On the Confederate victory at Gettysburg: July 3, 1863

Little Round Top

Gettysburg battlefield, Pennsylvania
From http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:View_from_Little_Round_Top_over_Gettysburg_Battlefield.jpg

The destruction of Philadelphia by Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia on September 11, 1863 effectively ended the War of Secession. Fighting between Lee's forces and remnants of General Winfield Scott Hancock's Army of the Potomac would continue for another month, with minor skirmishes ranging across Pennsylvania. But the burning of the city where the Declaration of Independence had been signed triggered the final dissolution of the American union, four score and seven years after its birth. Five days after Philadelphia, word reached Washington that France and Britain had  extended official diplomatic recognition to the Confederate States of America. The Anglo-French decision had been reached prior to the Philadelphia catastrophe, but news of European recognition sealed the union's fate. On September 17, a delegation of Congressional leaders met with President Lincoln at the White House. Following that meeting, Lincoln announced his resignation from office. Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin of Maine was sworn in two hours later as the seventeenth President of the United States. It was Hamlin who signed the peace accords with Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia, on October 30, 1863. 

The consequences of Confederate independence continue to be felt. The territory of the former United States at the outbreak of war in 1861 is now home to twenty one independent nation-states. The old Confederacy is the least of them all. The secession of Florida in 1972 reduced the rump Confederate states to a shell of their former greatness, with only Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi remaining as members. Today the Pacific Republic, anchored by California and the Vancouver States and the alliance with Tokyo, contends with the Texas-led Concordium of the Central Republics for economic and military supremacy in North America. Pacific dominance in information technology is more than counter-balanced by the C.C.R.'s control of oil fields in its Mexican and Venezuelan territories.  

The autocratic empire of New York stands in glittering isolation from the other North American powers, its attention long since turned eastward across the Atlantic. The admirals, field marshals and industrial managers in Manhattan are content to supervise a thriving Bismarckian realm extending from Pittsburgh to Charleston. New York's alliance with the trans-European Kriegstadt, dating from the Great War of 1913-1922, remains strong on paper. Whether the troops and naval squadrons of New York will continue to participate in Berlin's counter-guerrilla operations against Russian insurgents remains a subject of fierce debate within the Alliance.  

The other shabby autocracies and principalities of North America fend for themselves as best they can. The Mormons have their Utopian theocracy in Deseret. The Dominion of New England recently withdrew from the British Commonwealth at last, but faces internal strife that could be its undoing.  Various separatist parties, having abandoned armed resistance in the 1980s, are now close to forming a coalition in the parliament at Boston. Meanwhile, the Great Lakes Confederation remains a squabbling hodge-podge of corrupt little cornfield republics. The Dixie Mountain states fight their endless, bloody wars for God and feudal rights. And so on. 

All of this because of what began on an April day in 1861 at Fort Sumter. Or perhaps it all started in the presidential election of 1860, which unexpectedly brought an obscure extremist party to power in Washington, led by an ill-prepared, mediocre lawyer from Illinois. Or perhaps today's North America first took shape at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which failed so completely to forge a durable, functioning political union of the newly independent colonies. 

Some novelists and film-makers, rather implausibly, trace today's situation to the Battle of Gettysburg, the enormous bloodletting across three days in July, 1863. The triumph at Gettysburg led to further victories for Robert E. Lee at the Susquehanna and Pottsville in August. And on to Philadelphia, the city where the Union ended and began. No one can deny that Lee's spectacular success in the summer of 1863 made him immortal. Military glory ensured his election as the second President of the Confederate States of America. It did not, however, save him from assassination in Birmingham on November 22, 1868. By then, Lee's brief presidency had already been a failure, as the great military conqueror proved unable to reconcile feuding delegations in the Confederate Congress. Two years later, the coup against President Longstreet by General Nathan Bedford Forest would signal the beginning of the end for the Confederacy. 

Its former antagonist in the North fared no better. The disputed presidential elections of 1868 and 1872 degenerated into open warfare among contending military factions. Commanders who fought alongside one another in the War for the Union now waged bitter, bloody combat in the farmlands and cities of the United States. General Custer's seizure of Washington on June 25, 1876, ended the fighting. His summary execution of Generals Grant and Sherman on the national centennial made another war -- and the final breakup of the Northern Union -- inevitable. 

