Why do we write things down?
Oh no, not one of these.
Come on.
So we remember, I guess.
Exactly. Memories are fallible. If you put it on paper, it doesn't change.
Sure. So?
It's the entire basis of history. If you're dealing with elements of the past that aren't some kind of documented account, then you're doing archaeology or anthropology. But if it's a record of any kind, it's history. I will say, this also applies to oral history, but oral history can serve the dual purposes of passing down ancient knowledge and shaping future values, since you can change the story a little at a time to suit your needs. Since it's not put in any kind of fixed form, it's more a form of cultural transmission than a record, per se.
Yeah, I'm still with you.
Sometimes I think about that Idaltu Tomeworld, how they wrote down what we assume is the entire history of their race and used the surface of a whole planet to do it, as an eternal testament to their presence in the universe. As if the fold vectors weren't enough.
It's a bit much if you ask me.
I've never met an Idaltu before but I can't imagine they are anything but "a bit much." They didn't do anything small. So, focusing on them for a moment, they left their marks all over the universe. There's the Tomeworld, the fold vectors, the fact that they were probably wiped out by the Overlords. Their relationship with the Overlords, whatever it was, must have drastically shaped everything that came after. We're living in their shadow.
So you've told me.
Hey, I don't need the snark. What I find myself coming back to is the idea that history--or at least, the records that end up comprising it--are a form of imposition on the future. You are handing knowledge to future generations that they might be inclined to trust just because it's old. There's a certain authority to old things, wouldn't you agree? We look at the Code of Hammurabi. Did you know there are multiple, earlier written codes of law? But we think of Hammurabi because that's the one we found first. Anyway, as laws go, they're pretty brutal. Lie on your neighbor? Death. Burglary? Death. Slave defying his master? He gets to cut your ear off. Nasty stuff. Witness tampering? Death. Too broke to pay restitution? Death. Helping slaves escape? Death. Banditry? Death. King sends you on a job and you don't do it or you hire someone to do it for you? Death! Partying too hard? Death. Cutting corners on construction? Death.
Jesus. I get the point.
Well, I'm just saying, that's what's in there. Lots of other stuff, too, but the number of things that get you a death sentence or some kind of mutilation is pretty foul. There are also a bunch of tit-for-tat laws, like if you hit some guy's daughter and she miscarries and dies? The woman's father gets to kill your daughter. Imagine getting the death penalty because your relative fucked up. I'll point out this was mainly done to women. There were some laws where your son might be killed in exchange for killing another man's son, but most of these "kill your relative" laws treat women like livestock. You kill my cow? I get to kill your cow. Except the cows are actually daughters.
Charming.
Right, so we've spent a lot of time studying this, and other ancient codes of law. Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with knowing this information. There's a lot of value in knowing what the world was like in the past. But we hold these old things in reverence without thinking very much about what they actually are. They're almost like religious icons. Rarely does someone think, "the world would be better off if this and all knowledge of it was destroyed."
I guess you're going to argue people should think that more often?
I realize I put myself on the side of some pretty horrible people with a position like that. I'm not a zealot blowing up statues because I think they're idolatry, though. I just think we end up owned by the past because of our obsession with it. It was common practice for ancient cities that the city would eventually become unlivable, or get invaded, or burn down, or what have you, and what did people do? Well, they just built right on top of the rubble. They didn't even clear the land again, necessarily. Usually, they didn't bother. They just built right on top of whatever was left. You hear all the time about ancient cities being excavated and they find layer after layer, each one separated by decades or centuries. It's like layers of sediment, but the layers are history. Every layer you uncover tells you a new story and takes you to a different point in time. In that sense, history is literally built on an ever-evolving foundation. But what if, every once in a while, we just blew up the foundation? We destroyed the whole city, burned it to ashes, spread the ashes, forbade its old name to be spoken... just erased it from existence altogether. There were people deemed so terrible that exactly this was done to them. Their names were stricken from all records and it was even illegal to utter their names or speak of their deeds--or crimes. Sometimes that was quite successful! We have no idea who these people are. We might have some idea about what they did, but the person is lost to time. They'll never be anything but a nameless footnote.
People say we should do that whenever there's a mass shooting or a terrorist attack or whatever.
Right? I think that's essentially impossible in today's world, where everything is recorded a million times over. The situation is orders of magnitude more complicated than it was five thousand years ago. Back then, you could be born in a town, grow up there, spend your life there, die there. Nobody outside the town would ever know you existed unless some record of you was put down. So, if you did something bad enough, it wasn't that hard to "unperson" you. Trial, execution, burn or bury the body, and tell everybody in town: don't you dare ever talk about this person. If you do, you'll share their fate. That's gotta be pretty effective.
