I'm someone who usually doesn't come to the defense of ideology, religious or otherwise, but I've always said that the best case for religion isn't what it says about the nature of reality; rather, its strongest position is what it has to say about knowledge. The reason knowledge is dangerous isn't merely that knowledge is power; it's that knowledge is always incomplete. It's the people who have a small amount of knowledge who think they know everything, because they misguidedly apply pattern recognition techniques at scale. It's an error of excessive extrapolation that you get with the myopia of knowing enough to navigate some small area around you, but not enough to really see the forest through the trees.
Knowledge is incomplete, and whatever knowledge we do have requires interpretation, and that interpretation requires context that has to extend way beyond the span of our lives, and encompass more than merely our self interest. Of course we can rarely if ever manage this, so then we overcompensate with certainty and then force that certainty on the world around us in an attempt to exert and maintain control.
I love what you said about not wanting the future, because it's congruent with our lack of real interest in the truth. Because we can never have the full picture, we fill the picture ourselves, then demand that the world conform to it as a blueprint. Similarly, we want time to march in a linear progression that follows the causal logic of our limited understanding of the variables, and our biased presuppositions. This is precisely why we've surrendered ourselves to algorithmic selection, because it's a continuation of the oldest precepts of religious ideology: the world is unpredictable, knowledge is dangerous, so trust in the WORD. In the modern world, it's trust in the curation; it's to feed on the FEED, with it's self-fulfilling feedback loops.
There's so much more to say, Tamara. This is one of your best. I feel like I say this at least once a week, but you simply keep my gears oiled and spinning. The error is in thinking that there's an actual limit to your abilities. I can't be sure of the future, but it's hard to see one where you're not dominating this platform.
We fear ignorance when the danger is partial illumination. Total darkness humbles you. Full light would terrify you. But the dimly lit room is where people start mistaking orientation for mastery. A little knowledge intoxicates. It gives you enough orientation to act, but not enough horizon to doubt yourself. And once action begins to feel justified, certainty follows like an alibi.
I’m increasingly convinced that our obsession with pattern recognition is temperamental. We mistake coherence for truth because coherence soothes the nervous system. It reduces cognitive strain. It lets us move faster, decide quicker, govern harder. The problem is that reality doesn’t care about our tolerance for ambiguity. It doesn’t scale to our attention span. So we replace reality with models, and then punish reality for deviating from them. A technical failure + a failure of character. The willingness to live with incomplete maps is rarer than brilliance, and far more disruptive.
Your point about curation as secular doctrine feels perfect here. What’s chilling is how little résistance there was. No burning of books, no great prohibitions….. just relief. Someone else will choose. Someone else will filter. Someone else will decide what matters. The abdication came disguised as convenience. And once you stop choosing what you encounter, you stop encountering what might unsettle you. The feed doesn’t lie; it simply never risks telling you anything you didn’t already half-believe. Enclosure works through familiarity now.
As for the future and domination…. I’m allergic to that language, even when it’s generous. What I care about is staying unhouse-trained. Remaining capable of surprise, especially self-surprise. I’m trying to protect a certain permeability, the ability to be wrong without collapsing, to revise without self-betrayal, to think without immediately converting thought into position. If that resonates, it’s because we’re all suffocating a little under explanations that arrived too early and stayed too long.
Thank you, Andrew, reading with your incredible intellectual seriousness and emotional generosity. Exchanges like this are the most inspirational for me!
Knowledge in a universe of complexity will always be incomplete. Yet, for the curious who recognize that knowledge is incomplete and are open to Bayesian adjustments, knowledge will always be superior to static beliefs in myths.
I agree, with one important caveat that keeps nagging at me.
Knowledge that knows itself to be provisional is vastly preferable to myth that pretends to be timeless. Bayesian humility beats dogma every time, but only as long as adjustment remains genuinely open-ended. What worries me is how easily Bayesian language gets used to dignify what is, in practice, a very conservative operation… updating within a framework whose priors are never examined because they feel “reasonable”, “evidence-based”, or simply too foundational to touch.
So the danger isn’t static belief versus adaptive knowledge; it’s adaptive knowledge that freezes at the level of first assumptions. Many people are excellent at revising probabilities while remaining completely closed to revising the question itself. They update outcomes but protect the model. And that’s where Bayesian openness can start to behave like a more sophisticated myth, less flamboyant, more respectable, but just as resistant to surprise.
So yes, curiosity, revision, and probabilistic thinking are indispensable, but they only stay alive if they include the courage to let priors collapse, not just inch toward better confidence intervals. Otherwise, we end up with very elegant adjustments circling a question that no longer fits the world we’re in.
In theory, isn’t that what science philosophy do, eliminating the prior to form a new theory? Not really. Newtonian physics was not eliminated by relativity. It was modified or added to, to address different circumstances. However, the priors in love seem to collapse often.
Aren’t all mythologies essentially static? OK, there may some glacial movement but that movement is essentially static compared to the dynamics of the curious skeptics that choose to think?
Some may think I’m referring to all religions. Well, they are certainly a big subset of what I’m referring to
I think they appear static because we encounter them embalmed, already canonised, already summarised, already defended. What freezes isn’t the myth itself so much as the moment it’s declared finished. Early mythologies were anything but inert: they were unstable containers for fear, desire, power, weather, sex, death. They shifted orally, contradicted themselves shamelessly, mutated with each retelling. What made them dangerous, and alive, was precisely that they weren’t settled yet.
The rigidity enters when a myth stops being a question and starts being used as an answer. At that point it becomes administrative. It filters experience without absorbing it. And you’re right that many religions exemplify this, but they are not unique. Political ideologies, economic narratives, even scientific worldviews can harden the same way once curiosity is replaced by guardianship. The problem isn’t belief; it’s custodianship, which means someone decides the thinking has been done, and everyone else is instructed to inherit the conclusions.
Curious skeptics oppose myth by refusing closure. They keep myths open. They ask what a story is doing now, not what it once meant. So, curiosity isn’t anti-mythical, it’s pre-dogmatic, treating stories as provisional tools. The moment a mythology can no longer be interrupted by lived reality, it stops orienting and starts anaesthetising.
So yes, many mythologies function as static structures today but that stasis is a symptom, nothing to do with destiny. What’s glacial isn’t the myth; it’s the institution wrapped around it. And institutions move slowly because their primary task is preservation, not understanding. Curiosity, by contrast, has no archive to defend. That’s why it feels faster, riskier, and more alive.
I’m wondering about “static”. Does anything ever stand still or stay inn one place. I write poetry. My poems look static, same words, same punctuation, but they are not.
If you and Tamara read one of my poems, we would discover that neither of you actually read (received) the same poem. You mattered, the diversity of life in you, discovered the diversity living in the “static” poem. For some my poems are dead, for some, life giving… but never static.
….. “static” is often a visual illusion, not an ontological fact. We mistake fixity of form for fixity of meaning. A poem on the page looks still, but it’s more like a charged field than an object. It only becomes itself in contact with a reader’s history, temperament, griefs, hungers, attention that day. The text doesn’t move, but meaning does. And meaning is where life happens.
That’s why I’m careful with the word “static”. What actually stagnates is the relationship to an artifact. A poem dies when someone insists they’ve already finished encountering it. The same poem read at 20 and at 60 is not the same poem because the reader is not the same instrument. Nothing is ever still unless we approach it as if it were.
This is also why I resist closed interpretations. They collapse that living exchange. They treat reception as retrieval rather than participation. Some readers finding life, others finding nothing has nothing to do with a failure of the poem; it’s evidence of its honesty. Living things don’t distribute themselves evenly, they respond to conditions.
Thank you, Michael, for bringing poetry into this, and for articulating that distinction so clearly!
Tamara, this is one of your best. Reading it felt like standing in front of a painting that refuses to resolve if you stare too long. The kind where the closer you get, the less explanatory it becomes. It reminded me of Francis Bacon’s portraits where faces are smeared, features technically present but morally unstable. You can still recognise the human, but certainty has been violently removed. That’s what this essay does to history. It doesn’t deny its shape, it distorts it until our confidence in interpretation starts to melt.
What I admired the most is how the structure mirrors the thesis. You don’t march us toward a lesson; you circle, hesitate, double back, let ideas fray at the edges. That restraint is rare. Most writing about history wants to win. This wants to stay awake. It understands that clarity, when it arrives too smoothly, is often just obedience in a well-lit room.
Your argument about analogy as anesthesia landed hard for me. We reach for the past to the way museums reach for plaques, to make the chaos legible enough that we don’t have to feel implicated. It’s like how we turn Guernica into an icon of “anti-war” sentiment, stripping it of its ongoing violence, flattening it into a symbol you can nod at without being disturbed. The painting doesn’t change, but our relationship to it becomes hygienic. History gets the same treatment: framed, captioned, rendered safe.
The sections on algorithms and prediction felt especially personal because they echo what’s happened to art itself. Streaming platforms don’t recommend what might undo us, they recommend what statistically resembles what we already tolerated. The future is no longer commissioned; it’s extrapolated. And just like you describe, surprise gets treated as a flaw. The new, the dissonant, the genuinely unfamiliar, those things don’t perform well in systems trained on recognition. They get filtered out because they’re unclassifiable.
Your invocation of jazz is amazing, but I kept thinking of performance art instead. Marina Abramović sitting silently across from strangers, offering nothing to interpret, no moral, no arc—just presence. The work only exists if you’re willing to stay in discomfort without resolving it into meaning. That’s the posture you’re arguing for politically and historically, attention without premature narration. Most people can’t tolerate that. They want the label, the takeaway, the reassurance that they understood correctly.
And the personal passages matter precisely because they refuse redemption. The journals, the relationships, the embarrassment of former certainty do the work of proving the larger claim, that interpretation is often just a way of preserving dignity. We edit the past to survive. That doesn’t make us evil; it makes us unreliable. The danger begins when we confuse that coping mechanism for insight.
By the time you arrive at hope, it feels earned because it isn’t heroic. It’s closer to what artists do under regimes that don’t care whether they exist, they keep making work that may never be seen because not doing it would feel like a deeper lie. That version of hope doesn’t believe in progress. It believes in not going numb.
Your essay doesn’t ask to be agreed with. And that’s your brilliance. It asks to be held without being resolved. And that may be its most fantastic gesture. We are obsessed with conclusions, you’ve written something that insists on staying unfinished as an ethical stance. Discipline and extraordinary writing. Brava, Tamara. Encore une fois.
I’m glad you named that sense of refusal because for me the real risk in writing this was being over-understood. There’s a peculiar violence in work that gets explained too quickly, turned into an argument someone can “agree with” and move on from. I wanted to resist that pull toward neatness as a form of intellectual hygiene. When something resolves too cleanly, I start to suspect it has stopped asking anything of us. Staying with what won’t settle is often the only honest response to complexity.
I think that interpretation is less about truth than about timing. Too early, and it becomes a shield. Too late, and it becomes an evasion. Most of us interpret in self-defence. We tell stories about what happened so we can keep functioning, keep showing up, keep believing we weren’t foolish, complicit, or afraid. That’s human! But when that reflex migrates from private life into institutions, into politics, into culture, it hardens, stops protecting and starts instructing. And that’s where damage begins, when explanation graduates into authority.
On the question of art and systems that reward familiarity, I don’t think the tragedy is only that surprise disappears. It’s that risk gets reassigned. The burden of risk is no longer carried by those who curate, fund, or decide, but by those who create. If your work doesn’t fit what already exists, the system doesn’t say “interesting”, it says “improbable”. And improbability, in our era, is treated as irresponsibility, it teaches people to pre-edit themselves, to offer only what can be recognised in advance. The future isn’t cancelled by censorship, it’s worse, it’s starved by caution.
