Jottings from the Granite Studio

Interesting post on the academic blog, New Kid on the Hallway (”The Glory of Progress“) about the tendency by students and even some scholars to assume that because people from the past didn’t write what we would write or think the way we would think, that somehow this means they were…well, not as smart as we who live in the present day. (I’m excerpting larger than usual sections because the website is blocked in China.)

Something I run into relatively regularly is the idea that people in the past were stupider than modern people. (Granted, it’s not usually stated as bluntly as it was today, when a student explained something we were talking about by saying literally that medieval people were stupider than modern people, but the idea frequently underlies other comments.) I’m curious about how students define “the past” and “modern” in thinking about this - I suspect that they actually draw (entirely unconsciously) on an old school, secular humanist Enlightenment vision of history that disses the Middle Ages, and that they don’t actually believe that the ancient Greeks and Romans were less intelligent than people today - but I’m sure that this idea pops up in many fields of history. Apart from the Enlightenment vision, I think much of it derives from an idea of progress - that past history is a linear progression to the present and that progress entails improvement: hence, people today must be smarter than those in the past.

This is one of those fallacies that I, and many instructors I know, have railed against many times. But I feel a little unfair in doing so, because I can actually pinpoint the moment when, viscerally, I came to understand what I now tell my students. I’m sure that before that time I didn’t blurt out in class that people in the past were stupider than those today. But somewhere I absorbed the idea that because medieval sources didn’t try to tell us modern people what we wanted to know, they were deficient. They didn’t write “real” history.

Well, duh - of course they didn’t write “real” history. They didn’t know what it was. Not because they were stupid, but because the concept didn’t exist. They didn’t write for the same reasons we do; they had their own reasons. History meant something else entirely.

I think that this is even more common when the subject is China.

The New Kid suggests the break between the perceptions of the past in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with their fond gaze back to classical Rome and Greece, and the Enlightenment era ideas of progress and perfectability. The New Culture/May Fourth generation in China precipitated a similar schism–between the classicist/historicist leanings of the older scholar elite and the progressivist modernization/civilization discourse of the New Culture kids.

With this notion of historical progress so ingrained in our psyches, comes a dangerous slippery slope upon which we trod at our own peril.

In some ways it reminds me of a line from the Daodejing 道德经:

When everyone in the world knows beauty as beauty, ugliness appears.
When everyone knows good as good, not good arrives.
Therefore being and non-being give birth to one another;

In historiographical terms, until there was a need to describe that which was “modern,” there was no need to describe something as “traditional.” Along with this division came an implicit value judgement, based in large part on western ideas of linear history and notions of material progress that traditional was bad and modern was good. This division gave birth to other–a perhaps even more awkward divide–between “civilized” and “backwards.”

If today’s students in a class on medieval Europe occasionally feel as if their forbears from the Middle Ages were just “modern Europeans in training,” it is even more insidious when Americans view China’s past (and frankly, the present) in the same unfortunate way.

Say it with me: people in the past were not somehow slower on the uptake, it’s because we–in the present–get A LOT of help from the smart people who came before. And here I reveal my own slightly progressivist take on history. To borrow from P.J. O’Rourke, for those who feel that there was some magical time in the past when all was better, I give you one word: “dentistry.”

I do feel that we make progress as humans–that every generation has the opportunity and even the responsibility to learn from generations past–but while I believe in progress, I don’t think we progress as quickly as people would like to hope. I think that there are false starts, winding steps sideways and slippery steps backwards, hornets nests and poison ivy, and occasional holes along the trail in which we can twist our collective ankles or sometimes worse. (And yes, I’ve been doing some hiking lately. Why do you ask?) But where we get into trouble is when we load up notions of progress with inherent (often inherently “good”) moral values and then pass judgement on those in the past who, we feel, don’t measure up to to our contemporary standards.

That’s not to say there weren’t any stupid or evil people in history. There were. Lots. But we can’t assume that there were MORE stupid or evil people (or that people were more stupid) than today, in fact the law of big numbers suggests that can’t be true. To quote George Carlin, “Think about how stupid the average person is, and remember–by the law of averages–half the people you meet each day will be stupider than that.”

Seriously though, when dealing with China, the past is ever present and thus–I fear–those attitudes applied to generations of westerners past get placed at the feet of the Chinese today.

And so let’s play our game. China lacks equivalency with the west because it lacks FILL in the BLANK_________: (human rights/a civil society/subway manners/hygiene/open government/environmental protections).

We’ve seen it written a thousand times, I’ve probably done it myself. As with the New Kid’s students, few of us would admit this assumption of inferiority so boldly–but we all know of conversations, articles, or comments that are harder to swallow because of a slightly acidic aftertaste of western/progressive/presentist superiority.

That China is lacking in all of the above categories is hard to deny, but what shouldn’t be assumed is that it’s because the Chinese (past or present) didn’t/don’t somehow “Get it yet.” That on the timeline of human progress, China is still stuck at an earlier point in the developmental chart and is thus implicitly inferior to the modern, developed west. It’s a seductive trap and–quite frankly–a sentiment that is used as both a curse and a crutch. Witness the Chinese government brushing aside many of its social, political, industrial, and environmental problems as ’stages of development’ with the not so-subtle subtext of “we’re just not there yet, give us time.”

But perhaps even more dangerous is that many Chinese–especially the educated, urban elite zipping around Beijing in their new QQs and sipping on a frappuccino that they hate but who wouldn’t be caught dead drinking tea out of an old glass jar–is the internalization of this past/present progressive split and its regurgitation as a civilized/backwards view:

Urban=money=progressive=modern=”good quality” 素质=what we want to show the world. Poor=rural=backwards=superstitious=the men who build our apartments and the women who clean them=bad habits/”bad quality”=who both BOCOG and the urban elite wants to shove into some Hebei lake sometime before mid-July, 2008. Solve for x.

But enough about this…It’s a beautiful day in Beijing and the only modernity I frankly want to worry about this morning is “Scandinavian Modern.” See you at Ikea.