The Past Made Present

Two opposing attitudes dominate recent discourse on the use and misuse of history. Many take refuge in the past as an antidote to present disappointments and future fears. They hark back nostalgically or formulaically to the fancied benefits, even to the fearsome burdens, of times of lost purity and simplicity, lapsed immediacy and certitude, in some Golden Age of classical serenity, Christian faith, pastoral plenitude, or childhood innocence. Sojourning in the past seems preferable to living in the present.

And given the mounting surfeit of heritage sites and structures, more and more of the past is accessible. Critics find the collective legacy crushingly voluminous, backward looking, and crippling to present enterprise. Fifty years ago architectural historian Reyner Banham condemned "the load of obsolete buildings that Europe is humping along on its shoulders [as] a bigger drag on the live culture of our continent than obsolete nationalisms or obsolete moral codes."¹ The load is now heavier. In much of England one feels hardly ever out of sight of a listed building, a protected archaeological site, a museum-worthy work of art. The treasured past is said to overwhelm French culture and politics. "Everything is indiscriminately conserved and archived," notes a historian of the patrimony.² "We no longer make history," charges Jean Baudrillard. "We protect it like an endangered masterpiece."³ The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas calls preservation a dangerous epidemic. Noting that UNESCO and similar bodies sequester one-sixth of the Earth's surface, with more to come, he terms heritage a metastasizing cancer.⁴

The popular alternative to wallowing in the past is to dismiss it entirely. The past has ever-diminishing salience for lives driven by today's feverish demands and delights. The sensory-laden penchant for computer gaming, coupled with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, betoken a here-and-now environment dominated by raw sensations, in which "we live perpetually in the present."⁵ Being up-to-date now not only matters most, it is all that matters; knowing or understanding the past is an impediment in the present rat race.

Thus, for some, the past becomes the only worthwhile time, while for others it seems of little if any account. Yet these two takes, which seem utterly at odds, reflect the same overriding tendency to fold past within present. Both nostalgists and amnesiacs smudge the line between then and now. Whether all-consuming or overlooked, betokening everything or nothing, the past is less and less distinguishable from the present.

For the general public, to be sure, the past was never a foreign country. Significantly, the 1971 film script of L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between omits his second sentence, "they did things differently there," and shuns its implications.⁶ The cinematic past is not foreign or different. History vanishes; change is only life-cycle nostalgia. So, too, with most docudramas. Beyond their costumes, characters differ only in age and gender and status; the same motives and mentalities animate medieval as modern folk, elemental passions enacted on a timeless stage.

The past is ever more comprehensively domesticated. "Just as easy travel eroded the differences between one country and another, and between one world and another," say Douglas Adams's time travelers, so we are now "eroding the differences between one age and another. The past is now truly like a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there."⁷ Fiction that mimics history without being historical—Michael Cunningham's The Hours (1999), David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004), Hari Kunzru's Gods without Men (2011)—"inserts the contemporary reader into other locations and times, while leaving no doubt that its viewpoint is relentlessly modern and speaks entirely of our extreme present," observes Douglas Coupland.⁸ In the Internet universe, past, present, and future coexist at once.

Past and present are increasingly spoken of alike in the present tense. A British broadcaster interviews an aging celebrity about his past. "So, you're a young undergraduate uncertain about the direction your life should take."⁹ The false nowness presages the extinction of the past tense. The past itself becomes more and more like the ongoing present: messy, inchoate, and inconclusive...