I wanted to get down the regular and obligatory qualifying post about talking history, as much for myself as for my friend, the reader, who deigns to slog their way through this stuff with me. To begin with, the really good scientists will tell you: well, science is always provisional. A lot of this stuff is really useful and illuminating, but it is always changing as new information and analytical technologies and methodologies come online, so don't attach to any of it too much. Use it warily and responsibly as it works for you in your daily life, and as it appeals to your sense of what is true to the nature of reality and to the stirrings of the heart and spirit.
This standpoint has as much in common with the ever-shifting, infinitely complex, and elusive nature of reality as it does with the perpetually revolutionary technological and material nature of modern culture in time and space, in which existing knowledge structures and provisional cultural traditions are perpetually demolished as new technological modalities of perception and communication come online, lending to the wide cultural perception of the fragility of any sort of epistemology. And this is a standpoint which can provoke reactionary swings of the pendulum to fundamentalism as well.
To apply this to history, one good example is the technological and methodological revolutions in archeology which have allowed for a higher resolution of daily life for average peoples living in past eras, a perception that was previously limited to the writings of limited historical individuals. In consideration that writing was incredibly expensive and exclusive, what we often got were detailed progressions of court and aristocratic activity, especially in the case of the ancient world.
An awesome development that changes our understanding of history. But undergirding this development too is the cultural premium placed upon what is written and recorded, and the whole mass of skills, traditions, and technologies associated with that activity, reinforced in part by the constantly increasing material and technological complexity of the modern world, which plays a part in necessitating that cultural premium on written and recorded information.
To bring things back around, I like to apply the provisional understanding to the history as well. These are incredible stories and findings, that given the amount of time and space I have here to discuss them given my life circumstances, I do have to do a fair amount of simplification and compression, and then organizing it visually through metaphor to make certain salient points. And that is setting aside me just getting something wrong or mistaking what is currently known due to my limited time, energy, and understanding. Further, even "knowing" something as it is currently and collectively understood, there is always much more to it going on underneath; the work is never done. So take it all as provisional and subject to revision as new information or correction comes in.
But I'm not just shoveling bullshit either. Part of the attempted conveyance of aesthetic beauty and meaning in this project is to "get it right," or at least good enough to make sense and in harmony with the information that we have, and insofar as it furthers my own project in accordance with sound practical living and witnessing in our current time with the resources that I have. We're all moving through this perpetual material and technological convulsion together, and the ensuing ecological and civilizational instability related to all of that, and doing the best we can to make sense of it all with what we have.
