Druidry at the end of History part 1

This is roughly what I said at the TDN con this year, I’m going to blog it in stages.

Rumour has it that the Mayans reckoned 2012 would be the end of the world, which is partly, I imagine, why the convention’s theme was ‘druidry in changing times’. There’s nothing quite like the end of the world to change things! The Christians of 2000 years ago were expecting it, with the second coming right after the first. In the civil war, once again people were expecting Christ at the head of an army. The Victorians got all apocalyptic in the 1890s, with looming end of empire. The world war made annihilation seem immanent. If there’s one thing history can teach us, its that the end of history does not turn up anything like as often as advertised. Hardly at all, really. Perhaps though, in times of upheaval, the idea of it all ending helps people make sense of the chaos.

For falling cultures and those who die, the end of history is real enough, but others continue and when we too are gone, history will carry on without us. Actual history. Time history is not the stuff we put in books. It’s an important distinction.

There are times when the changes seem so great people feel history can have nothing to say to the present. What could the past know about our modern, technological lives? Rather a lot. All the fears we have about the internet were also fears people had about the telegraph network. Nothing is as new as we like to think it is.

Every so often some bright political spark will question the teaching of history in schools. It’s not the kind of subject that suggests utility in jobs. Mostly what we learn in school history is that Henry the 8th got through a lot of wives, and Hitler wasn’t a very nice chap. If you’re paying attention, you also learn that mostly we do not learn from history. In wider culture, we have history on the TV that is all costume, drama, sex and violence. It’s not very real either.

History as a subject has tended to be all about Kings and Queens, wars, nations, borders and a handful of very rich men. Most people are edited out of history by those who write it down. Most live are a great silence n the record. Names and opinions vanish, lives quietly washed away by the passing of time. Your ancestors will, for the greater part, belong to the silence. They disappeared. We will all disappear too. If we’re thinking about history in terms of the subject, it’s worth considering that for most of us, it never started. We weren’t there. Our people were not there. Your dead ancestors are not in the history books. It’s a sobering thought. Only the literate left a written record on which history can be based. For most of time, most women and children and poor people of both genders left nothing written about themselves. The wordless so soon become invisible.

History as a written subject is a long way from the reality of all the time that led to this moment. When we talk about the end of the world, what we really mean is the end of a human civilization. That’s probably not the end of the species even. Even if it was, for the cockroaches, history would continue to be made. If we eradicated all life on earth, there’s a whole universe out there, full of time. It exists regardless of whether we are around to tell stories about it.