There is a new article in Aeon about the role that (human) prehistory plays in making sense of the present (specifically, the nuclear age). I imagine the editors were sitting on this one for the coronation of the Anthropocene Epoch. Anyway, that ain’t happening, so here it is.
This, I take it, is the big idea:
No two eras from human history began more differently than the atomic age and the prehistoric period. And yet, despite the difference in their temporal constitution and their positions at the extremities of human time – one in the deep past, the other in the 20th century – a reciprocal analogical relationship exists between them. We have learned to imagine one through the other.
Again: “In the 20th century, prehistory constituted a symbolic field that never ceased to nourish the anxious thinking of the atomic age.”
Now go read the article and meet me after the break.
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Have you read it? Super! I just finished it myself. And I'm inclined to give a big shrug. Like, is it really the case that a deep reciprocal interaction existed between prehistory and the nuclear age? Or did a few scholars in the humanities use analogies with prehistory to say stuff about, like, the totemic function of nukes and the waywardness of nuclear society? The author has some interesting examples, but I can’t shake the feeling that they add up to less than what she claims for them.
I'm also skeptical of the notion that, in the 19th century, “understanding the deep past involved imagining the ruins of humanity and ejecting Homo sapiens from the evolution of life.” What's right about this claim is what Martin Rudwick has often said: that the sciences of geohistory were born when ideas from human history were transposed into the study of nature’s own history. But then what's this business about ejecting humans from the evolution of life? Also, the passage cited in support of this observation was written by a creationist scientist in 1844.
Okay, that's enough grumpiness from me. Happy Friday!