There's just no way to do something like that today, not without some kind of extremely draconian mass data collection and retention system that can also control what gets retained anywhere. Speaking for my own time, things never quite consolidated to that level, and thank goodness for that. The world increasingly splitting apart meant nobody had full control over the digital landscape. There were countries that intentionally held onto information everyone else wanted destroyed, just out of spite. I mean, that's kind of funny. Doesn't North Korea host a bunch of warez sites just to poke a finger in America's eye? Sounds like something they'd do. That lack of true centralization is the only reason some things got preserved at all.
The fucked up part is that nobody really chooses, on a grand scale, what is kept for the distant future. You ever watch Doctor Who?
I'm afraid I'm a total stereotype and love the Tenth Doctor.
Ah, who doesn't? I assume you know it's been around for decades. It's hard to imagine something like this happening now, but there are 97 missing Doctor Who episodes. The BBC doesn't have them. No fans apparently recorded them. Could be somebody has them rotting away in a basement somewhere, but it's not likely. They're just... gone. Before the twentieth century, though, that was basically the norm for everything, wasn't it? Time is like a sieve. The longer things go on, the more stuff gets left behind. What we have of the past dwindles and dwindles, the further back you go. Ancient people were pretty prolific writers, considering their means and the limited levels of literacy. We know for a fact that thousands of years ago, regular people put written graffiti on various monuments, like "my girlfriend and I fucked here," "the king's a dickhead," or even just "Joe was here." But imagine how much of that, how much trivial and inconsequential writing, has been lost forever. All of that is history, too, but it's beyond our ability to retrieve.
Not your ability, though?
That's a complicated question. Maybe at some point I'll give you the whole spiel about how bringing otherwise lost artifacts from the past into the future can seriously disrupt the timeline. There are factors you might not even think about. Imagine an item where we have a rough idea of when it was made, but we don't know exactly when it disappeared. Now, imagine you go back and grab it shortly after its creation, or even shortly before the window where we lost track of it. How many people's lives might that object have touched, that you've now caused untold disruption to? People could die because of this. What if it was lent to the person who currently has it? What if it's a prized possession that belongs to someone else, and now that person is accused of losing it? Their life could be ruined. Under some of that Code of Hammurabi shit, he could get the death penalty for something like this.
I hadn't thought of that.
Well, what reason do most people have to think about something like that? We're not all time travelers!
But I think a lot about the things that were lost, and how in many ways that frees us from whatever shackles those items would've put on us. To give you a contemporary example, look at how many weird guys pine for the Roman Empire. So much of the Imperium's history survived and has provided, for better or worse, a number of models for national aspiration, for government, for human rights, etc. There are people who imagine that this was the height of European greatness, even though there was no such thing as a "European" back then, or even nations as we think of them now. It's a bit of a paradox, because it's not like people want to bring back the Roman Empire exactly as it was, but rather to cherry pick random elements of it, shuffle them around, call it a sound historical narrative, and then use it as an appeal to tradition. This is how the Romans did things, and look how long their empire flourished! Clearly, that's what we need to do! Maybe we'd be better off if a lot of the knowledge we have had simply disappeared into the mists of time. Then, people could only speculate about what it was really like, and everyone else could more easily dismiss those weirdos because it's obvious they're just making shit up.
I don't know that you'll ever get rid of appeals to tradition like that. It's just a fact of life.
True. It's just kind of a mindfuck to think about the fact that we have no idea how the future will see us.
You do have an idea, though!
OK, I'm going to put that to rest right now. I've been to the future, even the distant future. But I'm not from those times. I didn't grow up in those cultures, in those reference frames. I can't ever understand the world the way they do. Regardless of how they see the past, I can never see it the way they do. It's simply unknowable to me. Just taking you as an example, you were born when?
1996.
I was born 70 years after that. That's a few generations apart. As much as I like this era, I'll never relate to it the way you do, and it's not just because I'm old as shit. Our basic formative experiences are just completely different and incompatible.
I've never actually dropped into a specific time and place to find this out, but it would be wild to think that in a thousand years one of the few things that might survive of this era is, let's say, Funko Pops. They get found in the rubble of millions of houses. They come in a wide variety. They look not entirely unlike the types of ancient figurines that today's archaeologists classify as fertility idols and so forth. Imagine they decide that this era must have had a popular religion with a vast pantheon of gods. That would be laughable to you and me, but who knows what future humans might think, if they only have limited information to judge the past by?
I think that also highlights the danger of looking to the past for things to recapture and rebuild. You'll never be able to rebuild something from the past exactly as it was, especially something abstract like an empire. Bringing it all back around... the Koraxians, to me, have always embodied the foolhardiness of such endeavors. They are extremely long-lived, but they have no living memory of when they were the Overlords. They have myths, they have records, they have artifacts. They think that's enough to rebuild that former glory, or at least their own spin on it. But really, they're just seeking to capture a past that's dead and gone and that they don't even remember accurately. Instead of forging a path forward, they reach endlessly into the past in a futile effort to rebuild the impossible. Fucked up to make that your entire cultural project, you know?
Uh, yeah.