Now we are awake

Clive Wearing was a musician who in the 1980s suffered an infection that destroyed his hippocampus, the part of the brain that lays down long-term memories. Thereafter Clive was unable to remember anything beyond a few minutes at a time. He lived in an eternally fleeting present, in his wife's words 'with no past to anchor it and no future to look ahead to'. As if to compensate, he maintained a diary in which he jotted down his thoughts every two or three minutes. The entries in the diary looked something like this:

10.20 Awake at last
10.23 Actually now I am awake
10.25 The above is mistaken. I am awake now!
10.28 No, no, no. NOW I am completely awake.
10.31 FINALLY WOKEN UP!!!!
10.33 Now I really am awake.
10.36 AWAKE FOR THE 1ST TIME IN YEARS
Etc. (See C Blakemore The mind machine pp. 55-8)

The human race suffers from a similar kind of amnesia. Each generation believes that it, at last, is awake, and that its parents and all the generations that went before were scarcely conscious.

This is what lies behind the belief that, until very recently, change has been minimal and only in our era has humanity achieved social and technological take-off. Previous generations are thought to have slumbered their way through lives that showed little variation from start to finish.

In my last post, I quoted a recent writer making this point. Another recent expression of it is the claim of the psychiatrist, R D Laing that "We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is disappearing".

To show that this attitude is itself a constant of history--just as Clive Wearing constantly believed himself to be waking up--I would like to offer some quotations from earlier writers on the same topic...

Our century has more history in its hundred years than had the whole world in the previous four thousand years; more books have been published in the last century than in the five thousand years before it; for it has profited by the recent inventions of typography, cannon and the marine compass.
-- Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639)

We have raised up a truly philosophical age, in which the deepest recesses of nature are laid open, in which splendid arts, noble aids to convenient living, a supply of innumerable instruments and machines, and even the hidden secrets of our bodies are discovered; not to mention the new light daily thrown upon antiquity.
-- Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716)

No age hath been more happy in liberty of enquiry than this.
-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Whoever reads these chronicles will find that, from the birth of Christ on, the whole history of the world in these hundreds of years is unparalleled, in every way.
-- Luther (1483-1546, in 1521)

I owe all the above to Pitirim Sorokin in Social and cultural dynamics pp. 272-3. To continue...

[The pace of change today] makes my head giddy.
-- Josiah Wedgwood (1730-95)

What marvellous, stupendous accomplishments human effort has achieved.
-- Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

As for the arts and skills, both those useful for the necessities of life and those created for pleasure, they were either invented or tested by our city [Athens], who then passed them to the rest of the human race to use.
-- Isocrates (436-338 BC)

The discovery of a means to test weights by balances and scales has delivered our life from fraud...Countless numbers of machines also exist...[and] are at hand every day: mills, blacksmiths' bellows, wagons, two-wheeled vehicles, turning lathes, and other things...
-- Vitruvius (1st century AD)