We call them the Dark Ages, but all that we mean is that we cannot see. R G Collingwood
I have written previously about Dante, who died seven hundred years ago. He is considered by some critics to be the greatest poet of the Western canon, whose artistic innovation in the Commedia transformed our understanding of what it means to be human. One of the conceits of the poem is that Dante, the narrator of the story, is guided through hell and purgatory by Virgil, the Roman poet whom he greatly admired. Previously, I had taken this to be solely a literary device, that allows for a continuous dialogue between the two protagonists as they travel, by which the fates of the various characters they encounter can be explained to the reader and, at the same time, an implicit assertion by Dante that he too ranked as one of the great poets. Recently, my attention was drawn to a point that previously I had missed entirely: Virgil lived in the age of the Emperor Augustus, born in 70BCE and died in 19BCE, whereas Dante was born in 1265CE and died in 1321CE. The distance in time between Dante’s death and Virgil’s death – 1340 years – is almost twice as long as the distance between the date of Dante’s death and the present time. Dante is far more contemporary with us than Virgil was with him.
Now consider a modern-day poet. Bob Dylan this year celebrated his eightieth birthday. Growing up, he would have enjoyed the US’s post-war economic boom, in his twenties he was part of the Civil Rights Movement, in the seventies he lived through the Vietnam War, the oil crisis, and the first landing on the moon. In more recent years he will have encountered novelties such as the internet, electric cars, and 3D-printing. Now imagine a woman who celebrated her eightieth birthday in the year of his birth. She would have been born in 1861, the year that the Civil War broke out in the US, and during her lifetime she would have experienced the development of electric lights, motor cars, the first human flight in an aeroplane, and the first global war. She would also have been entertained by innovations such as photography, the movies, and jazz music. The world of her birth – when none of the above were part of daily life – seems unimaginably remote to me. While Bob Dylan seems to be my contemporary, an imaginary woman who lived from 1861 to 1941 appears to come from way back in the historical past.
Psychologists have described the phenomenon of hyperbolic discounting, which refers to the common tendency to give much greater weight to small rewards in the near future, as compared with larger rewards that we might need to wait some time for. The phrase was first used by Richard Herrnstein in 1961, to describe the behaviour of subjects in his experiments, who tended to judge potential rewards in proportion not only their scale but also their immediacy. This widespread trait, which I plan to write about in a future text, has serious implications for many economic and political problems, such as our failure to make sensible choices about the sustainability of pension schemes and the unsustainability of energy supply from fossil fuels. For the moment, however, I want to consider a comparable tendency, but one that concerns what has already happened rather than what has yet to happen, by which we assign much greater value and importance to events in the recent past at the expense of those which took place much earlier. By discounting the past more aggressively as it becomes more distant, we mistakenly imagine that Virgil and Dante shared an outlook on life, but one that is very different from ours, or we convince ourselves that during the last forty years there was more rapid and significant technological change than during the years from 1880 to 1920.
Earlier this year I read Jill Lapore’s history of the United States, called These Truths. Published in 2018, it is an impressive telling of a national story, with admirable emphasis on the centrality of issues of equality and racial justice throughout, as well as some astute observations about the ways in which various communication technologies, such as written diaries and letters, newspapers, the radio, and the internet have influenced the way in which the national story has been understood. That said, as I progressed through the text, I found myself increasing bothered by the disproportionate space given to recent events, many of which were described through details that were of little historical import. Her book has 784 pages of text (excluding the short epilogue) and is divided into four chronological sections, which together cover 525 years, from 1492 to 2016. The first section covers 308 years in 152 pages (that is 59% of the time period in 19% of the text) while the fourth and final section covers 71 years in 264 pages (that is 14% of the time period in 34% of the text). While it is certainly true that contemporary readers are likely to find more recent events of greater interest, since they themselves might remember them directly, or might remember their parents talking about them, it is not true that they are more important for understanding the present situation.
By this, I don’t mean that current political debates should be settled by direct reference to the intentions of people who lived two hundred and fifty years ago, as some conservative jurists have argued. It is not as if the right of an individual to own an automatic assault rifle or the right of a company to provide unlimited funds to a political campaign were matters that entered James Madison’s thoughts. My point, rather, is that a clear understanding of the divisive issues in North America today, such as racial justice, immigration, economic inequality, and international trade, cannot be achieved without knowledge of what has been said and done over the past five hundred years. These problems did not originate in November 2016 (nor November 1980). I do not blame Lapore for the balance of her content, since her book is aimed at a wide popular audience rather than a narrower scholarly one, and she was no doubt encouraged by her publisher to dwell on the events of the recent past that are fresh in contemporary minds. Nevertheless, this process – perhaps we might call it backwards hyperbolic discounting – leads us astray in our efforts to understand how the present has evolved from the past, and the durability of certain forces – material and ideal – that have shaped how we live and think today.