From a certain simple point of view, the bitterness and squalor of the century and a half since 1863 might, conceivably, be traced to a few key moments in that fateful year. If Lee's daring decision to divide his forces at Chancellorsville had backfired, maybe the Confederate victory at Gettysburg two months later would not have happened. If Union General George Meade had not abandoned the left flank of his lines at Gettysburg on July 2, maybe Longstreet's Charge would not have swept Union forces from Cemetery Ridge on the following day. Perhaps Meade might have held the left flank on July 2 if not for the surrender of the 20th Maine at Little Round top that day. Maybe the destruction of the United States of America happened because a professor of rhetoric from Bowdoin College, one Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, found himself commanding men in battle at a critical moment in North American history. If Chamberlain had rallied his regiment at Little Round top, instead of surrendering, maybe everything afterward would have been different, as some writers of the Lost American Cause have insisted. Maybe Meade wouldn't have panicked when Confederate guns gained the summit of the hill Chamberlain lost. Maybe he wouldn't have ordered the withdrawals that led to Longstreet's Charge the next day. Maybe, if, only, might, would, should.

The urge to seek a single, decisive turning point in North American history is tempting. But turning points are the stuff of storytelling and myth. Historians are less apt to romanticize the course of human events. Their job is simply to seek explanation, by clearly defined chains of cause and effect. Unfortunately, events in the century and a half since the War of Secession (or the War for the Union, take your pick) do not easily yield to clear simple answers. The chains of cause and effect exist in an ocean of possibility and time. In the end, it's beyond our understanding, except in the most tentative of ways. 


We know that we are here, now. In this time and place. How this happened matters less than what we do today. For our descendants, it will be the same, looking back at the decisions we made. Mystic chords of memory will not offer simple understanding or solace. Only questions. We do the best we can, and go on. There is no other choice.

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Acknowledgments: 

I first encountered a depiction of "Longstreet's Charge," in an alternate Battle of Gettysburg, in the book Gettysburg: An Alternate History, by Peter G. Tsouras.  My use of that phrase is freely borrowed from that book, which portrays a very different outcome at Gettysburg than the one I sketched in this post. In Tsouras' account, Longstreet's Charge ends in an unspeakable catastrophe for the Army of Northern Virginia, on a scale far greater than the nightmare charge led by George Pickett in our universe. The bloody slaughter of Longstreet's men triggers a furious Union counterattack that breaks the Confederate Army, resulting in the capture of Robert E. Lee and the ending of the Civil War two years early. 


In the fiction of Harry Turtledove, I first pondered the idea of a Confederate victory in the American Civil War leading to German triumph in World War I. In Turtledove's alternate history and mine, there is no unified American republic to reinforce the exhausted Western Allies in 1917-1918. Thus, Kaiserine Germany succeeds in its bid for European hegemony. The Bolshevik Revolution, the rise of Hitler, and the Cold War never happen. The twentieth century world becomes a very different place. 


I owe my sketch of fratricidal warfare in North America in part to the novel The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. In that book, British inventor Charles Babbage builds a functioning computer in the 1830s, inaugurating a revolution in information technology during the Victorian Age. British technological supremacy leads to overwhelming global dominance, with Her Majesty's diplomats and generals successfully instigating the breakup of the fragile union of American states by the 1850s. 


Confederate victory in the Civil War is probably, along with Nazi conquest of the Western Allies, the most popular alternate history in fiction. Like all good fictional tropes, it is subject to endless, fascinating variation. It was fun to add one more version to the mix.

History cinema geekery: JFK makes the other guy blink

Yesterday was the twentieth anniversary of the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. The day of his "ask not what your country can do for you" speech. Which explains the mysterious ghost of JFK appearing on the Google home page yesterday. Surrounded by idealistic words and whatnot.

I've been in a movie kind of mood all week, wandering through clips on YouTube, thinking about films I've seen and have yet to see. Pondering how the pop culture ether has shaped my thinking about pretty much everything for my whole life. As important as science and empiricism and academic inquiry are, there's something to be said for stories and art in the way we humans understand our place in the universe.

JFK has always been a great source of stories, both real and fictionalized. Most polls of Americans rate him among our greatest presidents. Because most people remember only the facile image of the vigorous young leader, appearing to be bold and decisive as he delivered his inspiring rhetoric for the cameras. Then pitching forward in an open limousine in Dallas, before a bullet blew his skull and brain to bits. Camelot lost, the king cut down in his prime.

But in fact Kennedy was very much a mixed bag as chief executives go. His personal life was a disaster that almost certainly compromised his ability to serve as president. Fucking the mistresses of mafia dons will do that. So will letting a quack doctor pump you full of amphetamines to heighten thrill-seeking, risk-addictive behavior. Then there are the highly questionable policies. A vast, across the board military buildup that was totally unnecessary. A fixation on the clownish commie dictator in Havana. Reinforcing the stupid and murderous American military expedition in Vietnam.