If hope means anything to me at all, it has nothing to do with improvement curves or historical arcs, when it lives in refusal without spectacle, in continuing without applause, in not letting systems train the tenderness out of you. That sort of hope doesn’t need to be announced because it’s not trying to convince anyone. It’s simply a way of staying available to what hasn’t shown up yet.
Thank you, Alexander, for meeting my essay where it deliberately refused to land, and for your wonderful your compliments! You’re very generous.
The past always constitutes a seductive, imagistic field that constantly leads us to the temptation of pseudo-revisitation, always in search of a narrative that fits our present. As many Enlightenment artists and architects believed, history, in its becoming, is a dynamic process in time and space. It was therefore important to arrive at a reflection on immutable, universal, ahistorical principles, timeless principles, consecrating them as inspirational principles for forging the present and projecting the future. Not everyone slept on the seductive path of historical example to explain the ideas and the course of the world in its present. Yes, the evolution of the human condition is circular, just as nature shows us. The miracle of human nature has been the capacity to break this circularity, instead of sleeping in the repetitive stillness of the seasons that regulate our lives. After all, it is also a cycle of our civilizations, repeating the act of birth, growth, and death. The miracle of human life in this standardized circularity is the capacity to evolve, destroy, die, and be reborn, mimicking the cycles of Nature, even while de-standardizing it in our civilizational cycles.
The light of reason and human imagination is the umbilical cord of the meaning of our existence, where not everyone sleeps or suffers from blindness.
And there, yes, Jazz or Progressive Rock transforms music into a new semantic narrative, vibrant in scale, reach, and rhythm.
Congratulations on your essay, which is always complex for me to read, since I don't master writing in English.
Note: This comment is only superficially reflective, not intending to enter into the complex philosophical and ethical discussion about the existential problem of the role of history and the historian.
What I appreciate in your reading is the tension you keep alive between repetition and rupture. Biological, civilisational, psychological cycles exist, but they are not cages unless we agree to sleep inside them. What you call the “miracle” isn’t exemption from cycles; it’s the capacity to interfere with them. To interrupt repetition with imagination, to refuse pure recurrence even while knowing we are never outside pattern altogether.
Where I gently diverge is around the Enlightenment impulse to locate timeless, ahistorical principles. I understand the longing behind it, the desire for ballast in a moving world, but I’m increasingly suspicious of claims to the immutable. They often age into idols. What begins as orientation turns into authority, and authority, over time, resists revision. Reason and imagination matter deeply to me, but only when they remain answerable to what they can’t fully contain. Otherwise, light becomes glare.
Your analogy with music is beautiful. Jazz and progressive forms risk structure without abolishing it. They move forward by stretching timing, by letting dissonance breathe, by trusting that coherence can emerge without being pre-scripted. That’s close to how I think about history at its best, not as example or instruction, but as a field of motifs we can answer differently, or not at all.
And please don’t apologise for your English, Nuno! What you wrote carries precision, rhythm, and intellectual generosity. Complexity doesn’t belong to any single language. Thank you for reading so attentively, and for meeting my essay in its movement rather than trying to resolve it too quickly!
This is extraordinary, truly, Tamara. You have unfastened history from the prosthetic certainty we’ve strapped to it. The admiration comes from how deftly you expose the illusions we cling to, the seduction of hindsight, the moral choreography we impose on collapse, the algorithmic laundering of our own fears. Your metaphors always land with the precision of uncomfortable truth, and this time it’s marvelous: history as jazz instead of scripture, heartbreak as bruised alphabet, empires as improvisers rather than reenactors. You turn what most writers flatten into cliché into something alive, unstable, and therefore honest.
What stirs me the most is your insistence that our problem is expecting the past to behave, expecting it to offer moral clarity when it’s inherently ambiguous, expecting it to function like a diagnostic tool rather than a shifting landscape. That refusal to tidy complexity feels almost extraordinary. And your critique of how technology amplifies our least imaginative instincts, our desire for prediction, security, pre-approved coherence, feels painfully current. I had pain reading it, I swear. It’s as if you’ve traced a line between personal memory, national mythmaking, and the algorithmic frames that now discipline our thinking, and shown they’re all running the same faulty operating system.
perhaps the real task now is not to read history, but to cultivate a tolerance for the unmodeled, to train ourselves in what physicists call “anti-fragility to uncertainty”. Instead of using history as a forecasting instrument, we might learn to inhabit it like a landscape of unresolved tensions. Cultures that survive are the ones flexible enough to throw the map away when the terrain shifts. That’s as true geopolitically as it is personally. Our memories, our institutions, our states, none of them evolve by perfecting prediction. They evolve by expanding the range of surprise they can absorb without collapsing into defensiveness or repression.
And maybe that’s the deeper hope in your essay, one that is subversive. Hope as an obstinate openness, a refusal to seal the narrative prematurely, a willingness to let the past interrupt us instead of confirm us, a commitment to curiosity as a political act, humility as a civic virtue, and misinterpretation as a condition of staying open to what doesn’t yet exist.
Your writing models a different posture toward time itself, one that is awake, and brave enough to admit it doesn’t know. I find that thrilling. And deeply, refreshingly human.
Merci, Tamara, I’ll print this one and read it again.
Your attention to posture moves me the most, the way of standing in time without bracing for verdicts. I wasn’t trying to rescue history from misuse so much as to loosen our grip on it. to stop treating it like a piece of equipment we are entitled to operate. When we expect the past to clarify us morally, we often ask it to do emotional labour we’d rather not do ourselves. Ambiguity is its most honest condition.
I’m glad you brought up tolerance rather than mastery. Survival, whether personal or collective, seems less about foresight than about range, how much contradiction, novelty, and discomfort a system can endure without snapping into defensiveness. Most collapses don’t come from surprise itself, but from the rigidity that meets it. We fall apart because we’ve rehearsed certainty instead of responsiveness.
What you call hope as obstinate openness feels right to me. Not optimism, not faith in outcomes, but a refusal to seal meaning too early, a willingness to be interrupted by new information, but by forms of life and thought that don’t yet have names. comfortable.
Thank you, Céline, for reading me with depth and care, and for articulating what it stirred rather than what it settled.
Knowing the essay will be lived with, not just consumed, is the most meaningful compliment I could receive!
I'm not sure the future laughs. The Grim Reaper might. He alone knows for certain. Certainty without penalty. He laughs because he owns the point where all other certainties dissolve. A twenty year old certain of love: he laughs. An empire certain of dominance: he laughs. A Marxist certain of historical determinism: he laughs. Perhaps coming to terms with the Reaper is the wisest strategy, but, then, he has always been our greatest ambient fear.
This piece twists the paradigm: it posits acquaintance with uncertainty. History is death because it calcifies the viewer. Lot himself warned us not to look back. History turns us into pillars of salt. We gain provisional peace for permanent blinders. And not only that, we surrender the joy of surprise! Comfort, a sense of security, outsourcing responsibility for our own uncontrollable energies, our own humanity, these suck life from the form and leave it dry as Lot's petrified wife. Lifeless zombies. Half human because we'd rather look back than honestly inward.
Ohhh, this piece drives hard on the curves. The suspension holds the road and the speed of your voice sends thrills down the spine. The pacing is vigorous. It focuses the eye on the patch just in front of us. An occasional glance in the mirror just to hold the bearings is enough, but then back to Now where the rubber really hits the road. Like an electric vehicle, the voice accelerates quickly as it builds, the feedback loops coming fast and furious, reinforcing the point. Well, guess what! Point taken. Oracular observations with actionable, livable hints for ears honed to listen. This one merits a second printing.
I like the way you relocate certainty onto death itself because it exposes how borrowed most of our confidence really is. If anything deserves monopoly rights over finality, it’s the end because it interrupts explanation altogether. Everything else that parades as certainty is provisional theatre. The problem begins when we start behaving as if we’ve already been granted the Reaper’s vantage point, issuing verdicts from a height we haven’t earned, forgetting that the privilege of not knowing is precisely what keeps us alive to contingency.
What I resist slightly is the idea that coming to terms with it is a strategy. Strategies still assume leverage. What seems wiser to me is accepting that we never negotiate with the ending, we coexist with it. I don’t fear death; the danger is the way fear pushes us into freezing experience too early, embalming meaning while it’s still breathing. People look back because stillness feels safer than exposure. Salt is preservation, and preservation taken too far becomes suffocation.
I agree with your reading of history as a force that stiffens perception resonates, and allow me to push it one step further: history immobilises and flatters. It reassures us that what has already happened is somehow more real than what is unfolding. That backward-facing comfort robs the present of its volatility, which is exactly where ethical choice still lives. Surprise is a capacity we abandon when we outsource attention to precedent. Looking inward without guarantees is harder than looking backward with footnotes.
I’m grateful for the way you read this, Andrew, not treating it as a metaphysical claim, but as a lived posture. And thank you for the care you took with the movement, the velocity, the listening! Being met at that level of attention feels like company on the road, and that’s amazing!
Throughout your essay, Tamara, I feel that uncertainty is your theme.
Most people, if not all, fear uncertainty, even if only as a kind of background eustress of niggling discomfort.
The universal uncertainty is death. When and how will it happen to us? Unless of course we take it into our own hands.
And what will be after, what will happen? I increasingly find that many atheists take their position, because they are unwilling to accept the uncertainty that faiths, including my own, Christianity, presents us with.
As a geologist, my work is the inverse of that of a designer. An architect, for example, will start with an idea, then design that reality. In geology, we’re forced to start with the design, then unravel how it came to be.
Uncertainty is an intrinsic characteristic of the natural sciences. Yet the prevalent anti-scientific dogma of our age is that we’ll perish of climate catastrophe unless we stop offending the earth-god, by emitting CO2. Yet plants depend upon CO2 for food. That our planet orbits our star at variable distance & axial tilt, is not mentioned.
The elephant in the room is volcanism: 2 or 3 megaeruptions in a decade, as has often occurred in the past, are more than sufficient to plunge us into an ice age of such intensity that our species may be totally extinguished, leaving microbiota, insects & rodents to inherit the earth.
The downfall of the Roman Empire likely had less to do with moral decadence, or even the large scale importation of slaves from incompatible cultures, but more to do with cooling resulting from a very large, likely Icelandic, volcanic eruption, which ejected sufficient ash to significantly reduce global, but especially European, insolation.
Those who clutch at what they think are certainties, as if they were an infant clutching their mother’s bosom, are deceiving themselves into a fantasy world of childish make-believe.
You’re right that uncertainty runs through the essay, but not as a thesis so much as a condition we keep trying to anaesthetise. I am interested in uncertainty as information, a signal about the limits of our vantage point. The discomfort most people feel around it isn’t accidental; it’s what happens when control habits outpace understanding. We’re taught to treat uncertainty as a flaw to be eliminated, rather than as a feature that keeps our thinking elastic.
Your geological comparison is so perfect! There’s a humility built into disciplines that begin with what is and work backward, rather than projecting an idea forward and forcing reality to comply. That inversion disciplines the imagination. It doesn’t reward grand narratives; it rewards patience, inference, restraint. I suspect part of our current malaise comes from importing design logic into domains that don’t tolerate it well (history, climate, culture, human behaviour), where causality is layered, delayed, and often indifferent to our moral preferences.
Then, I don’t see atheism or belief as the real divide. What matters more to me is how people absorb not-knowing. Some use faith to hold uncertainty open; others use it to close the question prematurely. The same is true on the secular side. What I resist is certainty that presents itself as maturity, when it’s often just a refusal to stay exposed. Clutching certainty doesn’t make someone childish; it makes them frightened in a very understandable way. The danger lies in mistaking that grip for wisdom and then scaling it into doctrine.
