a common approach to sociological history is to presuppose that one is a future archaeologist, discovering remnants of one's own civilization. what will they make of our laptop computers? what will they make of our
plastic? how will we communicate with this future version of us?
i have always thought that this "thought technique" is helpful only in a very schematic sense; sort of the same way i regard
adam smith's "the rational actor". i think a healthy dose of skepticism is required to separate the important layers where the presupposition is applicable from the rest of the situation, where it is not. it is important to analyze the breakdown of the schematic-- why it works schematically but not in real life.
for example, i think it is useful to consider "future archaeologists" when thinking about
sustainable living habits and planetary stewardship: large picture, long range, effects within a small range of variability. i do not support this standpoint when it backs theories of human cultural events or sociological change. this is unacceptable precisely because the historical organization of humanity has been a consistently tangentially changing treatment of itself. change is the very basis for our culture and the change can not be predicted in terms of past trends. and this analogy is particularly vexing because our civilization is unlikely to be so completely eradicated as to produce future archaeologists that fail to recognize a single shard of today's humanity.
so, all that aside for a moment. what if humans found a way to dependably capture immortality? i'm mostly interested in our treatment of the past and how we've projected it onto the future... namely, we respect our ancestry and predecessors because they are dead and we will also soon be dead. it is that cyclic aspect of death and life that keeps humanity invested in the past. speaking about death as an essential element of humanity, helene cixous says the hopelessness of grief and the destitution of death are the most urgent reason for not renouncing our human heritage. "our lost pains are our ultimate goods, our silence renders a sound beyond the ear."
if humans were immortal would we forget our connection to humanity's past? and if that were the case, a "future archaeologist" could very well come across the remnants of our civilization with consternation. it is more likely that our civilization will re-transform itself so completely as to fail to recognize our own motherland. that's the scary part about the impending post-modern global apocalypse that we're so obsessed with talking about lately... not that we'll be wiped out completely so much as that we will change so cataclysmically that our own past will be incomprehensible.