On the other hand, there are the moments in which this cynical, profane, reckless man showed hints of genuine humanity and greatness -- or seemed to do so. Such glimpses depend greatly upon the eye of the beholder. It's far too easy to take a fleeting moment and inflate it into myth. Myths aren't necessarily bad. They are stories, upon which we story-telling human animals rely to construct the meaning of our existence.

Kennedy's occasional flashes of seeming brilliance enable myth-building and story telling. How "real" the myths and stories are is open to question.

One story goes like this. He set the United States on course to land human beings on another planetary body. Which they did. This alone ranks as possibly the single most astounding achievement in the 200,000 year history of our species. The only greater success would be that of the first humans to explore beyond Africa long ago, a venture that led our race to colonize the far corners of the Earth.


JFK on the need for space exploration, September 12, 1962

Other stories are told. After initial indifference, Kennedy moved slowly but surely toward putting the national government on the side of civil rights for African Americans. He changed the lives of people around the world by creating the peace corps. Some of the medical students I work with served in that organization, gaining insight and wisdom they might not otherwise have found.

And Kennedy decided against going to war with the Soviet Union over Cuba in October 1962. His performance in that crisis may not have been the cool, masterfully orchestrated manipulation of events described by his great hagiographers, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen. But it was good enough. His choices allowed me and a lot of other people to be born in the years that followed. Kennedy created the current historical time line of the universe we know, in which the United States did not, as planned, launch massive air strikes against Soviet forces in Cuba on the morning of Monday, October 29, 1962. Throughout the crisis, many of his advisers pushed Kennedy hard to forget about blockades and back-channel negotiations and just get on with bombing the fuck out of the Russians. He didn't.

One of my favorite movies is an idealized, not entirely accurate, still highly watchable retelling of Kennedy's actions in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The movie is Thirteen Days, released a decade ago. If you can't stand Kevin Costner, as many people evidently cannot, you will not be able to watch this movie. Costner plays Kenneth O'Donnell, a member of JFK's "Irish mafia" White House inner circle. I kind of like him, actually. Despite the typically bad Costner rendition of an exotic accent.

Bruce Greenwood as JFK does an amazing job blending elements of the president's popular image and actual personality. Cool, sardonic, cautious. The thrill-addict, horn-dog part of JFK's personality is conveniently left out. It's still a magnetic portrayal in an entertaining film. With little touches that make Greenwood's Kennedy feel real. Example: JFK leans forward to make a point and momentarily shudders from a spasm in his back. Greenwood's face and body language, in that flash of time, betray bodily torment kept constantly repressed by sheer will. The real Kennedy, thanks to war injuries and a variety of ailments, endured agonizing physical pain for every moment of his adult life.

Below is a clip from the film. It depicts the first high-seas showdown between the American and Soviet navies, on the morning of October 24, 1962. While my graduate degree in history hasn't made me rich, it does yield a geeky sort of thrill at seeing historical figures on film that most people have never heard of. Dean Rusk, Maxwell Taylor, Robert McNamara, John McCone, Adlai Stevenson, McGeorge Bundy. When I was in grad school, some of them were still alive.



In stories, a President can save the world. It's not like that today. But I like to think there's some wisdom to be found even so, in the stories of how people once made fateful choices, great and small.

Shadows out of time

I'm currently reading Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800, a book by the great French historian Fernand Braudel. He wrote about the humble daily necessities of life in the centuries and millennia before the industrial revolution. Life back then centered on the absolute basics: food, housing, tools, and clothing, as well as the social practices surrounding them, like law and religion. In pre-industrial days such fundamental realities changed very slowly if at all, on time scales dwarfing a human life. Generations, centuries, millennia. The daily and seasonal routines defined human existence, placing strict limits on the possibilities of human enterprise, whether pursued by peasant or monarch or priest.

Unlike other historians of his time, Fernand Braudel didn't see history as the outcome of choices made by rulers. The people at the top of human societies started wars and rebellions; diverted the production of food and material by commoners for their own ends; preserved dynasties and struggled for political power. But everything the rulers did, Braudel maintained, was entirely constrained and channeled by the physical and cultural limits of limited resources and technology. These, in turn, were the domain not of war councils but of methodical, deliberate centuries of common labor, which made the fabric of everyday life.