Your examples (volcanism, climate variability, historical collapse) underline something crucial, that reality does not organise itself around our priorities. Large systems don’t respond to virtue, blame, or intention. They respond to forces, thresholds, timing. When we moralise complexity, we simplify it just enough to feel righteous and just enough to be wrong. That’s not an argument against care or responsibility; it’s an argument against pretending we know more than we do while acting as if doubt were negligence.
Thank you, Russell, for bringing a scientist’s temperament into this conversation! The way you frame uncertainty, as the ground condition of honest inquiry, adds a depth and steadiness I appreciate very much.
I’m very grateful for your extraordinarily considered response. I’m humbled that you had the personal generosity & intellectual discipline to divine my thoughts. Pun intended.
Resisting, with difficulty, the temptation to respond essayicly, I think you’ve hit on a core human trait: the ability, to live with uncertainty. It’s a necessity.
To thrive with uncertainty requires true courage. Of course courage has many imposters: insensitivity, stupidity, desperation, drug-induced psychoses etc.
But we know when we meet true courage, & it’s sexy, in every meaning of the word. Courageous people are good to be around. It makes life worth living, & it’s why we admire success in the face of extreme hardship. It’s the core of most writing, theatre & art.
Tamara...I've only read this essay once, and I know it will keep revealing things to me, but I just had to say: How absolutely encouraging this essay is! What a statement of trust in our humanity it is; what a fierce refusal it is to take the fast answers given in historical analogies! THIS ESPECIALLY: "History doesn’t punish us for ignorance nearly as much as it punishes us for certainty." As a citizen historian, I don't know whether to nod agreement in sage wisdom or just jump for joy because I'm not alone in thinking these things! I'll go for the Joy! Thank you/t
I like that you chose joy, because joy is often treated as unserious in intellectual spaces, when in fact it’s one of the clearest signals that something true has landed without being weaponised. For me, encouragement was the wager underneath my essay, that if we stop outsourcing our thinking to ready-made explanations, we become more human, more awake, more capable of responding rather than reacting.
What you call a “fierce refusal” feels to me less like care. Fast answers are efficient, but they’re also emotionally lazy. They relieve us of the responsibility to stay present with complexity, with ambiguity, with our own limits. Refusing them is a form of trust that we can tolerate not knowing without turning brittle or cruel. That trust is, I think, deeply humane.
And you’re not alone. Not at all. There are far more people uneasy with certainty than the noise suggests; they are just less rewarded for saying so.
Thank you for reading me with such warmth and for choosing joy as your response!
What makes your essay sting in the best way is that it exposes contemporary politics as a kind of historical cosplay. Today’s leaders don’t govern the present; they curate analogies. They govern by reference slide: “this looks like that”, “we’ve seen this before”, “history tells us…”, as if moral certainty could be crowdsourced from dead centuries and run through PowerPoint. The result is policy as superstition: ritual invocations of Rome, Munich, the Cold War, “never again”, all deployed less to understand reality than to anesthetize responsibility in real time.
Your argument sharpens something crucial, that modern politics isn’t ignorant of history but addicted to it. The past is used the way insecure people use credentials, waved around to shut down thinking, to pre-empt surprise, to justify force with pedigree. This is why today’s political class is so fluent in precedent and so illiterate in emergence. They can quote collapse but cannot recognize novelty. They treat uncertainty as a systems failure rather than a signal, and so they manage instability instead of engaging it, regulate dissent instead of listening to it, model populations instead of addressing people.
What’s devastating is your insight that this isn’t a failure of data but of imagination. We’ve built governments that think like algorithms because they’re terrified of being wrong in public. So they cling to historical scripts the way bad actors cling to lines, even when the stage has caught fire. Politics becomes about liability management, no one wants to be surprised, because surprise implies accountability. Better to misread the present through the past than to face it naked.
And yet you refuse cynicism. That final turn, hope as a compulsion rather than a belief, rescues the piece from becoming another polished diagnosis. I admire and love that you don’t offer answers, and that restraint is precisely the point. You’ve written an essay that performs the humility it advocates, one that resists closure in a culture addicted to conclusions. You denied certainty the comfort of a neat ending. That is an act of intellectual courage, and a remarkable piece of writing, Tamara. And I thank you for that.
I keep noticing that analogy has replaced judgement, allowing leaders to act without actually deciding because if history has already “spoken”, then responsibility can be framed as obedience rather than choice. The past becomes a ventriloquist, which means it speaks, they move their mouths, and accountability dissolves into quotation. That’s why these gestures feel ceremonial rather than responsive. They look busy, informed, grounded, knowledgeable, while carefully avoiding the risk of meeting the present on its own terms.
This dependence on precedent that goes beyond fear of error is performative. Referencing history confers gravitas instantly; it signals seriousness without demanding presence. You don’t have to listen closely to people who are alive if you can invoke people who are dead. And dead witnesses don’t interrupt, don’t contradict, don’t demand revision, being infinitely compliant. That compliance is seductive, especially in systems that prize smooth execution over genuine responsiveness.
What worries me the most is how this habit trains the public as well. When politics becomes a theatre of reference, citizens are invited to argue about metaphors instead of consequences. Was this “another Munich” or “another Vietnam”? Meanwhile, the actual material, psychological, social conditions continue to shift underneath those labels. The debate becomes safer but thinner. And thin debates are easier to win without learning anything.
I’m grateful you noticed the refusal to harden into diagnosis. I wouldn’t do such a thing since certainty is tempting precisely because it feels like relief after long attention. But relief is not the same as care…… Ending without answers is an ethical move. Some questions should remain unsettled because settling them too quickly is how power avoids being surprised by reality.
Thank you, Clara, for reading this with such acuity, and for taking the time to point to what it stirred rather than what it concluded!
Yes, but...I know how I felt when I lived in Germany and people talked to me about their parents' attraction and revulsion to Hitler. I know how I felt, as a young person, watching the body count each evening on the five clock news in the days of Vietnam. I know how I feel reading my father's letters from Iwo Jima. So there is a hand of history that reaches out to me and I can't deny it. It doesn't offer a prediction, but it helps me see my place in the flow of time a bit more clearly. We may not be able to rely on the patterns but humans still look for them. We are woven into history each moment nonetheless. This is what I choose to write about because it has chosen me.
That’s the place where history stops being an abstract problem and becomes a lived encounter. Those moments orient, telling you that you are not alone in time, that your nervous system responds to something that didn’t end because the calendar moved on.
I think this is where the argument often gets misunderstood. To say we can’t rely on patterns isn’t to say we are untouched by what came before. I write from everything I went through (growing up in communist and post-communist Eastern Europe, to give you just one example). What reaches us does so through feeling before it ever becomes framework. The unease in Germany, the numbers on the evening news, the intimacy of your father’s letters do not operate as analogies. They don’t tell you what will happen. They tell you where you are standing. One closes inquiry; the other deepens it.
You’re right that humans look for patterns, but I’d add that we also look for lineage, and continuity of vulnerability. That’s why some histories grip us and others pass by untouched. They’ve already found a resonance point in us. Writing from that place is a response. When you say the subject has chosen you, I hear someone acknowledging obligation rather than preference.
Thank you, Michele, for commenting so beautifully and personally! It brings the conversation back to the body, to memory as sensation rather than doctrine, and I’m deeply grateful for that.
Again, you have generously made me feel personally heard-and recognized for being smarter than I am. I continue to write about the history (global and personal) that makes up my life, and I work hard at articulating my place in the midst of it all. Your attention strengthens my resolve to keep learning, and my debt to you grows larger.
Wonderful, wonderful read. I have always wanted a more incisive understanding of that aphorism that is always touted "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Is it that we are doomed to co-opt patterns that have always worked for a certain group of people and to the detriment of others? In this sense can we truly derive meaning from retrospective inquiry?
My suspicious after this read is that our access to the past is always mediated by interpretation rather than direct observation, historical understanding is inevitably shaped by present values and by the futures we seek to bring about. As those values and aspirations change, so too do the meanings we assign to past events, the causes we emphasize, and the lessons we claim they teach. History therefore lacks a stable interpretive core if viewed in this lense as it is continuously reconstructed in light of contemporary concerns rather than serving as an independent source of guidance.
For this reason, appeals to “learning from history” risk circularity, since the future we desire determines the past we invoke to justify it. An interpretive foundation that shifts with each rearticulation of collective aims cannot reliably instruct what the future ought to be, even if it may still constrain what futures are materially or psychologically possible.
I think the aphorism survives because it flatters our sense of agency. It suggests that history behaves like a rulebook, follow the instructions and avoid the penalty. But it ignores that “learning” is never neutral. We don’t extract lessons from the past the way we extract data from a lab experiment; we select, elevate, and narrate, and those choices are already shaped by who we are, what we fear, and what we’re trying to protect. Thus, repetition is a failure of imagination constrained by power.
I share your suspicion about mediation. We never encounter the past raw. We meet it filtered through archives, silences, translations, winners’ accounts, and present-day anxieties. That doesn’t make historical inquiry pointless, but it does make it unstable by design, and that instability is the honest condition of working with human memory at scale. The problem arises when that instability is denied and dressed up as objectivity, allowing certain interpretations to pretend to be inevitabilities.
Now the danger is indeed that we choose pasts that justify desired futures, and that once those pasts are canonised, they narrow what futures can even be imagined. Interpretation constrains, telling us what kinds of change are “realistic”, what risks are “acceptable”, and which lives are legible within the story. That’s how historical reasoning becomes conservative even when it claims to be corrective.
Where I still find value in retrospective inquiry is in friction. History can unsettle our confidence, expose how contingent our values are, and remind us that what feels natural or permanent has been assembled before, and disassembled too. It doesn’t tell us where to go, but it can make us more cautious about believing we already know.
Thank you, Christine, for your precision and for pushing the argument into its epistemic consequences!
I'd not heard of Anselm Kiefer, and his illustrations seemed the perfect match with your essay. They offer a feeling (to me) of the messiness of history within an attempt to control or corral it (especially "The High Priestess"), with the burning buildings in "An Intimation of Apocalypse" vividly suggesting consequences, and the final one, "The Renowned Orders of the Night" offering the suggestion of hope that you mentioned.
Your one line, "Our hunger to extract patterns from pain has the shape of belief," is a perfect expression of our need to make meaning from history. It reminds me of what is often said when a soldier or a first responder loses their life: "They didn't give their life in vain." Or the motto during the Great War, which became World War I - "The war to end all wars." Not so much. But as you say, we feel a need to create a story from what happened, which allows us not to do what you say we need to do, and "live with the bruised alphabet," or live with the real pain of the history, worldwide or personal. Perhaps it is possible to live with the pain and allow it some meaning - for example, when someone dies to save another's life. That might be a case in which it's possible to hold both. However the history books are generally written by the winners, which makes it difficult to get a complete picture.
I appreciated the passage about your journal in your early twenties in which you wrote that you, "finally understood love." The only thing I'd argue is that you weren't mistaken, you didn't add the context. That you understood love to the best of your ability or capacity at that time of your life - because with that context, it becomes true, I think. And none of us would add the context at that age, because that's the age when we think we are immortal and know everything, isn't it? I have a similar journal from roughly the same age, and yes, there are things in there that make me cringe when I read them. At the same time, I treasure it, because it tells me so much more than any photograph about who I was then.
And then we get back to what could it be worth, though, to go through that history? It's true enough that there are plenty of times I mined my past for nostalgic reasons, or to justify something to myself, or just to wallow in it. There are also times when I discover an answer to an old question that I'd overlooked, or couldn't have understood before. Sometimes it's not a big deal, sometimes it makes a difference. And I think that's true whether it's personal or larger than that. I'm thinking now of the number of books that have been written on a part of history previously ignored, like the African American women who were "computers" in the NASA space program, or the Navajo code-breakers in the South Pacific theater in WWII. Those are more recent parts of history that are now acknowledged instead of hidden.
