When I stand before a rather battered, bruised and broken piece of furniture, it can be like standing at a crossroads. One direction calls for renewal and the other for an ending. One direction tends to be pessimistic and melancholy and the other confident and optimistic. One of the things that separates confident from diffident people is their sense of how feasible it might be to change the status quo. Broadly-speaking, the un-confident believe that history is over; the confident trust that it is still in the process of being made – one day possibly by themselves.
The way we enter the world carries with it an inherent bias towards an impression that the status quo has forever been settled. Everything around us conspires to give off a sense of fixity. We are surrounded by people far taller than we are, who follow traditions that have been in place for decades, even centuries. As children, our understanding of time hugely over-privileges the immediate moment. Last year feels, to a five-year-old, like a century ago. The house we live in appears as immutable as an ancient temple; the workplace we attend looks as though it has been performing the same processes since the earth began.
We are constantly told why things are the way they are and encouraged to accept that reality is not made according to our wishes. We come to trust that human beings have fully mapped the range of the possible. If something hasn’t happened, it’s either because it can’t happen – or it shouldn’t. The result is a deep wariness around imagining alternatives. There is no point starting a new business (the market must be full already), pioneering a new approach to the arts (everything is already set in a fixed pattern) or giving loyalty to a new idea (it either exists or is mad).
When we study history, however, the picture changes sharply. Once time is sped up and we climb up a mountain of minutes to survey the centuries, change appears constant. New continents are discovered, alternative ways of governing nations are pioneered, ideas of how to dress and whom to worship are transformed. Once people wore strange cloaks and tilled the land with clumsy instruments. A long time ago, they chopped a king’s head off. Way back, people got around in fragile ships, ate the eyeballs of sheep, used chamber pots and didn’t know how to fix teeth.
We come away from all this knowing, at least in theory, that things do change, but in practice – almost without noticing – we tend to distance ourselves and our own societies from a day-to-day belief that we belong to the same ongoing turbulent narrative and are, at present, its central actors. History, we feel, is what used to happen; it can’t really be what is happening around us in the here and now. Things have – in our vicinity at least – settled down.
How often do you see a general resignation that we would be wiser to accept the way things are, quietly go home, make some pasta or pizza and settle down for the evening? But if you stop momentarily and think about it, everything that we associate with history – the impetuous daring of great people, the dramatic alterations in values, the revolutionary questioning of long-held beliefs, the upturning of the old order – is still going on, even at this very moment, in outwardly peaceful, apparently unchanging places like the comfort of our home.
We don’t see it only because we are standing far too close. The world is being made and remade at every instant. And therefore, any one of us has a theoretical chance of being an agent in history, on a big or small scale. It is open to our own times to build a new city as beautiful as Venice, to change ideas as radically as the Renaissance, to start an intellectual movement as resounding as Buddhism. The present has all the contingency of the past – and is every bit as malleable. It should not intimidate us. How we love, travel, approach the arts, govern, educate ourselves, run businesses, age and die are all up for further development.
Current views may appear firm, but only because we exaggerate their fixity. The majority of what exists is arbitrary, neither inevitable nor right, simply the result of muddle and happenstance. We should be confident, even at sunset on a balmy summer afternoon, of our power to join the stream of history – and, however modestly, change its course.
What is on your change agenda and where do you sit in the confident-diffident scale?
