Away in France on a break, I am taking the opportunity to read the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn’s book on the 20th century, The Age of Extremes. At the beginning of the book, I was struck by the following paragraph: 

“The destruction of the past or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century. Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.”

This is something I have often thought about myself. In other words, prior to the late 20th century, my parents and their parents’ generation had an inherently felt relationship with the public past, which to a great extent shaped the context for their experience of the world. But for my generation and the generations following in the 21st century, this is no longer the case. This is all the more ironic given that these generations, as a whole, in the West at least, have been better educated than any in history. This includes access to virtually all human knowledge, including every religious, philosophical and psychological tradition.

The loss of organic connection to the past and living in the sort of ‘permanent present’ described, has made it very hard for us to truly comprehend the sheer scale and speed of the economic, social, and cultural transformation that took place in the last third of the 20th century.

 The Most Fundamental Change in Recorded History

Hobsbawn describes the change in this period as “the most fundamental in recorded history”, marking “the end of seven or eight millennia of human history, that began with the invention of agriculture in the stone age, if only because it ended the long era when the overwhelming majority of the human race lived by growing food and herding animals.”

There is no room here to even begin to cover the extent of this transformation, in particular in Western societies, but it includes the almost total loss of what was once called the ‘peasantry’, and also illiteracy. It includes the massive spread of primary, secondary and even higher education, the rapid growth of urban culture, the breakdown of the family unit, the rise of individualism and alienated individual self-interest, the commodification of goods, services, and ideas in service to the financial market, a global world reality and consciousness, the explosion of youth culture, the mutation in sexual mores and identity, the rise of feminism, and the revolution of technology. In other words, a lot!

Successive generations of the late 20th and early 21st century, who have lived in this curious myopia of the past, has had serious implications for society and culture. But as human beings, we have unfortunately never really learned the lessons of history, at the best of times.

Hobsbawn gives the powerful example of even after International Conventions on the way wars should be fought were agreed upon, and formal treaties of peace laid out the rules of war as being only fought between opposing combatants, “in the course of the 20th century, wars have been increasingly waged against the economy and infrastructure of states and against their civilian populations. Since the First World War the number of civilian casualties in war has been far greater than that of military casualties in all belligerent countries except the USA.”

The war in Gaza is currently the most extreme example of this phenomenon.

A Profound Paradox

The lack of a sense of continuity of the human experience and relationship to the public past which began in earnest in the 1960’s, certainly made conceivable the alienated individualism of our current era. But this was exacerbated by its conscious commodification through consumerism and the neoliberal economic agenda. “There is no such thing as society” etc…

The prevailing denial of the scale of the climate and ecological crisis in the mainstream, is the most obvious example of this disconnect to events that concern us all, and their historical context. The breakdown in world order is another, and even on a far smaller scale, the gradual yet insidious erosion of the humanities in educational curriculum.

Yet, despite the perilous aspects of living in ‘a sort of permanent present’, it was exactly this sense of freedom from the past and the space it provided, that made the questioning of human society and the human experience in the 1960’s, as radical as it was. Without this dramatic rupture with all that had come before, this would never have happened. It gave birth to an unrivalled idealism, and the necessity to question the entirety of the conventional world that previous generations to a great extent, had taken for granted.

Two significant current examples of the consequences of this cultural upheaval, that we continue to highlight on 3rd Space, is ironically, the growing recognition in younger people particularly, of the extraordinary ignorance of our exploitative and separative relationship to the natural world as it has been for millennia, and the emergence of the influence of women in every field of human endeavour. In particular, those women no longer tied to a traditionally male view of the world.

Hobsbawn gives an interesting anecdote early in his book of how in his lifetime, the connection to the past was given texture in their lives as “the streets and public places were still called after public men and events.” So true and revealing. But at the same time, to many of us now, the fact that our statues are almost only of war heroes, almost all of whom are men, however heroically they may have served us in wartime—or not(!), only points to how primitive our values still are.

An Accelerating Challenge

On the other side of the world, in 1916, at the beginning of the century in question, the Indian mystic and revolutionary Sri Aurobindo, already saw the collective flowering of the individual and subjectivity brewing in the West, as a significant moment in the evolution of humanity and human consciousness. At the same time, he was also acutely aware of its dangers.

He wrote, “Everything depends on…to what kind of subjectivity we arrive and how far we go in self-knowledge; for here the dangers of error are as great as the results of right-seeking. The conventional age avoids these dangers by building a wall of self-limitation against them; and it is because this wall becomes in the end a prison of self-ignorance that it has to be broken down and the perilous but fruitful adventure of subjectivism undertaken.”

Hobsbawn is right when he writes that: “Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the end of the 20th century [and indeed of own era], is the tension between this accelerating process of globalisation and the inability of public institutions and the collective behaviour of human beings to come to terms with it.”

And this is our challenge. Can the individual and the collective come together in a global world to bring a new order of innately collaborative human society into being? At present we are not doing well. This is essentially because the scale of change being called for is fundamental. It is a spiritual, or ontological one, at the level of being.

“This what a true subjectivism teaches us”, Sri Aurobindo writes in The Human Cycle, “first, that we are a higher self than our ego…secondly, that we are in our life and being not only ourselves but all others; for there is a secret solidarity which our egoism may kick and strive against, but from which we cannot escape. It is the old Indian discovery, that our real “I” is a Supreme Being which is our true self and which it is our business to discover and consciously become and, secondly, that that Being is one in all, expressed in the individual and the collective.”