Can We Change the Past?
Perhaps the past depends on the present, just as the present depends on the past
In this day and age, the idea that we can somehow change the past seems strange indeed.
From the modern, mechanistic view, the past looks like a monolithic block of facts: like a fixed thing, a complex machinery that can only be analyzed by looking at small details, establishing causal relationships between them, and then explaining how they supposedly all fit together.
We keep our past at arm’s length, as if it were an experiment in a laboratory.
But just as we cannot explain how a great painting came into being by looking at the mechanics and physics of arm movements and brush pressure, we cannot explain the unfolding of the past by looking at isolated actions and what they “caused.” Just to say, for example, General X issued the order Y, and therefore army Z got defeated, tells us next to nothing about what had been going on.
No, to understand the past, we must know what individual people thought, what their motivations were, their drives, their purposes, how they felt. Since we often can’t know that, and even if we have their writings or other records we can’t take them at face value, we need to imagine what it was like for them, and use that understanding to make sense of the “facts.” To imagine means to connect them with our own experience. Therefore, what we see and recognize and explain in the past depends on our own development: what we have gone through, what we have felt, what motivates us and gives us purpose and how and why this might have changed over the course of our lives. We recognize the dynamics of our own age, and our role in it, and therefore can understand history as well—and vice-versa.
This is what R.G. Collingwood, the great philosopher of history, meant when he said that in order to understand history, we must re-enact people’s thoughts and feelings.
Now, you might say, that is all fine and good, but what does this have to do with changing the past?
Past and Present Are Connected
One simple way of looking at this dynamic is that by us making sense of the past, certain developments come into existence.
Henri Bergson, the great and much-demonized French philosopher, gave the following example:1 if there was no Romantic movement, we wouldn’t be able to detect a precursor to Romanticism in the Classical period. It simply wouldn’t exist. But since the Romanticists thought and felt about the world as they did, we can see that the Classical period led to such thoughts and feelings. It didn’t have to! So, first the Romanticists changed history by thinking and feeling as they did, and then we changed it again by understanding the individual drives, thoughts and feelings of the Romanticists.
You might object that this is merely stating the obvious: that we interpret things differently. In no way does that change the past.
Well, not so fast.
See, part of people’s drives, feelings, and aspirations is directed at the future—perhaps in a way all are. And I don’t mean in the trivial sense of utilitarian goals such as “to eat tomorrow, I need to work today.” I mean in a more spiritual, more all-encompassing sense.
If someone does something, for example, “just because it’s the right thing to do” even though it may not generate any immediate advantage whatsoever, part of that person expects this to eventually play out in the right way. Whether fully conscious or not, the assumption is that this might help bring into being a better future. It might help change the course of history, whether in small or big ways, and even if the fruits of this person’s actions might come to pass only in 10 years, or 100 years, or 2000 years. Such actions are based on the unshakable faith that the right thing to do is good: it plays its part in a cosmic dynamic that is positive, and will bring good results—even though it might be utterly impossible to predict them, to define them, to anticipate them. That’s what an act of faith is all about.
Now, to understand this, we need to have undergone a certain development: if all we see in life are immediate utilitarian ends, we will be completely blind to other ways of looking at the world, including by historical people. But if we do see them, and if those rightful and moral actions (now visible to us) of historical actors do begin to have a positive impact on us—they inspire us, they help us with our own problems, they let us see moral and spiritual truth more clearly, they help us connect the dots so that crucial puzzle pieces in our understanding of reality fall into place, etc.—then we have vindicated the assumptions of past actors that they did the right thing, and that by doing so, they shall have a positive impact on a cosmic scale, even though they gained nothing, or even lost everything, by their thoughts and actions.
In other words, it depends on us whether what people in the past believed was true! (And is true.) It depends on us whether their faith was right and justified. It depends on us whether their thoughts, feelings, and actions were aligned with the Highest Good.
How is that not changing the past?
How does it not matter to people in the past whether their actions are/were based on truth?
One might put it this way: in a sense we are part of past peoples’ God: their ultimate goals and assumptions, the ground of their reality. By our own actions and thoughts, we create that pull, that motivation, that telos that people in the past are drawn to. We do our part of bringing God into existence.
And the same thing applies to our own situation as it relates to the future. People in the distant future are rendering our assumptions true or false in this very moment. Having faith that we can help them, and that they in turn can help us by vindicating us—because they will profit from our faith, from our thoughts, from our actions—brings a possible future into existence that is positive, good, and aligned with respect for freedom and rightfulness.
There might be an alternative future as well: a bleak future of moral depravity and technocratic enslavement. This future, too, has the power to vindicate our assumptions: if we assume that all that counts is instant gratification and direct utilitarian ends, cold rationality and atheism, disrespecting other people’s free will, and so on, we help create the “evil gods” of the future: the technocratic overlords of a dystopian reality. They get strengthened by us believing they are right; even while they are strengthening those assumptions because they exploit them for their purposes, and therefore (from their perspective) render them true.
Truth, in part, depends on the future. The truth for people in the past, in part, depends on us. As does, obviously, the truth of the future.
In other words, it seems that a whole lot depends on us: on our assumptions, our thoughts, feelings, motivations, and actions. In a sense, the entire Cosmos depends on us. Better choose wisely!
Pretty far out, eh? Perhaps. But I think it only seems to us that way because of the mechanistic, materialist assumptions that have been drilled into our very being for a long, long time. Our telos, for far too long, has been a bleak technocratic future of enslavement, drawing us towards it by way of our assumptions, feelings, and actions.
Perhaps it’s time to change them, and therefore help those beings inhabiting our good future to vindicate us.
See Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things, Perspectiva Press, 2021, around p. 915