Still, I keep coming back to the realisation that the bigger the picture, the more likely that making meaning out of history is senseless because it is messy, and it's way more improv than organisation. You are so on target there it's impossible to ignore it.
I'm left with a question that is more of a personal one related to history. Growing up, a lot of my history came from reading biographies of famous people that focused on them as children, and gave only broad strokes about their adulthood. I read about George Washington, Crazy Horse, Joan of Arc, Abe Lincoln, Annie Oakley, George Washington Carver, Daniel Boone, and Teddy Roosevelt. History books from school filled in a lot, and my own reading filled in the rest. My sense of history was kind of a tapestry of people and events and they live in my memory in that way. A while back you'd commented on something I'd written, and said, "moments of intimate self-revelation opening outward into collective memory, history, and myth." In that kind of context, history intertwined with our personal journey, how would you see the history fitting in, if it even can?
This is one of those essays that I need to come back to it again and again. At the same time, I had so many things come up the first time I read it, that I wanted to reread once or twice and then comment, so I wouldn't forget all of it.
Doc, I am glad you lingered with both the art and the unease it carries, because for me Kiefer isn’t illustrative in the explanatory sense. I find him accumulative, and without clarifying history, he weighs it down. What you’re calling “messiness within an attempt to corral” feels right… there’s always structure present, but it’s scorched, overbuilt, provisional. Order is there, but it looks exhausted by what it’s trying to hold. That tension mattered to me more than symbolism ever could, and that’s why I chose his art to illustrate this essay.
On meaning and pain, I think you touch a real fault line. There are moments where meaning doesn’t feel imposed but earned, acts that are unmistakably relational, where someone intervenes so another might live. But notice how small-scale and intimate those cases are. Meaning seems to survive the best when it stays close to bodies, to faces, to names that matter to someone specific. The trouble begins when we scale that impulse upward and start demanding that entire wars, collapses, or eras justify themselves. That’s where meaning starts to behave like anaesthesia rather than insight.
I think we converge the most strongly on the question of scale. The closer you stay to particular lives, the more history feels usable as texture. Once you zoom out far enough, narrative coherence starts to lie. The big picture demands simplification to survive being seen at all. That makes the details more fragile, which is why the recovery of sidelined histories matters. It keeps the picture from pretending it ever could be complete.
Your final question is beautiful, and I don’t think it has a clean answer. My sense is that history fits the best when it’s allowed to braid rather than dominate, when it enters personal life as resonance, far from destiny or example. Figures encountered young often live inside us as tonal presences, shaping how we imagine courage, failure, stubbornness, dignity. That’s history as companionship…. it doesn’t tell you what to do, it keeps you company while you decide.
Thank you, Doc, for taking the time to think your way through this so carefully, and for trusting the first reading enough to speak from it before it settled!
For me, that in-between is also a pressure zone. Order promises relief, chaos promises aliveness, and standing between them means refusing the full comfort of either. It’s where I feel the cost of attention the most sharply because nothing there is automatic. I have to keep choosing presence without the shelter of certainty or the thrill of collapse.
Thank you for naming that sensation so cleanly, Mow!
I’ll confess… I had to look this up. And once I did, I couldn’t unsee how perfectly it fits.
What struck me is the behaviour it describes: a rule so simple it feels harmless, applied repeatedly until it produces something wildly unstable or unexpectedly bounded. That’s exactly how certainty works in human systems. We start with a small assumption, add a constant we barely question (context, ideology, fear, ambition), and then iterate. Over time, the output stops resembling the input, yet we keep insisting the logic is sound because the rule itself never changed.
Thank you, Lorenzo, for dropping this here! Sometimes a symbol does more work than a paragraph, especially when it exposes how little control repetition actually gives us + I’ve learnt something new, and for that I’m the most grateful.
Berra’s brilliance is that he turns common sense inside out without dressing it up. What sounds like a joke is actually a warning about our addiction to foresight. Prediction is hard because the future keeps renegotiating the terms while we’re busy polishing our expectations. We want it to behave like a continuation, and it keeps behaving like an interruption.
“The future ain’t what it used to be” lands even harder now, because we’ve built entire systems assuming continuity, only to discover that acceleration itself changes the rules. When the pace of change increases, even yesterday’s future becomes obsolete.
Randolph, thank you for dropping Berra here! His humour cuts through pretence faster than theory ever could.
That feeling you describe is one of the most honest forms of learning. Real insight rarely arrives as a new possession. It should disturb, and reorder what you thought was already settled.
Thank you, Mike, for reading my essay and the conversations around it!
"All life is built on the rejection or exclusion of other projects. Or rather, it feeds on a crime: that of the possibilities that it has killed and that have not been able to prosper. The event is fatal and ends everything that could have taken its place. The temptation is great then, in the last stages, the temptation to want to reach these abandoned possibilities to give them new life and growth. Although we know that there are possible new beginnings, that the bets are still to be made, the fact is that what has happened overshadows what could have happened. One remains, regardless of what he wants, a prisoner of his actions. And, for those who do not receive the grace of a second, third or fourth chance, then the time of the scarcity of possibilities begins. The hands stop stretching, the days are still poor in adventures, the path no longer deviates: everything is traced, desperately flat. This is how certain public figures disappear, who suddenly stop being heard about, and whose names only resonate on the day of their death, when everyone had already forgotten them. Time reduces uncertainty , although in certain privileged moments there seems to be more wealth in us than we will ever know. So the dream is to yearn, until the end, to escape from this heavy self, this past heavy as a ball, and seek the saving episode from which "everyone has the right to wait for the revelation of the meaning of his life" (André Breton).
Maybe history is heretical, speaking to the status quo of our current commons of algorithmic AI influenced orthodoxy, with the paradoxical language of the prophets of old, attesting to our hedonistic ways with the critical eye of one whose voice echoes with the unpredictability of the past in its wilderness and unknown mythical depths reaching from the place of the Creator to touch our contemporary awareness with the dreams of our ancestral and species longing, and for which we are asked to carry through on, to fulfill?
History is bethrothed to the future through the progeny stemming from us in the present. What did we stand for, what did we do, how did we live, from the legacy of what was handed down to us to carry on with, and in turn hand on to the further generations rippling out from the testimony of our lives?
That we may not prematurely close our accounts with reality and remain open to experiences that lie beyond our ordinary consciousness (James), is what the past is asking of us. The poets, the mystics, the medicine ways of shamans, from the long ago as well of from today, are pointing to what has been lost in our present worldview of reductive material reality.
And it remains to be seen what may come out of this current era of humanity's endeavor to survive our chauvinistic left-brain hegemony on all our possible untried complementary relations.
Thank you Tamara, a beautiful and resounding reflection to start the year!
What I hear beneath the prophetic cadence of your comment is a plea for unfinishedness. Not heresy as provocation, but heresy as refusal to let the present crown itself orthodox too quickly. When history starts sounding subversive, it’s usually because the present has grown overly confident in its own explanations. Orthodoxy, whether theological, political, or algorithmic, always mistakes legibility for truth. What unsettles it isn’t opposition, but voices that won’t stay inside the sanctioned grammar.
I’m wary, though, of framing history as issuing a task to be fulfilled. Obligation can slide too easily into destiny, and destiny has a habit of flattening moral responsibility. What feels more honest to me is the idea of continuation without instruction. We inherit fragments, pressures, unresolved tensions, not mandates. The question isn’t “what must we complete?” but “what are we willing to remain answerable to?” That answerability is quieter than legacy-building, less flattering, but far more demanding.
I like your invocation of expanded consciousness, especially the insistence that what’s been excluded keeps returning as necessity. When the range of what counts as real narrows too much, reality pushes back. Poets, mystics, and non-instrumental ways of knowing don’t offer solutions but reintroduce dimensions that technocratic cultures amputate. That’s a reminder that human perception was never meant to be single-channel.
As for the imbalance between analysis and receptivity, I think the danger is reason that has forgotten it is partial. When one mode of knowing declares itself sufficient, it stops listening. And listening, more than believing, is what keeps us in contact with what hasn’t yet taken form.
Thank you, Mike, for bringing this register into the conversation! Your reflection opens a long view, and I’m grateful for the generosity and seriousness with which you offered it.
The one orthodoxy that is critical and hegemonic today is the scientific worldview that has been co-opted by corporate entities, be they the AMA and Big Pharma in the USA, or even deeper, by a series of misbegotten notions at the base of interpretation about the facts of life, as in the germ theory which has never been proven, scientifically, leading to our current quandary of health concerns built upon not so much a lie, but a floundering which has become a vested opportunity for profitable medical protocols, and deleterious to genuine health practices.
Thank you Tamara for your take on my response which is so truthsome, and allowing me the opening here to address what we are facing with Turquoise's health going forward: meeting the orthodoxy of medical science head on with alternative perspectives voicing an equally empirical place at the table of life!
Wisdom is inversely correlated with certainty. However, I’m not certain about that.
I know—nope, I believe—that you like some, if not all of Humes’s philosophy. As you know, according to Hume there is a flaw in inductive reasoning. Yet, if one can get a quantitative measurement of the most predictive variables, one can estimate a probability.
So what are the quantitative variables of past relationships?
Even if one knows, how are they measured and quantified?
Maybe relationships are emergent spaces that dissolves as the lower scale variables change.
That opening line made me smile, because it already does the work it pretends to question. For me, wisdom isn’t anti-certainty so much as suspicious of where certainty comes from. There’s a difference between provisional confidence earned through contact with reality, and the brittle assurance that arrives by abstracting life into something manageable. The latter is what worries me because it’s often too tidy to survive lived conditions.
You’re right to bring up Hume because the flaw he points to in induction is an existential glitch. Probability can tell us how often something tended to happen, not why it must happen again. Quantification is persuasive because it feels modest, just estimates, just likelihoods, but it smuggles in an assumption of continuity that human relationships routinely violate. People change interior weather without notice. Context mutates faster than metrics can update. What looks like a stable variable is often a frozen snapshot of something already in motion.
When it comes to relationships, I’m increasingly skeptical that the most important variables are even measurable in a useful way. You can count duration, conflict frequency, attachment styles, shared values but the decisive shifts often happen at a scale that resists capture… timing, courage, boredom, fear, the sudden revaluation of one’s own life. Two identical relational “inputs” can yield opposite outcomes depending on whether someone has just lost a parent, discovered a new ambition, or crossed a threshold they didn’t know existed.
Your last line is where I fully agree with you. I think relationships fail because they are emergent spaces that can’t survive being treated as static problems. As lower-level conditions like identity, desire, self-respect change, the space itself reorganises or evaporates. No equation breaks; the field simply no longer exists in the same form. Expecting predictability there is like demanding consistency from weather patterns that are responding to pressures you can’t see yet.
Thank you, Jim, for taking my essay seriously enough to interrogate it at this level, and for doing so with humour and intellectual generosity!
‘’ When it comes to relationships, I’m increasingly skeptical that the most important variables are even measurable in a useful way.”
Exactly the point i was making. Humans are extremely complex which for me means i view anyone who speaks with certainty about human behavior not with one eye but both eyes jaundiced.
I'm someone who usually doesn't come to the defense of ideology, religious or otherwise, but I've always said that the best case for religion isn't what it says about the nature of reality; rather, its strongest position is what it has to say about knowledge. The reason knowledge is dangerous isn't merely that knowledge is power; it's that knowledge is always incomplete. It's the people who have a small amount of knowledge who think they know everything, because they misguidedly apply pattern recognition techniques at scale. It's an error of excessive extrapolation that you get with the myopia of knowing enough to navigate some small area around you, but not enough to really see the forest through the trees.