If we are to escape the gravitational pull of the past, we need first to become aware of its strength and tenacity. To illustrate this point, consider the issue of migration, which is a highly divisive political issue in Europe and America. There are migrants trying to enter the European Union from the east – in particular, from Belarus and Afghanistan – and from the south, across the Mediterranean from West Africa and Syria, and some of those who succeed then continue on to Northern France to cross the Channel to reach England. Likewise, there are many Central Americans who are heading north through Mexico to try to cross into the United States. These migrants are often the victims of war or violence, or they have been displaced by changing weather patterns caused by the burning of fossil fuels. They are desperate to find a place to start a new and better life, where they can bring up their children. Many are skilled, multilingual, and keen to work, but their lives have been disrupted by the actions of the rich Western nations to where they are headed, whose military interventions and patterns of energy consumption are the principal causes of their displacement. Nonetheless, significant proportions of the populations of these same rich Western nations are strongly opposed to allowing migrants to settle in their countries, mostly owing to erroneous views about economics and culture. In a democratic system, strong opinions, however misguided, need to be taken account of by governments confronted by a steady and determined stream of immigrants.
Migration is not a new problem. In fact, like war, it is one of the oldest of human problems. Virgil’s epic poem, Aeneid, tells the story of Aeneas, a Trojan prince who escapes from the destruction of his city at the end of the decade-long war, and travels by ship with his son and a group of fellow citizens to establish a new home, where they will rebuild their lives and traditions and found a new empire. The chosen site is on the banks of the River Tiber and in time their city grew to become Rome, the heart of the greatest Mediterranean Empire of classical times. As Dante was well aware, the great reach of Rome’s dominions, and the peace established within them by the Emperor Augustus, who was Virgil’s patron, later allowed for the rapid spread of the Christian faith across the Middle East, and Western and Eastern Europe. Aeneas’s voyage and Augustus’s empire – both celebrated in Virgil’s poem – made possible the Christian world that Dante celebrated in his work.
That mighty Rome was founded by a shipload of migrants fleeing a terrible war, is a lesson that has been lost in time. Back in 1968, Enoch Powell, the leading English nationalist of the day, made an inflammatory speech attacking the government’s policy of welcoming immigrants from South Asia and the West Indies, who were needed to supplement the workforce. Powell, who had been a professor of classics in his early life, referred to Virgil’s poem in his speech, and in particular the vicious war that started when the Trojans arrived in Italy and announced their intention to stay and make a home there. Powell said, “as I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.” I have always been puzzled by this remark. First, because then as now, most English people do not read Virgil and would therefore not have understood who or what was being described. Second, those few English people who do read classical poetry would have known that ‘The Roman’ is Aeneas, at this stage still very much a Trojan prince – for the new city has yet to be founded – and therefore a newly arrived immigrant. While much blood was spilt in fighting, the Trojans prevailed and remained. If Powell were being serious by comparing England in 1968 with Italy at the time of Aeneas’s arrival, then what he appears to have prophesied was the dramatic re-birth of the British Empire under the leadership of the newly arrived immigrants.
I have no idea what Powell thought he was saying. I suspect he was primarily concerned to further his political career and thought a fiery speech on immigration a good issue to make himself popular with a section of the working class (in which he succeeded). Yet, for all the huff and puff he created for a short period, his influence on British public policy remained negligible, and fifty years later Britain continues to welcome hundreds of thousands of immigrants each year, because we need them for our economy and because many people recognise the value they bring to our culture and society. Similarly, a desire to limit immigration motivated many of those who voted in 2016 for Britain to leave the European Union and yet, only five years later, they are now discovering that levels of migration to Britain cannot fall without significant disruption to the economy and public services. Perhaps the best way of understanding the Brexit vote is to say that significant numbers of voters confused the long-term historical forces that drive the British economy with the short-term political arrangements that they were familiar with during their own lifetimes. In other words, they exhibited backwards hyperbolic discounting.
Overturning a constitutional decision made fifty years earlier was relatively easy but changing the enduring patterns of human behaviour throughout recorded history turns out to be a little harder. There have always been migrants – victims of war or famine – and there always will be. A very few – perhaps a child who today is camped on the US-Mexican border, or who is in a small, crowded boat crossing the Channel – might one day, like Aeneas, become the founder of a nation or an empire, and after their death they will be eulogised by the great poets. Others, the great majority, will be happy to live in peace and quiet, to study, to work, to retire with savings, and to enjoy a secure life with their family. If we look beyond the immediate past and take the long view – la longue durée – we will discover that there has always been vocal opposition to migration, often accompanied by lurid prophesies of disaster, and yet migration has continued despite all the fuss, and will no doubt carry on for many millennia to come.
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