The Past Is A Dangerous Country
Abhimanyu Jha
History, Philosophy, Psychology, Society, Politics
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Atomic Essay
The Past Is A Dangerous Country
"Charavaiti, charavaiti: keep moving, keep moving" - Aitareya Upanishad
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” - Native American Saying (?)
“Happiest people, like happiest nations, have no history.” - George Eliot + Me
“The past is another country.” - L P Hartley
"The times they are a changing" - Bob Dylan
One of the most famous lines of literature is the last line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus ‘The Great Gatsby’: “And so we beat on, boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
In this line, Fitzgerald was perhaps commenting on the psychology of his hero Gatsby, on the general tendency of us human beings to get forever stuck in the past wallowing in nostalgia for times that have gone by and will never come again. Or perhaps he was commenting on the American society, saying that the American ideal that 'we can become whoever we want if we just fight hard enough' was false. And Gatsby could never have escaped his past as the son of a North Dakota farmer and entered the upper classes to become an equal of his hearththrob Daisy.
But when I read the line of Fitzgerald, I see it in a very different light. I see it being true for entire human societies at an entirely different level. And especially, I see the line manifested in a large number of human conflicts - the key reason why there is so much of never-ending violence and bloodshed in the world.
When I look at the major ongoing conflicts, I see generations stuck in a bloody time-warp the way Fitzgerald describes the forever stuck boat in his sublime sentence.
For me, the boat in the line stands for each individual generation. And the current that is dragging each boat into the past so each generation is stuck in the same horrifying place? The attachment of human beings, and entire societies, to their past/s - whether they love a certain past and want to bring it back, or hate it and wish that past had never existed.
The past is not just another country, as L P Hartley once said. It’s a country fraught with dangers for anyone. And depending upon who you are and where you are, it can be the most dangerous country you can visit in the world.
Sometimes, the best choice you can make, is to never visit it.
There is a native American saying that goes: “We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”
This is an uplifting egoless generational view that looks to the future, not at the past.
It says our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who are to come and live on this earth, who will one day walk on the sand and dust we are walking on now, matter more than our ancestors - our ancestors who came, lived their lives however they lived, and went back into the infinity. Our ancestors who, unless you believe in reincarnations, will never come again. (And even if you believe in reincarnations they will be back in later generations anyway which makes the coming generations even more important).
And if that is the case, it would be a crime for us adults to take our psychological hurts, the holes in our sorry hearts, the tragedies and complexes and psychoses of our own lives, and inject those hurts and fears and hatreds and bitternesses into the memories of our children’s future.
Only a generation holding such an egoless view as described in the Native American saying, seeing its kids as travelers and denizens of the future rather than as custodians of the past or warriors fighting fight to retrieve it or preserve it, can free the generational boat from the diabolical current that Fitzgerald describes.
Sometimes adults teach kids about the past, tell them stories of once-upon-a-time so the kids can understand their roots, where they come from. But an equal number of times adults drag their kids into the past, hold the kids there, teach the kids about themselves, their ancestors and their histories, pull them to fight into their historical battles, not because it’s good for the kids, but because the adults don’t want to feel lonely. Don’t want to feel unsafe, don’t want to feel without control. They want the kids to be by their sides as life goes by, want the kids to listen to them and understand them — their memories, their desires, their dreams, their hurts, their fears — and do what the adults want or at least what the adults are themselves doing, win for adults the fights they are fighting. They fear if they don’t pull the kids back to themselves, bring them to where they are, they will become strangers to their own kids. And in the process they mire the kids into the past by injecting the kids with the memorial poison filling their hearts.
The future is a stranger. And the more rapidly the times change, the stranger is that stranger. If the kids are to be travelers and denizens of that strange place called future, then the adults must either allow the kids to slowly become strangers. Or even better, travel with the kids to the future themselves and become strangers to their own past. But they can’t continue to live in the same place, stay where they are, or worse, go further back into the past, and do right by their kids. They can’t fulfill their parental responsibilities the way they should if they remain prisoners of their unhappy (or happy) past.
One of the ancient Sanskrit philosophical texts, Aiteraya Upanishad, has a simple, transformational phrase consisting of just one word repeated once: Charavaeti, charavaeti. Keep moving, keep moving.
Recognizing the cycles of nature, the constant changes and transformations that things in nature like the honey bee and the sun undergo, the lines in the Upanishad ask us to recognize that we are beings of nature too. And so we must submit ourselves mindfully to this central paradigm of constant change and keep moving.
In short, adults need to change the way we see the world. Till now, hostages of our pasts, obsessed with the holes in our egotistic hearts, we have seen the world primarily in terms of frameworks like countries, ideologies, religions, races, political parties etc. It’s easy to see why. These frameworks, these entities, these point of views, these ways of looking at the world, give us identities, give us communities, which in turn help us create a continuity with the past and feel secure. Mostly these frameworks, these entities don’t change with time, and even when they do, the change happens excruciating slowly - keeping our identities and communities intact and providing us with lifeboats in a tumultuous sea of changes. In fact that is perhaps the most important purpose of these identity and community bestowing frameworks: to let us define today in terms of yesterday and make sure that today hasn’t changed much.
Adults need that. Identity. Stability. Continuity. Community. Security. We need that to go about our daily lives, protect ourselves from foreseen and unforeseen risks, make the world go round, take care of our kids who will one day take care of the future.
But the world doesn’t only go round. It also moves forward in the one framework that scares us the most because it reminds of our changeability, loss of our identity, our mortality, our death. One framework that our evolutionary biological programming, focused on survival, hasn’t really taught us to grapple with.
TIME.
Fitzgerald's famous line from my point of piew is thus about time, about the past, about memory, about the hold time and past and memory, together, have on us.
And about these currents holding the generational boat in their deathly grip, making it go round and round around the endless whirlpools of never-ending conflict.
It's time each generation stuck in its past worked to free the next generational boat from the diabolical Fitzgeraldian current.
Topics
History, Philosophy, Economics, Ethics, Politics, Governance, Society