Knowledge is incomplete, and whatever knowledge we do have requires interpretation, and that interpretation requires context that has to extend way beyond the span of our lives, and encompass more than merely our self interest. Of course we can rarely if ever manage this, so then we overcompensate with certainty and then force that certainty on the world around us in an attempt to exert and maintain control.
I love what you said about not wanting the future, because it's congruent with our lack of real interest in the truth. Because we can never have the full picture, we fill the picture ourselves, then demand that the world conform to it as a blueprint. Similarly, we want time to march in a linear progression that follows the causal logic of our limited understanding of the variables, and our biased presuppositions. This is precisely why we've surrendered ourselves to algorithmic selection, because it's a continuation of the oldest precepts of religious ideology: the world is unpredictable, knowledge is dangerous, so trust in the WORD. In the modern world, it's trust in the curation; it's to feed on the FEED, with it's self-fulfilling feedback loops.
There's so much more to say, Tamara. This is one of your best. I feel like I say this at least once a week, but you simply keep my gears oiled and spinning. The error is in thinking that there's an actual limit to your abilities. I can't be sure of the future, but it's hard to see one where you're not dominating this platform.
We fear ignorance when the danger is partial illumination. Total darkness humbles you. Full light would terrify you. But the dimly lit room is where people start mistaking orientation for mastery. A little knowledge intoxicates. It gives you enough orientation to act, but not enough horizon to doubt yourself. And once action begins to feel justified, certainty follows like an alibi.
I’m increasingly convinced that our obsession with pattern recognition is temperamental. We mistake coherence for truth because coherence soothes the nervous system. It reduces cognitive strain. It lets us move faster, decide quicker, govern harder. The problem is that reality doesn’t care about our tolerance for ambiguity. It doesn’t scale to our attention span. So we replace reality with models, and then punish reality for deviating from them. A technical failure + a failure of character. The willingness to live with incomplete maps is rarer than brilliance, and far more disruptive.
Your point about curation as secular doctrine feels perfect here. What’s chilling is how little résistance there was. No burning of books, no great prohibitions….. just relief. Someone else will choose. Someone else will filter. Someone else will decide what matters. The abdication came disguised as convenience. And once you stop choosing what you encounter, you stop encountering what might unsettle you. The feed doesn’t lie; it simply never risks telling you anything you didn’t already half-believe. Enclosure works through familiarity now.
As for the future and domination…. I’m allergic to that language, even when it’s generous. What I care about is staying unhouse-trained. Remaining capable of surprise, especially self-surprise. I’m trying to protect a certain permeability, the ability to be wrong without collapsing, to revise without self-betrayal, to think without immediately converting thought into position. If that resonates, it’s because we’re all suffocating a little under explanations that arrived too early and stayed too long.
Thank you, Andrew, reading with your incredible intellectual seriousness and emotional generosity. Exchanges like this are the most inspirational for me!
“Enclosure works through familiarity”
We circle the wagons,
our wagons, to feel safe
but they are not ours,
they are just wagons
and we circle them
around nothing
but our fear
to protect it from
the wind, the sky,
& blurry caravans of unknown;
“our word wagons have weapons so these future harbingers, well
they must too… it must be true!”
So we fire upon
wagons full of honey jars
and of old women
stitching flowers
into denim garments
and humming merrily
of their blessings
Beautiful!
Knowledge in a universe of complexity will always be incomplete. Yet, for the curious who recognize that knowledge is incomplete and are open to Bayesian adjustments, knowledge will always be superior to static beliefs in myths.
I agree, with one important caveat that keeps nagging at me.
Knowledge that knows itself to be provisional is vastly preferable to myth that pretends to be timeless. Bayesian humility beats dogma every time, but only as long as adjustment remains genuinely open-ended. What worries me is how easily Bayesian language gets used to dignify what is, in practice, a very conservative operation… updating within a framework whose priors are never examined because they feel “reasonable”, “evidence-based”, or simply too foundational to touch.
So the danger isn’t static belief versus adaptive knowledge; it’s adaptive knowledge that freezes at the level of first assumptions. Many people are excellent at revising probabilities while remaining completely closed to revising the question itself. They update outcomes but protect the model. And that’s where Bayesian openness can start to behave like a more sophisticated myth, less flamboyant, more respectable, but just as resistant to surprise.
So yes, curiosity, revision, and probabilistic thinking are indispensable, but they only stay alive if they include the courage to let priors collapse, not just inch toward better confidence intervals. Otherwise, we end up with very elegant adjustments circling a question that no longer fits the world we’re in.
In theory, isn’t that what science philosophy do, eliminating the prior to form a new theory? Not really. Newtonian physics was not eliminated by relativity. It was modified or added to, to address different circumstances. However, the priors in love seem to collapse often.
Aren’t all mythologies essentially static? OK, there may some glacial movement but that movement is essentially static compared to the dynamics of the curious skeptics that choose to think?
Some may think I’m referring to all religions. Well, they are certainly a big subset of what I’m referring to
I think they appear static because we encounter them embalmed, already canonised, already summarised, already defended. What freezes isn’t the myth itself so much as the moment it’s declared finished. Early mythologies were anything but inert: they were unstable containers for fear, desire, power, weather, sex, death. They shifted orally, contradicted themselves shamelessly, mutated with each retelling. What made them dangerous, and alive, was precisely that they weren’t settled yet.
The rigidity enters when a myth stops being a question and starts being used as an answer. At that point it becomes administrative. It filters experience without absorbing it. And you’re right that many religions exemplify this, but they are not unique. Political ideologies, economic narratives, even scientific worldviews can harden the same way once curiosity is replaced by guardianship. The problem isn’t belief; it’s custodianship, which means someone decides the thinking has been done, and everyone else is instructed to inherit the conclusions.
Curious skeptics oppose myth by refusing closure. They keep myths open. They ask what a story is doing now, not what it once meant. So, curiosity isn’t anti-mythical, it’s pre-dogmatic, treating stories as provisional tools. The moment a mythology can no longer be interrupted by lived reality, it stops orienting and starts anaesthetising.
So yes, many mythologies function as static structures today but that stasis is a symptom, nothing to do with destiny. What’s glacial isn’t the myth; it’s the institution wrapped around it. And institutions move slowly because their primary task is preservation, not understanding. Curiosity, by contrast, has no archive to defend. That’s why it feels faster, riskier, and more alive.
I’m wondering about “static”. Does anything ever stand still or stay inn one place. I write poetry. My poems look static, same words, same punctuation, but they are not.
If you and Tamara read one of my poems, we would discover that neither of you actually read (received) the same poem. You mattered, the diversity of life in you, discovered the diversity living in the “static” poem. For some my poems are dead, for some, life giving… but never static.
Thanks for your post. It awakened my curiosity.
….. “static” is often a visual illusion, not an ontological fact. We mistake fixity of form for fixity of meaning. A poem on the page looks still, but it’s more like a charged field than an object. It only becomes itself in contact with a reader’s history, temperament, griefs, hungers, attention that day. The text doesn’t move, but meaning does. And meaning is where life happens.
That’s why I’m careful with the word “static”. What actually stagnates is the relationship to an artifact. A poem dies when someone insists they’ve already finished encountering it. The same poem read at 20 and at 60 is not the same poem because the reader is not the same instrument. Nothing is ever still unless we approach it as if it were.
This is also why I resist closed interpretations. They collapse that living exchange. They treat reception as retrieval rather than participation. Some readers finding life, others finding nothing has nothing to do with a failure of the poem; it’s evidence of its honesty. Living things don’t distribute themselves evenly, they respond to conditions.
Thank you, Michael, for bringing poetry into this, and for articulating that distinction so clearly!
The seed has born fruit. Love it. If we were totally in sync with each other the light of thought would have no mass, there would be stasis.
Tamara, this is one of your best. Reading it felt like standing in front of a painting that refuses to resolve if you stare too long. The kind where the closer you get, the less explanatory it becomes. It reminded me of Francis Bacon’s portraits where faces are smeared, features technically present but morally unstable. You can still recognise the human, but certainty has been violently removed. That’s what this essay does to history. It doesn’t deny its shape, it distorts it until our confidence in interpretation starts to melt.
What I admired the most is how the structure mirrors the thesis. You don’t march us toward a lesson; you circle, hesitate, double back, let ideas fray at the edges. That restraint is rare. Most writing about history wants to win. This wants to stay awake. It understands that clarity, when it arrives too smoothly, is often just obedience in a well-lit room.
Your argument about analogy as anesthesia landed hard for me. We reach for the past to the way museums reach for plaques, to make the chaos legible enough that we don’t have to feel implicated. It’s like how we turn Guernica into an icon of “anti-war” sentiment, stripping it of its ongoing violence, flattening it into a symbol you can nod at without being disturbed. The painting doesn’t change, but our relationship to it becomes hygienic. History gets the same treatment: framed, captioned, rendered safe.
The sections on algorithms and prediction felt especially personal because they echo what’s happened to art itself. Streaming platforms don’t recommend what might undo us, they recommend what statistically resembles what we already tolerated. The future is no longer commissioned; it’s extrapolated. And just like you describe, surprise gets treated as a flaw. The new, the dissonant, the genuinely unfamiliar, those things don’t perform well in systems trained on recognition. They get filtered out because they’re unclassifiable.
Your invocation of jazz is amazing, but I kept thinking of performance art instead. Marina Abramović sitting silently across from strangers, offering nothing to interpret, no moral, no arc—just presence. The work only exists if you’re willing to stay in discomfort without resolving it into meaning. That’s the posture you’re arguing for politically and historically, attention without premature narration. Most people can’t tolerate that. They want the label, the takeaway, the reassurance that they understood correctly.
And the personal passages matter precisely because they refuse redemption. The journals, the relationships, the embarrassment of former certainty do the work of proving the larger claim, that interpretation is often just a way of preserving dignity. We edit the past to survive. That doesn’t make us evil; it makes us unreliable. The danger begins when we confuse that coping mechanism for insight.
By the time you arrive at hope, it feels earned because it isn’t heroic. It’s closer to what artists do under regimes that don’t care whether they exist, they keep making work that may never be seen because not doing it would feel like a deeper lie. That version of hope doesn’t believe in progress. It believes in not going numb.
Your essay doesn’t ask to be agreed with. And that’s your brilliance. It asks to be held without being resolved. And that may be its most fantastic gesture. We are obsessed with conclusions, you’ve written something that insists on staying unfinished as an ethical stance. Discipline and extraordinary writing. Brava, Tamara. Encore une fois.
I’m glad you named that sense of refusal because for me the real risk in writing this was being over-understood. There’s a peculiar violence in work that gets explained too quickly, turned into an argument someone can “agree with” and move on from. I wanted to resist that pull toward neatness as a form of intellectual hygiene. When something resolves too cleanly, I start to suspect it has stopped asking anything of us. Staying with what won’t settle is often the only honest response to complexity.
I think that interpretation is less about truth than about timing. Too early, and it becomes a shield. Too late, and it becomes an evasion. Most of us interpret in self-defence. We tell stories about what happened so we can keep functioning, keep showing up, keep believing we weren’t foolish, complicit, or afraid. That’s human! But when that reflex migrates from private life into institutions, into politics, into culture, it hardens, stops protecting and starts instructing. And that’s where damage begins, when explanation graduates into authority.
On the question of art and systems that reward familiarity, I don’t think the tragedy is only that surprise disappears. It’s that risk gets reassigned. The burden of risk is no longer carried by those who curate, fund, or decide, but by those who create. If your work doesn’t fit what already exists, the system doesn’t say “interesting”, it says “improbable”. And improbability, in our era, is treated as irresponsibility, it teaches people to pre-edit themselves, to offer only what can be recognised in advance. The future isn’t cancelled by censorship, it’s worse, it’s starved by caution.
