Looking at the past...

We are all in a dire situation. Whether we like it or not, we’re born into the time and place that we are. We have no choice; it is not up for negotiation. Not only are we born into that time and place, we’re born to a particular set of people. I’m not free to choose my parents; they are who they are. And since, as a child, I have no method of self-determination, I am a product of their particular modes of thinking. On top of that, my parents, who have been in pretty much in the same predicament as I am, are, along with me, completely reliant on the culture around them to provide us with all the necessary information about this world that I can’t simply reach out and touch, taste, smell, hear, or see on my own. The only knowledge we have beyond our senses, is the knowledge that we’ve inherited from our collective past.

So, where does that leave us? Well, one upshot is that I don’t have to relearn math in order to do it. In fact, while we ascribe brilliance to Pythagoras, Euclid, Leibniz, and the other great mathematicians of the past, nowadays their life’s work can be reasonably mastered by an astute high school student. I also don’t have to appreciate my own novels and poems. I’ve come into possession of all that Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck and Walt Whitman have written even without their ever knowing me. In fact, I could write my own stories or compose my own poems while consciously or unconsciously building upon my literary influences from the past. Even the very words I use are a product of a language that was forged over the centuries of peoples interacting with one another.

Without having lifted a finger, I am the heir of all civilization and the benefits therein, just like my parents, and their parents before that. I am born not just into a family, but into a community, a culture. Our participation in this wider civilization is our peculiarly human characteristic. Aside from received knowledge, from where else can I know anything? I can’t test out and derive all there is to know on my own, not in a million lifetimes. Indeed, everything I know actually took a few million lifetimes to put together. For this reason, I don’t just keep a working knowledge of the past, but I revere the past, the source from which my knowledge is drawn.

-Steve K.

(this was originally the beginning of a larger article I had been working on...that article moved in a different direction and is forthcoming soon)