The Telescope of History

Guide: "This wall was built around 972! Isn't that cool?"
Mother to child: "Look, dear, that wall is from when Jesus was alive!"

...

OK, that's a slightly different scale of problem than I'm really able to address. But it is related to a very interesting phenomenon.

People see history through a telescope.

Or, better, they see history like a telescope: the closest bit is small, manageable, able to be seen in detail; then moving away, they get larger and less focused. What I mean is, our perspective on past time isn't even, when it comes to being able to make out details, sort out chronology, and above all, to understand differences. The farther back in time we go, the more we have a tendency to lump everything together.

This is different from the issue that, by and large, the father back we go the fewer sources there are for the historian to work with and so we can't necessarily investigate every last issue as thoroughly. Going back, there is greater willingness to create groupings which wouldn't have made much sense to contemporaries.

To illustrate:
It is fairly easy for the average adult today to differentiate between decades in the 20th century (many of which they might have lived through): the 90s are not the 80s are not the 70s are not the 60s... I imagine you can fill in the rest of the sequence.

Before the first World War, things get murkier. Despite being told that something is Victorian, many museum visitors will then ask "so when is this from?" There might be a disjunct between knowing the name of an era and having some dates to pin it on, but when I specify that it's from the last half of the Victorian era (say, 1870-1901), they would probably have a hard time knowing what had changed in context since the first half--despite this spanning over 6 decades.

Creeping backwards, "the Renaissance" is more or less a single period in our normal consciousness (possibly separate from the irritatingly-similar-feeling "Enlightenment"). Worse, the thousand years of "the Middle Ages" are all more or less cut from one cloth. "The Romans", with their centuries of expansion and shift from Kingdom to Republic to Empire are treated in the main as a single unit, like their earlier (they're earlier, right?) cultural model, the Greeks. We won't even attempt to delineate the Egyptians; I certainly couldn't properly identify and place the different eras of their expansive history. (And of course, all this refers only to the eras of history considered closely-enough linked with our own, Western culture to bring them to our public consciousness).


This is the reason why people think the Vikings are part of the Bronze Age (to leave aside the other problems people have in placing them chronologically). Strangely (and somewhat perversely) I think it is also the reason why Victorian things are confused with things people can actually remember, alongside things that are far older than the Victorians.* Pre-modern (essentially, pre-20th-century) history is all a great swath of "old", with some divisions more important than others.

This is not a complaint about the lack of public understanding (or teaching) of history, it is simply an interesting factor of how we view past cultures. As a medievalist, I like to break down the early Middle Ages, the central ones, the high, the late(r)... but of course there are reasons why "periodization" is railed against by academics! And an Egyptologist could do a far better job than I at marking similar points of evolution within their focus. These are not necessarily things that everyone needs to fully intuit (though all knowledge is good knowledge here, to be sure).

What it might be a complaint about, however, is how it leads us to treat the past. It annuls nuance. When thinking in monoliths, highly selective features will come to the forefront and push aside all the instances--more frequent than not, usually--where such-and-such was not the case. It encourages a focus on the breaks in society rather than the evolutions and continuities. And it makes everything bland. The pace of social evolution has certainly accelerated since the Industrial Revolution encouraged ever-more-rapid technological evolution, and we live at a turbulent social moment (moving, I hope, towards a better model). But this perspective makes people forget that people in the past were living also in their moment, that they experienced change (and certainly whined enough about the loss of the "good old days" to give any Victorian or twentieth-century-ian a run for their money), that their fashions evolved, and that, at their point in time, they too were modernity.

This is perhaps best encapsulated by the phrase, particularly common among British museum-goers, "those times". What times? All of the Victorian period? the Renaissance? Classical antiquity? Yes. Existence is relegated to a "type", in which the variations of experience are blurred. Everyone, no matter their background, will resort to this approximation of history for some era/place or another, because there is simply too much human experience to keep track of. But being aware that that's what we're doing--and this is something few people seem to be taught to bear in mind--means that we encourage ourselves to look for the human viewpoint even in the distant past instead of resorting to "types" that work only under abstracted rules.

It's not always easy, or helpful, to keep track of the details. But perhaps, at least for the man who came by asking in all sincerity whether the Vikings were homo erectus**, it would be a good place to start understanding the difference between hundreds and tens of thousands of years.


*In some cases, sure, the Victorian technology/artifacts/institutions did continue long after the period. But the same cultural context did not apply, so assuming their sweetshop sells the same sweets your parents ate is unlikely to produce results even though, yes, they're all sold in jars!
**He seemed dissatisfied with all our reassurances that they were in fact homo sapiens, just like us.

[Edit: A friend of mine has used this idea to generate a discussion about his own area of specialty. You can check it out here!]