If hope means anything to me at all, it has nothing to do with improvement curves or historical arcs, when it lives in refusal without spectacle, in continuing without applause, in not letting systems train the tenderness out of you. That sort of hope doesn’t need to be announced because it’s not trying to convince anyone. It’s simply a way of staying available to what hasn’t shown up yet.
Thank you, Alexander, for meeting my essay where it deliberately refused to land, and for your wonderful your compliments! You’re very generous.
The past always constitutes a seductive, imagistic field that constantly leads us to the temptation of pseudo-revisitation, always in search of a narrative that fits our present. As many Enlightenment artists and architects believed, history, in its becoming, is a dynamic process in time and space. It was therefore important to arrive at a reflection on immutable, universal, ahistorical principles, timeless principles, consecrating them as inspirational principles for forging the present and projecting the future. Not everyone slept on the seductive path of historical example to explain the ideas and the course of the world in its present. Yes, the evolution of the human condition is circular, just as nature shows us. The miracle of human nature has been the capacity to break this circularity, instead of sleeping in the repetitive stillness of the seasons that regulate our lives. After all, it is also a cycle of our civilizations, repeating the act of birth, growth, and death. The miracle of human life in this standardized circularity is the capacity to evolve, destroy, die, and be reborn, mimicking the cycles of Nature, even while de-standardizing it in our civilizational cycles.
The light of reason and human imagination is the umbilical cord of the meaning of our existence, where not everyone sleeps or suffers from blindness.
And there, yes, Jazz or Progressive Rock transforms music into a new semantic narrative, vibrant in scale, reach, and rhythm.
Congratulations on your essay, which is always complex for me to read, since I don't master writing in English.
Note: This comment is only superficially reflective, not intending to enter into the complex philosophical and ethical discussion about the existential problem of the role of history and the historian.
What I appreciate in your reading is the tension you keep alive between repetition and rupture. Biological, civilisational, psychological cycles exist, but they are not cages unless we agree to sleep inside them. What you call the “miracle” isn’t exemption from cycles; it’s the capacity to interfere with them. To interrupt repetition with imagination, to refuse pure recurrence even while knowing we are never outside pattern altogether.
Where I gently diverge is around the Enlightenment impulse to locate timeless, ahistorical principles. I understand the longing behind it, the desire for ballast in a moving world, but I’m increasingly suspicious of claims to the immutable. They often age into idols. What begins as orientation turns into authority, and authority, over time, resists revision. Reason and imagination matter deeply to me, but only when they remain answerable to what they can’t fully contain. Otherwise, light becomes glare.
Your analogy with music is beautiful. Jazz and progressive forms risk structure without abolishing it. They move forward by stretching timing, by letting dissonance breathe, by trusting that coherence can emerge without being pre-scripted. That’s close to how I think about history at its best, not as example or instruction, but as a field of motifs we can answer differently, or not at all.
And please don’t apologise for your English, Nuno! What you wrote carries precision, rhythm, and intellectual generosity. Complexity doesn’t belong to any single language. Thank you for reading so attentively, and for meeting my essay in its movement rather than trying to resolve it too quickly!
Thank you so much for your generosity in taking the time to reply to my comment. Congratulations on your essays!
Thank you too! I am grateful and always moved when I’m read so generously.
This is extraordinary, truly, Tamara. You have unfastened history from the prosthetic certainty we’ve strapped to it. The admiration comes from how deftly you expose the illusions we cling to, the seduction of hindsight, the moral choreography we impose on collapse, the algorithmic laundering of our own fears. Your metaphors always land with the precision of uncomfortable truth, and this time it’s marvelous: history as jazz instead of scripture, heartbreak as bruised alphabet, empires as improvisers rather than reenactors. You turn what most writers flatten into cliché into something alive, unstable, and therefore honest.
What stirs me the most is your insistence that our problem is expecting the past to behave, expecting it to offer moral clarity when it’s inherently ambiguous, expecting it to function like a diagnostic tool rather than a shifting landscape. That refusal to tidy complexity feels almost extraordinary. And your critique of how technology amplifies our least imaginative instincts, our desire for prediction, security, pre-approved coherence, feels painfully current. I had pain reading it, I swear. It’s as if you’ve traced a line between personal memory, national mythmaking, and the algorithmic frames that now discipline our thinking, and shown they’re all running the same faulty operating system.
perhaps the real task now is not to read history, but to cultivate a tolerance for the unmodeled, to train ourselves in what physicists call “anti-fragility to uncertainty”. Instead of using history as a forecasting instrument, we might learn to inhabit it like a landscape of unresolved tensions. Cultures that survive are the ones flexible enough to throw the map away when the terrain shifts. That’s as true geopolitically as it is personally. Our memories, our institutions, our states, none of them evolve by perfecting prediction. They evolve by expanding the range of surprise they can absorb without collapsing into defensiveness or repression.
And maybe that’s the deeper hope in your essay, one that is subversive. Hope as an obstinate openness, a refusal to seal the narrative prematurely, a willingness to let the past interrupt us instead of confirm us, a commitment to curiosity as a political act, humility as a civic virtue, and misinterpretation as a condition of staying open to what doesn’t yet exist.
Your writing models a different posture toward time itself, one that is awake, and brave enough to admit it doesn’t know. I find that thrilling. And deeply, refreshingly human.
Merci, Tamara, I’ll print this one and read it again.
Your attention to posture moves me the most, the way of standing in time without bracing for verdicts. I wasn’t trying to rescue history from misuse so much as to loosen our grip on it. to stop treating it like a piece of equipment we are entitled to operate. When we expect the past to clarify us morally, we often ask it to do emotional labour we’d rather not do ourselves. Ambiguity is its most honest condition.
I’m glad you brought up tolerance rather than mastery. Survival, whether personal or collective, seems less about foresight than about range, how much contradiction, novelty, and discomfort a system can endure without snapping into defensiveness. Most collapses don’t come from surprise itself, but from the rigidity that meets it. We fall apart because we’ve rehearsed certainty instead of responsiveness.
What you call hope as obstinate openness feels right to me. Not optimism, not faith in outcomes, but a refusal to seal meaning too early, a willingness to be interrupted by new information, but by forms of life and thought that don’t yet have names. comfortable.
Thank you, Céline, for reading me with depth and care, and for articulating what it stirred rather than what it settled.
Knowing the essay will be lived with, not just consumed, is the most meaningful compliment I could receive!
I love this so much! And the comments are fantastic.
I'm not sure the future laughs. The Grim Reaper might. He alone knows for certain. Certainty without penalty. He laughs because he owns the point where all other certainties dissolve. A twenty year old certain of love: he laughs. An empire certain of dominance: he laughs. A Marxist certain of historical determinism: he laughs. Perhaps coming to terms with the Reaper is the wisest strategy, but, then, he has always been our greatest ambient fear.
This piece twists the paradigm: it posits acquaintance with uncertainty. History is death because it calcifies the viewer. Lot himself warned us not to look back. History turns us into pillars of salt. We gain provisional peace for permanent blinders. And not only that, we surrender the joy of surprise! Comfort, a sense of security, outsourcing responsibility for our own uncontrollable energies, our own humanity, these suck life from the form and leave it dry as Lot's petrified wife. Lifeless zombies. Half human because we'd rather look back than honestly inward.
Ohhh, this piece drives hard on the curves. The suspension holds the road and the speed of your voice sends thrills down the spine. The pacing is vigorous. It focuses the eye on the patch just in front of us. An occasional glance in the mirror just to hold the bearings is enough, but then back to Now where the rubber really hits the road. Like an electric vehicle, the voice accelerates quickly as it builds, the feedback loops coming fast and furious, reinforcing the point. Well, guess what! Point taken. Oracular observations with actionable, livable hints for ears honed to listen. This one merits a second printing.
I like the way you relocate certainty onto death itself because it exposes how borrowed most of our confidence really is. If anything deserves monopoly rights over finality, it’s the end because it interrupts explanation altogether. Everything else that parades as certainty is provisional theatre. The problem begins when we start behaving as if we’ve already been granted the Reaper’s vantage point, issuing verdicts from a height we haven’t earned, forgetting that the privilege of not knowing is precisely what keeps us alive to contingency.
What I resist slightly is the idea that coming to terms with it is a strategy. Strategies still assume leverage. What seems wiser to me is accepting that we never negotiate with the ending, we coexist with it. I don’t fear death; the danger is the way fear pushes us into freezing experience too early, embalming meaning while it’s still breathing. People look back because stillness feels safer than exposure. Salt is preservation, and preservation taken too far becomes suffocation.
I agree with your reading of history as a force that stiffens perception resonates, and allow me to push it one step further: history immobilises and flatters. It reassures us that what has already happened is somehow more real than what is unfolding. That backward-facing comfort robs the present of its volatility, which is exactly where ethical choice still lives. Surprise is a capacity we abandon when we outsource attention to precedent. Looking inward without guarantees is harder than looking backward with footnotes.
I’m grateful for the way you read this, Andrew, not treating it as a metaphysical claim, but as a lived posture. And thank you for the care you took with the movement, the velocity, the listening! Being met at that level of attention feels like company on the road, and that’s amazing!
Throughout your essay, Tamara, I feel that uncertainty is your theme.
Most people, if not all, fear uncertainty, even if only as a kind of background eustress of niggling discomfort.
The universal uncertainty is death. When and how will it happen to us? Unless of course we take it into our own hands.
And what will be after, what will happen? I increasingly find that many atheists take their position, because they are unwilling to accept the uncertainty that faiths, including my own, Christianity, presents us with.
As a geologist, my work is the inverse of that of a designer. An architect, for example, will start with an idea, then design that reality. In geology, we’re forced to start with the design, then unravel how it came to be.
Uncertainty is an intrinsic characteristic of the natural sciences. Yet the prevalent anti-scientific dogma of our age is that we’ll perish of climate catastrophe unless we stop offending the earth-god, by emitting CO2. Yet plants depend upon CO2 for food. That our planet orbits our star at variable distance & axial tilt, is not mentioned.
The elephant in the room is volcanism: 2 or 3 megaeruptions in a decade, as has often occurred in the past, are more than sufficient to plunge us into an ice age of such intensity that our species may be totally extinguished, leaving microbiota, insects & rodents to inherit the earth.
The downfall of the Roman Empire likely had less to do with moral decadence, or even the large scale importation of slaves from incompatible cultures, but more to do with cooling resulting from a very large, likely Icelandic, volcanic eruption, which ejected sufficient ash to significantly reduce global, but especially European, insolation.
Those who clutch at what they think are certainties, as if they were an infant clutching their mother’s bosom, are deceiving themselves into a fantasy world of childish make-believe.
You’re right that uncertainty runs through the essay, but not as a thesis so much as a condition we keep trying to anaesthetise. I am interested in uncertainty as information, a signal about the limits of our vantage point. The discomfort most people feel around it isn’t accidental; it’s what happens when control habits outpace understanding. We’re taught to treat uncertainty as a flaw to be eliminated, rather than as a feature that keeps our thinking elastic.
Your geological comparison is so perfect! There’s a humility built into disciplines that begin with what is and work backward, rather than projecting an idea forward and forcing reality to comply. That inversion disciplines the imagination. It doesn’t reward grand narratives; it rewards patience, inference, restraint. I suspect part of our current malaise comes from importing design logic into domains that don’t tolerate it well (history, climate, culture, human behaviour), where causality is layered, delayed, and often indifferent to our moral preferences.
Then, I don’t see atheism or belief as the real divide. What matters more to me is how people absorb not-knowing. Some use faith to hold uncertainty open; others use it to close the question prematurely. The same is true on the secular side. What I resist is certainty that presents itself as maturity, when it’s often just a refusal to stay exposed. Clutching certainty doesn’t make someone childish; it makes them frightened in a very understandable way. The danger lies in mistaking that grip for wisdom and then scaling it into doctrine.
