Contingency, Plasticity, Mortality
Some scattered thoughts
One of the things that studying history gives you is a sense of how contingent things are. That is, things just 'happen to be' the way they happen to be, and they didn't have to be that way.1 Things could have turned out differently. The world in which we currently live, could be very different.
I think a lot about this when people want to inscribe their contemporary models of how humans are meant to do society, their sociological and anthropological models, as simply "how we are", "the way we are meant to be", or "how God made us to be".
Unlike the meme, I spend far more time thinking about Sparta than Rome. Not because I think ancient Sparta was a good idea, but because it was a radically alternative model for organising human relationships, and they gave it a really good go. They really went for the whole military state, minimalist family life, strict austerity, gender division, massive slave class. And they kept it up for ages.
But it's not just Sparta. A little comparative anthropology and historical perspective helps you see that the way we conceive of family life and family units, or economic activity, or so on and so forth, could be radically different than it is. Which is a warning not to think that what we have is in any way normative.
I have been listening/reading a history of the second world war, and reflecting on Germany in the period 1870-1920 is also incredibly strange. The world they inhabit is so foreign to us: the army as a social entity unto itself, people's whole lives encompassed by their political organisations and affiliations, the various youth movements, the role of the press, the social hierarchies, and so on. It reminds of two things: firstly, how difficult it really is to understand and imagine oneself in a totally different society, because so many of one's ways of thinking are bounded by the society and time one lives in. It's difficult to simply imagine what it's like to be there and then, in a way that captures the way they would think.
Secondly, how plastic human beings are. We are a highly adaptive species. Human beings can change to survive all sorts of conditions: physical, environmental, but especially social. Yes, there are parameters, and we become less flexible as we age, but humans are remarkable, wondrous creatures, and the varieties of ways we can organise ourselves, and survive, is astounding. This includes the resilience humans show under some of the most inhumane, cruel conditions.
For all this, we are but specks in the cosmos. With some calculations, we may be currently at 117 billion humans who have ever lived. That is a staggering number. The current population is around 8.2 billion, which is a large fraction of that. It is hard to conceive of so much human life, and put it in the perspective of so much human death. For all our vigour, we are mortal creatures, each doomed to a certain lifespan of unknown days, after which our legacy lasts but a few generations if fortunate. What is a human being? What's their measure? And that God is mindful of each human life? These are thoughts on a scale beyond our comprehension.
I'm only dimly aware of where this reflection is going. Except that a dogmatic insistence that we know exactly how human life ought to be organised, and that we've finally figured it out, and this is social recipe for society for all time, seems like a staggering version of ahistorical hubris. Finitude in the face of infinity means we are small children, all - staring into a colossal abyss, wondering if our individual lives have any greater significance, trying to make a scratch, a dint, anything, out of our four score years plus or minus.
I mean, setting aside questions about God's providence