Future History
“If history has taught us anything,” he mused aloud as they explored the labyrinthine corridors of the old museum, “it’s that all civilisations eventually decline and fall, and their buildings and artefacts crumble and are buried within the earth for future generations to discover. Progress is not a linear process, but is cyclical. Advances are made, new technologies are discovered, but it’s all eventually lost and forgotten and has to be rediscovered all over again. Recent studies of the Sphinx in Giza just highlight this. It would seem to be hugely older than was first thought and we know almost nothing about the obviously advanced civilisation that built it other than a few random clues scattered throughout our ancient myths and legends.
“I can’t help but wonder what future archaeologists will think when, thousands of years from now, they start digging up the remains of our long since fallen civilisation. Thanks to the efforts of the historians, museums and archaeologists of our own age they will be completely baffled. We have systematically removed countless ancient artefacts from their proper, dateable context within the historical record and placed them in our own strata. In the future they will discover dinosaur bones buried alongside plasma screens and be forced to conclude that dinosaurs and man coexisted.
“It’s always fascinated me that we see our past selves as ignorant, and interpret everything they did through the lens of superstition and religion. We arrogantly assume that we are the first people to discover science, just like every generation of teenagers assume that they’re the first to discover music. Will the historians of the future treat us any better? Or will they assume that we were a primitive, superstitious lot who indulged in the worship of the strange metal boxes that they’ll find in almost every dwelling? Will stories of our weird religions be filtered down to them through oral tradition as garbled tales of a war between the trickster god Mac and the all-powerful PC? What will they make of the remains of all of our cars when the engines have long since been fused into solid blocks of rusted metal, and the rubber from the tyres has perished and rotted away? All of our knowledge, all of our writing will have been utterly lost by then, they’ll have no way to place anything in context, as we’ll have transferred everything we know into a fundamentally impermanent digital format. The internet will have quite literally disappeared without a trace.
“So you see, our constant quest for progress has robbed our future selves of any meaningful history of our own race…and that’s what I’m going to write about this week.”
“Oh, Ian…” she sighed, a sweet smile playing across her lips as her beautiful, grey eyes filled with a loving pity, “once again you’ve shown a fundamental misunderstanding of what a story actually is…”
Rivka Jacobs
Usually I would ask, where *is* the story, except it is a story, and the first-person jeremiad is concise and I happen to completely agree with the sentiments. Museums — even pictures of museums — inspire such reflections.
Funny that the British Museum is so classical looking, copied after an ancient Greek temple; but it does make you think about human civilization and ask, “Where are we going and where have we been?”
And in your story, as usual, there is a girl at the end who offers wisdom. The twist being, her comment about “Ian” misunderstanding what a story is, actually turns the personal-politics into a story.
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iansharman
Well, yes, it was a sneaky trick to use someone commenting that it isn’t a story to actually turn it into a story…
Hmmm….yes…the girl at the end is becoming something of a theme…
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