History feels like it’s moving forward, but it’s understood backwards, like when seated on a train, seeing things only when they’ve been passed over.
Everything makes more sense post factum. Often, the only meaning can be acquired after the fact. Hindsight bias is the fancy term for it, but there is no other way of making sense of the world flashing up around us.
Then there’s the next big idea that everyone loves talking about. There’s a pretty good podcast as well by the same name, but the hosts, to my knowledge, never paused to ask, is the next big idea actually the previous big idea?
Hidsight-free disenchantment is possible, but at a terrible cost, that of withholding judgement, saying ‘not sure’ and ‘I don’t know’ rather than pumping in meaning and making predictions, which is our weakest suit as thinking creatures.
There’s nothing more uncomfortable than admitting ignorance, randomness and senselesness, in a non-performative-contradictory way, as when a postmodern or nihilist thinker pontificates about the meaninglessness of existence in the strongest definitive language.
The ancient Greek and Roman sceptics of the Pyrrhonian tradition struggled not so much with the mechanisms of withholding judgement or epochê as they called it than with the shadow of infinite regress self-contradiction: if I sit out on taking sides, what about sitting out on the sitting out, and then again and again, ad infinitum.
The previous big idea is the only idea, and time is the only guide to ‘big-ness’, which is, en dernière analyse, rather foolish, given how blind we are to everything affecting everything else in a complex domain, which is the only domain there is.
Ultimately, I don’t know seems the wisest view, but nothing can ever be built on top of that. And to think, as one philosopher once put it, one first needs to survive, which selects against the I-don’t-know type. And then we’re back to square one, riding a bigger and wilder dilemma than when we started out.