Your examples (volcanism, climate variability, historical collapse) underline something crucial, that reality does not organise itself around our priorities. Large systems don’t respond to virtue, blame, or intention. They respond to forces, thresholds, timing. When we moralise complexity, we simplify it just enough to feel righteous and just enough to be wrong. That’s not an argument against care or responsibility; it’s an argument against pretending we know more than we do while acting as if doubt were negligence.
Thank you, Russell, for bringing a scientist’s temperament into this conversation! The way you frame uncertainty, as the ground condition of honest inquiry, adds a depth and steadiness I appreciate very much.
I’m very grateful for your extraordinarily considered response. I’m humbled that you had the personal generosity & intellectual discipline to divine my thoughts. Pun intended.
Resisting, with difficulty, the temptation to respond essayicly, I think you’ve hit on a core human trait: the ability, to live with uncertainty. It’s a necessity.
To thrive with uncertainty requires true courage. Of course courage has many imposters: insensitivity, stupidity, desperation, drug-induced psychoses etc.
But we know when we meet true courage, & it’s sexy, in every meaning of the word. Courageous people are good to be around. It makes life worth living, & it’s why we admire success in the face of extreme hardship. It’s the core of most writing, theatre & art.
I couldn’t have said it better! Thank you, Russell!
Tamara...I've only read this essay once, and I know it will keep revealing things to me, but I just had to say: How absolutely encouraging this essay is! What a statement of trust in our humanity it is; what a fierce refusal it is to take the fast answers given in historical analogies! THIS ESPECIALLY: "History doesn’t punish us for ignorance nearly as much as it punishes us for certainty." As a citizen historian, I don't know whether to nod agreement in sage wisdom or just jump for joy because I'm not alone in thinking these things! I'll go for the Joy! Thank you/t
I like that you chose joy, because joy is often treated as unserious in intellectual spaces, when in fact it’s one of the clearest signals that something true has landed without being weaponised. For me, encouragement was the wager underneath my essay, that if we stop outsourcing our thinking to ready-made explanations, we become more human, more awake, more capable of responding rather than reacting.
What you call a “fierce refusal” feels to me less like care. Fast answers are efficient, but they’re also emotionally lazy. They relieve us of the responsibility to stay present with complexity, with ambiguity, with our own limits. Refusing them is a form of trust that we can tolerate not knowing without turning brittle or cruel. That trust is, I think, deeply humane.
And you’re not alone. Not at all. There are far more people uneasy with certainty than the noise suggests; they are just less rewarded for saying so.
Thank you for reading me with such warmth and for choosing joy as your response!
What makes your essay sting in the best way is that it exposes contemporary politics as a kind of historical cosplay. Today’s leaders don’t govern the present; they curate analogies. They govern by reference slide: “this looks like that”, “we’ve seen this before”, “history tells us…”, as if moral certainty could be crowdsourced from dead centuries and run through PowerPoint. The result is policy as superstition: ritual invocations of Rome, Munich, the Cold War, “never again”, all deployed less to understand reality than to anesthetize responsibility in real time.
Your argument sharpens something crucial, that modern politics isn’t ignorant of history but addicted to it. The past is used the way insecure people use credentials, waved around to shut down thinking, to pre-empt surprise, to justify force with pedigree. This is why today’s political class is so fluent in precedent and so illiterate in emergence. They can quote collapse but cannot recognize novelty. They treat uncertainty as a systems failure rather than a signal, and so they manage instability instead of engaging it, regulate dissent instead of listening to it, model populations instead of addressing people.
What’s devastating is your insight that this isn’t a failure of data but of imagination. We’ve built governments that think like algorithms because they’re terrified of being wrong in public. So they cling to historical scripts the way bad actors cling to lines, even when the stage has caught fire. Politics becomes about liability management, no one wants to be surprised, because surprise implies accountability. Better to misread the present through the past than to face it naked.
And yet you refuse cynicism. That final turn, hope as a compulsion rather than a belief, rescues the piece from becoming another polished diagnosis. I admire and love that you don’t offer answers, and that restraint is precisely the point. You’ve written an essay that performs the humility it advocates, one that resists closure in a culture addicted to conclusions. You denied certainty the comfort of a neat ending. That is an act of intellectual courage, and a remarkable piece of writing, Tamara. And I thank you for that.
I keep noticing that analogy has replaced judgement, allowing leaders to act without actually deciding because if history has already “spoken”, then responsibility can be framed as obedience rather than choice. The past becomes a ventriloquist, which means it speaks, they move their mouths, and accountability dissolves into quotation. That’s why these gestures feel ceremonial rather than responsive. They look busy, informed, grounded, knowledgeable, while carefully avoiding the risk of meeting the present on its own terms.
This dependence on precedent that goes beyond fear of error is performative. Referencing history confers gravitas instantly; it signals seriousness without demanding presence. You don’t have to listen closely to people who are alive if you can invoke people who are dead. And dead witnesses don’t interrupt, don’t contradict, don’t demand revision, being infinitely compliant. That compliance is seductive, especially in systems that prize smooth execution over genuine responsiveness.
What worries me the most is how this habit trains the public as well. When politics becomes a theatre of reference, citizens are invited to argue about metaphors instead of consequences. Was this “another Munich” or “another Vietnam”? Meanwhile, the actual material, psychological, social conditions continue to shift underneath those labels. The debate becomes safer but thinner. And thin debates are easier to win without learning anything.
I’m grateful you noticed the refusal to harden into diagnosis. I wouldn’t do such a thing since certainty is tempting precisely because it feels like relief after long attention. But relief is not the same as care…… Ending without answers is an ethical move. Some questions should remain unsettled because settling them too quickly is how power avoids being surprised by reality.
Thank you, Clara, for reading this with such acuity, and for taking the time to point to what it stirred rather than what it concluded!
Yes, but...I know how I felt when I lived in Germany and people talked to me about their parents' attraction and revulsion to Hitler. I know how I felt, as a young person, watching the body count each evening on the five clock news in the days of Vietnam. I know how I feel reading my father's letters from Iwo Jima. So there is a hand of history that reaches out to me and I can't deny it. It doesn't offer a prediction, but it helps me see my place in the flow of time a bit more clearly. We may not be able to rely on the patterns but humans still look for them. We are woven into history each moment nonetheless. This is what I choose to write about because it has chosen me.
That’s the place where history stops being an abstract problem and becomes a lived encounter. Those moments orient, telling you that you are not alone in time, that your nervous system responds to something that didn’t end because the calendar moved on.
I think this is where the argument often gets misunderstood. To say we can’t rely on patterns isn’t to say we are untouched by what came before. I write from everything I went through (growing up in communist and post-communist Eastern Europe, to give you just one example). What reaches us does so through feeling before it ever becomes framework. The unease in Germany, the numbers on the evening news, the intimacy of your father’s letters do not operate as analogies. They don’t tell you what will happen. They tell you where you are standing. One closes inquiry; the other deepens it.
You’re right that humans look for patterns, but I’d add that we also look for lineage, and continuity of vulnerability. That’s why some histories grip us and others pass by untouched. They’ve already found a resonance point in us. Writing from that place is a response. When you say the subject has chosen you, I hear someone acknowledging obligation rather than preference.
Thank you, Michele, for commenting so beautifully and personally! It brings the conversation back to the body, to memory as sensation rather than doctrine, and I’m deeply grateful for that.
Dear Teacher Tamara!
Again, you have generously made me feel personally heard-and recognized for being smarter than I am. I continue to write about the history (global and personal) that makes up my life, and I work hard at articulating my place in the midst of it all. Your attention strengthens my resolve to keep learning, and my debt to you grows larger.
That is wonderful, Michele! Never stop writing!
Wonderful, wonderful read. I have always wanted a more incisive understanding of that aphorism that is always touted "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Is it that we are doomed to co-opt patterns that have always worked for a certain group of people and to the detriment of others? In this sense can we truly derive meaning from retrospective inquiry?
My suspicious after this read is that our access to the past is always mediated by interpretation rather than direct observation, historical understanding is inevitably shaped by present values and by the futures we seek to bring about. As those values and aspirations change, so too do the meanings we assign to past events, the causes we emphasize, and the lessons we claim they teach. History therefore lacks a stable interpretive core if viewed in this lense as it is continuously reconstructed in light of contemporary concerns rather than serving as an independent source of guidance.
For this reason, appeals to “learning from history” risk circularity, since the future we desire determines the past we invoke to justify it. An interpretive foundation that shifts with each rearticulation of collective aims cannot reliably instruct what the future ought to be, even if it may still constrain what futures are materially or psychologically possible.
I think the aphorism survives because it flatters our sense of agency. It suggests that history behaves like a rulebook, follow the instructions and avoid the penalty. But it ignores that “learning” is never neutral. We don’t extract lessons from the past the way we extract data from a lab experiment; we select, elevate, and narrate, and those choices are already shaped by who we are, what we fear, and what we’re trying to protect. Thus, repetition is a failure of imagination constrained by power.
I share your suspicion about mediation. We never encounter the past raw. We meet it filtered through archives, silences, translations, winners’ accounts, and present-day anxieties. That doesn’t make historical inquiry pointless, but it does make it unstable by design, and that instability is the honest condition of working with human memory at scale. The problem arises when that instability is denied and dressed up as objectivity, allowing certain interpretations to pretend to be inevitabilities.
Now the danger is indeed that we choose pasts that justify desired futures, and that once those pasts are canonised, they narrow what futures can even be imagined. Interpretation constrains, telling us what kinds of change are “realistic”, what risks are “acceptable”, and which lives are legible within the story. That’s how historical reasoning becomes conservative even when it claims to be corrective.
Where I still find value in retrospective inquiry is in friction. History can unsettle our confidence, expose how contingent our values are, and remind us that what feels natural or permanent has been assembled before, and disassembled too. It doesn’t tell us where to go, but it can make us more cautious about believing we already know.
Thank you, Christine, for your precision and for pushing the argument into its epistemic consequences!
I'd not heard of Anselm Kiefer, and his illustrations seemed the perfect match with your essay. They offer a feeling (to me) of the messiness of history within an attempt to control or corral it (especially "The High Priestess"), with the burning buildings in "An Intimation of Apocalypse" vividly suggesting consequences, and the final one, "The Renowned Orders of the Night" offering the suggestion of hope that you mentioned.
Your one line, "Our hunger to extract patterns from pain has the shape of belief," is a perfect expression of our need to make meaning from history. It reminds me of what is often said when a soldier or a first responder loses their life: "They didn't give their life in vain." Or the motto during the Great War, which became World War I - "The war to end all wars." Not so much. But as you say, we feel a need to create a story from what happened, which allows us not to do what you say we need to do, and "live with the bruised alphabet," or live with the real pain of the history, worldwide or personal. Perhaps it is possible to live with the pain and allow it some meaning - for example, when someone dies to save another's life. That might be a case in which it's possible to hold both. However the history books are generally written by the winners, which makes it difficult to get a complete picture.
I appreciated the passage about your journal in your early twenties in which you wrote that you, "finally understood love." The only thing I'd argue is that you weren't mistaken, you didn't add the context. That you understood love to the best of your ability or capacity at that time of your life - because with that context, it becomes true, I think. And none of us would add the context at that age, because that's the age when we think we are immortal and know everything, isn't it? I have a similar journal from roughly the same age, and yes, there are things in there that make me cringe when I read them. At the same time, I treasure it, because it tells me so much more than any photograph about who I was then.
And then we get back to what could it be worth, though, to go through that history? It's true enough that there are plenty of times I mined my past for nostalgic reasons, or to justify something to myself, or just to wallow in it. There are also times when I discover an answer to an old question that I'd overlooked, or couldn't have understood before. Sometimes it's not a big deal, sometimes it makes a difference. And I think that's true whether it's personal or larger than that. I'm thinking now of the number of books that have been written on a part of history previously ignored, like the African American women who were "computers" in the NASA space program, or the Navajo code-breakers in the South Pacific theater in WWII. Those are more recent parts of history that are now acknowledged instead of hidden.
