Human Lifetime and Natural History
or how personal experience constrains our sense of nature
“If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time…so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours…Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises…The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible…There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life…He should see that he can live all history in his own person…We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.” - Emerson, History
A lifetime is a funny thing, both in myth and in reality. We tell these stories about different times in life. People are toddlers. There are first steps and first words—we film them because they’re so important: markers, memories.
We grow more and there’s a first day of school. We take pictures on first steps. New backpacks, the smell of sharpened graphite. Friends and feuds, the first time someone says “you’re cute!” games like catch the leaf, soccer. First kisses and first crushes.
If there is any consensus about growing up, it is this: middle school is nuts. Social life coming into being. Scientists say smartphones have irreparably fucked this up. People get bullied. There are rumors about sex. The big kid calls a teach a bitch and people talk about it for years.
High school is often a bit easier, but still hard. Someone dies in a car crash, many end up in the ER from chugging vodka, and the weed dealer is lowkey the biggest and most successful budding capitalist. There might be gun violence. The nerd who spends all day playing Fortnight has millions of followers on Twitch, but no one knows how that power dynamic translates to school dances.
Some go to college, others straight to work, and other others into drugs and prison. In the twenties some people get married early and others later or not at all. Some have kids, others don’t. Some grow up in their twenties for various reasons, others stay immature. Then the thirties hit and things churn different. Then the forties and fifties, and eventually people die and the lifetime is all they know. And yet each of us tries our best to make sense of all of it.
All of reality comes into being and then disappears into nothing. Today the lifetime is the frame through which we all experience Nature, reality, whatever all this shit is. And thus we sense everything as though everything is a lifetime, and this is perhaps our biggest flaw. The lifetime is mere metaphor, an arbitrary unit of time that dominates all of our knowledge-making and history. It constrains our sense of the world. It puts guardrails on our science, on our professional work, our policymaking, and on our imagination of the good life.
You are a self around which all of history and reality pivots, no longer an intergenerational thread that fixes at least a few dimensions of reality into place. The world appears dizzying from the perspective of individuals, and thus we anchor our reality to a short string called the lifetime. You have one of them they say, and they’re right. And we experience all of time and space (what is natural) as though they adhere to the same developmental principles as a human life: “it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time…so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours.”
The sense of progress and evolution that is more or less biologically inherent to the individual human experience of a lifetime becomes mistakenly transposed (imposed) onto the natural and the social worlds. We come to believe that both nature and society must evolve, change, progress in the same way as an individual human lifetime. Our mistake is to presume that the trials of national governance must fit the trials of personal developmental psychology. It is a weird turn for developmental psychologists to become the myth-makers of civilization.
Not only does the metaphor of the human lifetime affect our sense of the shape of change, but also how we sense the aspect of nature called time, in particular the relationship between past and present.
It is of course true that the only thing we can sense in any given moment with our like, eyes, ears, etc is the present. But of course we also can sense our past via the thing we call memory. Memory is a past-sense. We all somehow remember our personal experience of yesterday, or even middle school. But we also, in a much weirder way, remember like, history—even history that predates our existence. For instance I was born in 1991, but I sort of have a sense of World War 2, and I do this in more or less the same way as I remember middle school.
Thus, the relationship between our past selves and present selves becomes the basic frame through which we sense history. The past-sense of individual experience shapes and constrains our ability to have a past-sense of social and natural history entirely. Thus, the experience of a human lifetime is the frame for all of history and the two even suffer the same problems. The problems with past-sense are the same with personal and, for instance, national histories in that we tend to make shit up in order to stabilize ourselves today (individual-psychologically or community-sociologically) in the present tense: “Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises…The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible.”
For the Modern person believing themselves to be a unique individual the human experience of a lifetime is the primary frame for all of reality. A Western capitalist experiencing the Industrial Revolution comes to invent Darwinism and evolutionary theory. A Hindu agrarian planting year after year experiences time and change as cyclical. A white person in the United States experiencing generational class ascendancy becomes a leftists who believes that social progress is a natural law, whereas an Indigenous person experiencing genocide throughout their life knows that social progress is bullshit.
We often mistake the threads of meaning that constitute the tapestry of our own personal lifetime for natural and social laws. It is the stories of the past that best fit our own tapestry that we see as true. For those who have seen first hand how fucking corrupt and pedophilic the church aristocracy is come to believe that Hillary Clinton must be a pedophile. Donald Trump thinks everyone in politics is a corrupt grifter not because it’s true, but because it’s true enough to be plausible and because he is a corrupt grifter. DC Democratic policymakers believe that all Republicans are pieces of shit not because all Republicans are pieces of shit, but because all DC-based Republican policymakers are pieces of shit. The boomer Notre Dame fan at the bar the other night thinks the United States population is a bunch of unappreciative country club brats that don’t know how good they have it not because it’s true of the South Side or Appalachia or the Rosebud Rez or the Bronx, but because he himself is an unappreciative country club brat.
A history of ideas, nation, species, if it is to find resonance must fuse with the lived experience of self in its audience. It must fit the same relationship the reader has with their past selves in the present in order to be sensible. In this way the popular history of everything takes the shape of a history of self, of the individual experience of lifetime. The lifetime is the primary metaphor not just for social history, but of natural history. Evolution emerges as sensible only during the industrial revolution.
For the Modern person, the experience of lifetime is thus the experience of everything, both literally and metaphorically. It is everything that has ever mattered, and shapes everything that is ever sensible. It is where we stand