, simply:

Aufidius was here.

Things around us change, but they do not represent real change. New countries are created and new machines invented – we use flushing toilets now! – but the fibre of our souls remains the same, and it is that which defines us. We fight the same spiritual and emotional battles our ancestors did thousands of years ago; we face the same struggle to do what is right. From the Katha Upanishad, an ancient Hindu scripture:

As the sun, who is the eye of the world,

Cannot be tainted by the defects in our eyes

Nor by the objects it looks on,

So the One Self, dwelling in all, cannot

Be tainted by the evils of the world.

For this Self transcends all!⁴

Human nature, like the Sun, cannot be tainted – shaped, influenced, affected – by the material world. Our condition, fixed and imperturbable, has an apparent sea of change – technology, ideas, wars, countries, fashions, books, cars, politics – revolving around it. But we, at the centre, have not changed, do not change, and cannot ever change.

5. Constant Change

This theory finds an echo in that popular saying: history rhymes but it never repeats. Similarities, yes, but the same thing never happens twice. Progress might go on forever – but it might not. We experience decline – but it is reversible. Thus the decisions we make matter because the future is not certain, everything is unprecedented, and there is no set pattern. Empires have fallen; an everlasting empire could yet rise.

Even if human nature is unchanging, different political and cultural regimes emphasise or repress particular elements of that nature. We have always fought wars, but we have fought them for many different reasons. There are nuclear bombs now, so surely geopolitics will never quite be the same. It can be comforting, even an excuse for indecision, to prognosticate about cycles of history. More challenging is this uncyclical prospect: that the stakes are always high, that present and future are not bounded by past. As the ancient and rather mysterious philosopher Heraclitus wrote: “You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”⁵

6. Unknowable

To see which direction something is going you need a certain amount of information. Since we do not know how big the future is we cannot properly judge the present or the past. Consider these graphs:

The first graph charts the population of Europe throughout the Middle Ages, showing a sudden decline during the Black Death in the fourteenth century. The second graph charts global population from 10,000 BCE up until today.

Whatever conclusions we draw from the first graph would certainly change in view of the bigger picture. Similarly, whatever conclusions we make about history up until now may become equally inconsequential if it transpires that we have been dealing with an absurdly small sample size. Without a sure frame of reference we cannot state with certainty what the shape of history is. It remains – and always must remain - a mystery.

So, where are we in The History of Humankind? I ask you this because we must maintain perspective when thinking about history, as we have been doing throughout this first pillar. Right now certain national or international problems seem like the most important things in the world, perhaps the most important things that have ever happened. But as we say this about our various crises, so people said the same about the First and Second World Wars, the Industrial Revolution, the Black Death, and so on. And don’t you think, for those Byzantine bureaucrats huddled by the walls of Constantinople as the Ottomans laid siege to the city in 1453, or for the librarians of Baghdad when Mongols battered at the gates in 1258, nothing more important had ever happened? I invite you to read this letter, sent to the King of Carchemish 3,000 years ago:

When your messenger arrived, the army was humiliated and the city was sacked. Our food in the threshing floors was burnt and the vineyards were also destroyed. Our city is sacked. May you know it! May you know it!⁶

For the Mycenaeans, Hittites, and Kassites, whose societies were wiped out in a fifty year hurricane of wars, mass migrations, and natural disasters known as the Bronze Age Collapse, the world as they knew it was literally ending. And yet here we are. Here you are, reading this book; here I am, writing it. So… what shape is history?

Sheehan Quirke’s book, The Cultural Tutor: Forty-Nine Lessons You Wish You’d Learned at School, is available from Penguin, Waterstones and Amazon now. To give you a sense of it, here’s the contents page for three of the book’s seven “pillars”...

Sheehan’s Substack has enough followers that I feel quite intensely jealous. If you wish to add to my troubles, you can join them here.

1. The Poems of Sappho, trans. Julia Dubnoff.

2. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book XII (1674).

3. Pompeiian graffiti: CIL 3457, 2048, and 6702.

4. The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Penguin: 1989).

5. The Fragments of Heraclitus, trans. John Burnet, in Early Greek Philosophy (Adam and Charles Black: 1920).

6. Translation of letter RS 20.18 from 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilisation Collapsed, Eric H. Cline (Princeton University Press: 2014).