Still, I keep coming back to the realisation that the bigger the picture, the more likely that making meaning out of history is senseless because it is messy, and it's way more improv than organisation. You are so on target there it's impossible to ignore it.
I'm left with a question that is more of a personal one related to history. Growing up, a lot of my history came from reading biographies of famous people that focused on them as children, and gave only broad strokes about their adulthood. I read about George Washington, Crazy Horse, Joan of Arc, Abe Lincoln, Annie Oakley, George Washington Carver, Daniel Boone, and Teddy Roosevelt. History books from school filled in a lot, and my own reading filled in the rest. My sense of history was kind of a tapestry of people and events and they live in my memory in that way. A while back you'd commented on something I'd written, and said, "moments of intimate self-revelation opening outward into collective memory, history, and myth." In that kind of context, history intertwined with our personal journey, how would you see the history fitting in, if it even can?
This is one of those essays that I need to come back to it again and again. At the same time, I had so many things come up the first time I read it, that I wanted to reread once or twice and then comment, so I wouldn't forget all of it.
Doc, I am glad you lingered with both the art and the unease it carries, because for me Kiefer isn’t illustrative in the explanatory sense. I find him accumulative, and without clarifying history, he weighs it down. What you’re calling “messiness within an attempt to corral” feels right… there’s always structure present, but it’s scorched, overbuilt, provisional. Order is there, but it looks exhausted by what it’s trying to hold. That tension mattered to me more than symbolism ever could, and that’s why I chose his art to illustrate this essay.
On meaning and pain, I think you touch a real fault line. There are moments where meaning doesn’t feel imposed but earned, acts that are unmistakably relational, where someone intervenes so another might live. But notice how small-scale and intimate those cases are. Meaning seems to survive the best when it stays close to bodies, to faces, to names that matter to someone specific. The trouble begins when we scale that impulse upward and start demanding that entire wars, collapses, or eras justify themselves. That’s where meaning starts to behave like anaesthesia rather than insight.
I think we converge the most strongly on the question of scale. The closer you stay to particular lives, the more history feels usable as texture. Once you zoom out far enough, narrative coherence starts to lie. The big picture demands simplification to survive being seen at all. That makes the details more fragile, which is why the recovery of sidelined histories matters. It keeps the picture from pretending it ever could be complete.
Your final question is beautiful, and I don’t think it has a clean answer. My sense is that history fits the best when it’s allowed to braid rather than dominate, when it enters personal life as resonance, far from destiny or example. Figures encountered young often live inside us as tonal presences, shaping how we imagine courage, failure, stubbornness, dignity. That’s history as companionship…. it doesn’t tell you what to do, it keeps you company while you decide.
Thank you, Doc, for taking the time to think your way through this so carefully, and for trusting the first reading enough to speak from it before it settled!
This is exactly what it feels like to stand between chaos and order. Amazing
For me, that in-between is also a pressure zone. Order promises relief, chaos promises aliveness, and standing between them means refusing the full comfort of either. It’s where I feel the cost of attention the most sharply because nothing there is automatic. I have to keep choosing presence without the shelter of certainty or the thrill of collapse.
Thank you for naming that sensation so cleanly, Mow!
z=z^2+C
I’ll confess… I had to look this up. And once I did, I couldn’t unsee how perfectly it fits.
What struck me is the behaviour it describes: a rule so simple it feels harmless, applied repeatedly until it produces something wildly unstable or unexpectedly bounded. That’s exactly how certainty works in human systems. We start with a small assumption, add a constant we barely question (context, ideology, fear, ambition), and then iterate. Over time, the output stops resembling the input, yet we keep insisting the logic is sound because the rule itself never changed.
Thank you, Lorenzo, for dropping this here! Sometimes a symbol does more work than a paragraph, especially when it exposes how little control repetition actually gives us + I’ve learnt something new, and for that I’m the most grateful.
From Yogi Berra:
It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future
The future ain't what it used to be
Berra’s brilliance is that he turns common sense inside out without dressing it up. What sounds like a joke is actually a warning about our addiction to foresight. Prediction is hard because the future keeps renegotiating the terms while we’re busy polishing our expectations. We want it to behave like a continuation, and it keeps behaving like an interruption.
“The future ain’t what it used to be” lands even harder now, because we’ve built entire systems assuming continuity, only to discover that acceleration itself changes the rules. When the pace of change increases, even yesterday’s future becomes obsolete.
Randolph, thank you for dropping Berra here! His humour cuts through pretence faster than theory ever could.
This was a great read and reading the exceptionally well thought out comments and replies was a treat.
I feel like I learned something today even if it is that I know less now than I did before.
That feeling you describe is one of the most honest forms of learning. Real insight rarely arrives as a new possession. It should disturb, and reorder what you thought was already settled.
Thank you, Mike, for reading my essay and the conversations around it!
"All life is built on the rejection or exclusion of other projects. Or rather, it feeds on a crime: that of the possibilities that it has killed and that have not been able to prosper. The event is fatal and ends everything that could have taken its place. The temptation is great then, in the last stages, the temptation to want to reach these abandoned possibilities to give them new life and growth. Although we know that there are possible new beginnings, that the bets are still to be made, the fact is that what has happened overshadows what could have happened. One remains, regardless of what he wants, a prisoner of his actions. And, for those who do not receive the grace of a second, third or fourth chance, then the time of the scarcity of possibilities begins. The hands stop stretching, the days are still poor in adventures, the path no longer deviates: everything is traced, desperately flat. This is how certain public figures disappear, who suddenly stop being heard about, and whose names only resonate on the day of their death, when everyone had already forgotten them. Time reduces uncertainty , although in certain privileged moments there seems to be more wealth in us than we will ever know. So the dream is to yearn, until the end, to escape from this heavy self, this past heavy as a ball, and seek the saving episode from which "everyone has the right to wait for the revelation of the meaning of his life" (André Breton).
Excerpt From
An eternal instant
Pascal Bruckner
Ohhh I love Bruckner, and this excerpt is wonderful. Thank you, Juan Carlos!
Maybe history is heretical, speaking to the status quo of our current commons of algorithmic AI influenced orthodoxy, with the paradoxical language of the prophets of old, attesting to our hedonistic ways with the critical eye of one whose voice echoes with the unpredictability of the past in its wilderness and unknown mythical depths reaching from the place of the Creator to touch our contemporary awareness with the dreams of our ancestral and species longing, and for which we are asked to carry through on, to fulfill?
History is bethrothed to the future through the progeny stemming from us in the present. What did we stand for, what did we do, how did we live, from the legacy of what was handed down to us to carry on with, and in turn hand on to the further generations rippling out from the testimony of our lives?
That we may not prematurely close our accounts with reality and remain open to experiences that lie beyond our ordinary consciousness (James), is what the past is asking of us. The poets, the mystics, the medicine ways of shamans, from the long ago as well of from today, are pointing to what has been lost in our present worldview of reductive material reality.
And it remains to be seen what may come out of this current era of humanity's endeavor to survive our chauvinistic left-brain hegemony on all our possible untried complementary relations.
Thank you Tamara, a beautiful and resounding reflection to start the year!
What I hear beneath the prophetic cadence of your comment is a plea for unfinishedness. Not heresy as provocation, but heresy as refusal to let the present crown itself orthodox too quickly. When history starts sounding subversive, it’s usually because the present has grown overly confident in its own explanations. Orthodoxy, whether theological, political, or algorithmic, always mistakes legibility for truth. What unsettles it isn’t opposition, but voices that won’t stay inside the sanctioned grammar.
I’m wary, though, of framing history as issuing a task to be fulfilled. Obligation can slide too easily into destiny, and destiny has a habit of flattening moral responsibility. What feels more honest to me is the idea of continuation without instruction. We inherit fragments, pressures, unresolved tensions, not mandates. The question isn’t “what must we complete?” but “what are we willing to remain answerable to?” That answerability is quieter than legacy-building, less flattering, but far more demanding.
I like your invocation of expanded consciousness, especially the insistence that what’s been excluded keeps returning as necessity. When the range of what counts as real narrows too much, reality pushes back. Poets, mystics, and non-instrumental ways of knowing don’t offer solutions but reintroduce dimensions that technocratic cultures amputate. That’s a reminder that human perception was never meant to be single-channel.
As for the imbalance between analysis and receptivity, I think the danger is reason that has forgotten it is partial. When one mode of knowing declares itself sufficient, it stops listening. And listening, more than believing, is what keeps us in contact with what hasn’t yet taken form.
Thank you, Mike, for bringing this register into the conversation! Your reflection opens a long view, and I’m grateful for the generosity and seriousness with which you offered it.
The one orthodoxy that is critical and hegemonic today is the scientific worldview that has been co-opted by corporate entities, be they the AMA and Big Pharma in the USA, or even deeper, by a series of misbegotten notions at the base of interpretation about the facts of life, as in the germ theory which has never been proven, scientifically, leading to our current quandary of health concerns built upon not so much a lie, but a floundering which has become a vested opportunity for profitable medical protocols, and deleterious to genuine health practices.
Thank you Tamara for your take on my response which is so truthsome, and allowing me the opening here to address what we are facing with Turquoise's health going forward: meeting the orthodoxy of medical science head on with alternative perspectives voicing an equally empirical place at the table of life!
Wisdom is inversely correlated with certainty. However, I’m not certain about that.
I know—nope, I believe—that you like some, if not all of Humes’s philosophy. As you know, according to Hume there is a flaw in inductive reasoning. Yet, if one can get a quantitative measurement of the most predictive variables, one can estimate a probability.
So what are the quantitative variables of past relationships?
Even if one knows, how are they measured and quantified?
Maybe relationships are emergent spaces that dissolves as the lower scale variables change.
That opening line made me smile, because it already does the work it pretends to question. For me, wisdom isn’t anti-certainty so much as suspicious of where certainty comes from. There’s a difference between provisional confidence earned through contact with reality, and the brittle assurance that arrives by abstracting life into something manageable. The latter is what worries me because it’s often too tidy to survive lived conditions.
You’re right to bring up Hume because the flaw he points to in induction is an existential glitch. Probability can tell us how often something tended to happen, not why it must happen again. Quantification is persuasive because it feels modest, just estimates, just likelihoods, but it smuggles in an assumption of continuity that human relationships routinely violate. People change interior weather without notice. Context mutates faster than metrics can update. What looks like a stable variable is often a frozen snapshot of something already in motion.
When it comes to relationships, I’m increasingly skeptical that the most important variables are even measurable in a useful way. You can count duration, conflict frequency, attachment styles, shared values but the decisive shifts often happen at a scale that resists capture… timing, courage, boredom, fear, the sudden revaluation of one’s own life. Two identical relational “inputs” can yield opposite outcomes depending on whether someone has just lost a parent, discovered a new ambition, or crossed a threshold they didn’t know existed.
Your last line is where I fully agree with you. I think relationships fail because they are emergent spaces that can’t survive being treated as static problems. As lower-level conditions like identity, desire, self-respect change, the space itself reorganises or evaporates. No equation breaks; the field simply no longer exists in the same form. Expecting predictability there is like demanding consistency from weather patterns that are responding to pressures you can’t see yet.
Thank you, Jim, for taking my essay seriously enough to interrogate it at this level, and for doing so with humour and intellectual generosity!
‘’ When it comes to relationships, I’m increasingly skeptical that the most important variables are even measurable in a useful way.”
Exactly the point i was making. Humans are extremely complex which for me means i view anyone who speaks with certainty about human behavior not with one eye but both eyes jaundiced.