a reading-related thought

For the flight earlier today I picked out a history of the origins of the Roman Republic, and it struck me how easily we forget the strangeness of the Roman phenomenon… From a hillside village to an empire stretching at its peak from the edge of Scotland as far as Mesopotamia, all in the pre-mechanical age. Few are surprised in retrospect, but no one would ever have predicted it, or anything remotely like it.

Actually, I’m tempted to wonder if “the bigger the achievement, the less shocked we are by it” isn’t a general rule of human history. A thousand years from now, when the United States will probably be long gone in favor of who knows what, surely the moon landing will be remembered as one of the key achievements in American history. Yet we’re still only 40 years removed from it, but already we’re not really too excited by it. (I was born just in time to be a semi-conscious baby when it happened, so I didn’t have the chance to experience what was doubtless a great deal of excitement at the time.)

It’s not such a surprise, I guess. For the moment it’s a dead end. The USA stopped going to the moon because it was accomplishing nothing there, and when India and China go soon enough, the motive will be little more than nationalism. But once it becomes more feasible and perhaps fruitful to explore outer space with humans on board, the initial moon landing will retroactively seem like a watershed again.

The very existence of philosophy, which most readers of this blog probably care a very great deal about… It didn’t need to happen, yet only rarely do we find ourselves marvelling that it did happen.

And the same holds for each and every autobiographical reflection by each and every person. If asked to describe the entire course of your life in ten sentences, the stuff you’d come up with would probably just be colorful trivia, because the things that really define our horizons are things that we take for granted, and are also generally things that are unchosen. I didn’t choose to be born in Iowa, late 1960’s, male, blue-eyed, right-handed, first-born. I didn’t choose my parents or siblings, my native language, the financial and political situation in which I was born, my natural talents and shortcomings, and so forth. At this stage of technology, at least, we are mostly still forced to play the hand we are dealt.