Positive Liberty

I’m a historian. I’m also a lover of science fiction, and this means that past and future are both fascinating to me. They just don’t always sit so easily with one another.

Today I received from amazon.com The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith. Smith was among the first of science fiction’s universe-builders, and his are stories of planoforming ships, extradimensional religion, and a planet with the improbable name of Old North Australia. They’re amazing stuff, obviously the inspiration of later writers like Frank Herbert and Orson Scott Card. Still I can’t help but notice that, like many other science fiction writers, Cordwainer Smith has it in for historians.

Much like Isaac Asimov, Walter Miller, and a host of others, Smith holds that our future will be almost entirely ignorant of the past as we now know it. In his imagined future, Christianity is remembered only as the Old Strong Religion, whose sign was a fish… and that’s about it. Famously, Asimov’s future humans even forget the name of Earth: Mankind’s origins will lie entirely forgotten in the legendary past, and the question, “Where was our home world?” will be left to crank archaeologists who have nothing better to keep them busy.

What if they’re right? What if all the effort of teaching and learning facts about human history is utterly futile, doomed to be overwhelmed one day by entropy, technological complexity, and the ever-growing volume of history itself? I’d like to think, perhaps, that in ten thousand years, someone could still go to a computer, type the words “Maximilien Robespierre,” and get information about the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution. He’d be able to read about the days when mankind lived on only one planet, before they’d learned the secret to faster-than-light travel. Perhaps my hypothetical future human will find something meaningful, but perhaps he will not. We don’t have enough experience with history yet to know how it will hold up in ten thousand years.

Let’s take the worst-case scenario: Suppose that every effort of every historian to discover the facts of the past, to impart those facts to the public, and to catalogue and interpret them, will one day come to naught. What are we then doing as historians? Albert Einstein once said that education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. What will remain of history, after all of the detail has been forgotten? Learning history is beside the point: What will be the historical education of humanity’s future? That is to say, what are the great, enduring lessons of history? Has anyone really worked on this question lately?

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