More on Historic Optimism as a recent attitude
“Like a Greek frieze, such a future was organized around the heroic exploits of great men, but these exploits, while their outcome was ever in doubt, did not constitute an essential departure from the past. Kings succeeded kings, empires followed empires, but so far as the perception of contemporaries was concerned, “history” was a succession of changes whose main attribute was their violence, not their aggregate evolution. […] To come to grips with such a capricious but withal monotonous future, the ancients turned to the factor which was common in all its permutations. This was the factor of human motivation and especially of heroic motivation. Thus it was envy and loyalty, love and hate, power and submissiveness- in short the primordium of human nature- which were thought to contain the impelling force of events.
I think you can especially notice this attitude in past classic writings, such as the works of Shakespeare and writings of Machiavelli, which both tend to oversimplify events as being driven solely by human emotion and personality, with very little role left for the complexities of the sort of large-scale forces that drive history. (You could say their worldview has the flaws in human nature taking the center stage as it were. xd)
What was so egregariously lacking in this estimate of the future was the idea of social movement, of aggregate betterment, of progress. It is astonishing when we look back upon the infinitely painful panorama of past history to find this idea is totally absent as a popular sentiment. Pre-modern man could console himself for the harsh realities of existence in his visions of heaven, he could gratefully accept the social reforms handed down from time to time by his compassionate masters, he could indulge in sporadic and short-lived outbreaks of dispair. What he could not bring himself to believe was that heaven might be sought on earth, that reform might proceed from his own aspirations, that despair could give way to determination.”
“…what lacked were requisites of a much more mundane kind. First there was [needed] the power to alter a man’s subservience before nature to a mastery of it. Second, there was required a belief in the legitimacy in the idea of human betterment. And last there was a missing framework of social institutions which would combine power and hope, and which would then permit this fruitful combination to achieve its own spontaneous growth.”
Or in other words, ancient history moved so slowly, it seemed to only change in the most superficial of ways, kings replaced by kings, crop failure one year, disease the next. (Truely a bleak life…) The other part of it, is that in the modern day we have the present to provide us with contrast and significance to the pasts of history, and without that present, it would have been difficult for ancient historians to see things in their eventual context.
Sometimes it seems to me that history and the pace of change is like a glacier-paced conveyer belt. It moves so slowly, that moment to moment, month to month it seems like it’s not moving at all. Until the change, which had been building unseen to that moment, shifts into events like a catastrophic earthquake. You look backwards and you can see the changes accumulating, and hindsight can even fool you into thinking that everything was building up solely to this moment you are now living. But it was always there, and if you look carefully, you can see things moving, shifting, going back and forth like the tide.