Today, "history" is for most people a boring, forgotten subject from the childhood purgatory of decrepit public schools. Or, it's an electronic diversion piped into the home via cable television, filled with lurid, facile documentaries about wars and royal debauchery. History needs to be more than that. A way to prepare for what's coming. In the age of peak oil and extreme climate change, we will find a vital resource in scholars like Fernand Braudel, who devoted their lives to understanding what human societies were like in the days before hydrocarbon fuel. Those days spanned almost the entire past existence of humanity, dating back to the lost legendary times before the written word. When human beings wandered a pristine immensity of plains, forests and mountains, teeming with animals in the billions. Places ruled by birds and beasts and fish, vast beyond imagining beneath the vaults of heaven, untouched by cities and their reach.

Thousands of years have passed since those ages. Two great transformations of human life have happened in that time: the invention of agriculture, about 13,000 years ago, and the creation of cities, about 5,000 years ago. Further changes happened in the age of cities, as human beings improved their methods of building structures, producing food, exploiting animals, waging war, and so on. But all the changes took place over hundreds of years. An ordinary person typically lived only to age 40 or so, before being killed by accident, disease, or starvation. From the perspective of that lifetime, the routines of everyday life appeared to change not at all. The routines were like the mountains: apparently timeless, even though subtly shifting and changing their shape over huge lengths of time, at a rate too slow to see.

In the knowledge of those times we of the present will find practices and devices, from spinning wheels to ox-drawn plows, that need to be resurrected for the future beyond fossil fuels, which will be the remaining ages of humanity's time on Earth. Our past will also yield lessons to be learned and warnings to be heeded, of the catastrophes so common in the first age of age scarcity (ca. 200,000 B.C. to A.D. 1800).

The book I'm reading by Fernand Braudel describes two of the commonplace disasters: pestilence and famine. In the pre-industrial era, the threat of disease and starvation hung forever over every human life. One or two bad harvests could mean early death for whole communities. Monarchs may have hoarded excess food, but if crops failed the ruler still had to face rebellion by desperate subjects. And rulers had no more immunity to microbial slaughter than anyone else.

In the previous world of scarce energy, human communities lacked the means to protect against famine and pestilence. They were without industrial abundance but also without knowledge. Our descendants will once again exist without material abundance built on surplus energy. But they may, if all goes well, possess our scientific knowledge, of soil, plants, pests, fertilizers, and other facets of agriculture. The societies of coming centuries will also have, if all goes well, access to our knowledge of bacteria, viruses, nutrition, physiology, and the many other components of human health. Our descendants won't be able to build and operate huge mechanized farm machines or giant MRI devices, but they will know far more than our pre-industrial ancestors about the way the physical world actually works. Or so we can hope. In the best case scenario for the human future, ecotechnic civilizations will be inhabited by healthy, well-fed citizens, existing in low-energy, low-consumption, ecologically rooted settlements.

I'm going to try, in my upcoming description of Albuquerque, New Mexico in the twenty second century, to describe what the tentative foreshadowing of such a society might be like. We may not get there, but we have to try. Because of what's at stake, and what the future will look like if we fail.

We can behold that future in the most horrifying episodes of our pre-industrial past. Fernand Braudel tells of one such cataclysm, the Deccan Famine of 1630 in India. Unknown thousands upon thousands of people starved to death in the cities and countryside of the subcontinent. Perhaps millions. Braudel quotes a Dutch explorer who visited India during the famine:

People wandered hither and thither, helpless, having abandoned their towns or villages. Their condition could be recognized immediately: sunken eyes, wan faces, lips flecked with foam, lower jaw projecting, bones protruding through skin, stomach hanging like an empty sack, some of them howling with hunger, begging alms.

Braudel then writes in his own voice, "The customary dramas ensued: wives and children abandoned, children sold by parents, who either abandoned them or sold themselves in order to survive, collective suicides... Then came the stage when the starving split open the stomachs of the dead or dying to 'eat their entrails.' "

Braudel concludes with the words of the Dutch merchant who beheld these things:

Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people died, to the point when the country was entirely covered with corpses which stayed unburied, and such a stink arose that the air was filled with it and pestilential. 

The future will not be utopia. But it must not be hell. From the Mars novels of Kim Stanley Robinson: shikata ga nai. There is no choice.

On the uses of history

What will a future defined by peak oil and climate change be like and how should we approach it? For me, one of the best ways to understand any future is to look at the past. We do that all the time in our personal lives, without thinking of it as peering into a crystal ball. It's just common sense. Why do I keep getting fired from my jobs? I have to understand the circumstances of those past incidents if I hope to get an answer and then act on it. Why is such-and-such person so angry and anxious all the time? Because they suffered long and grievous abuse as a child. Dealing with the emotions of the present has to begin with understanding the trauma of the past.

It isn't too much of a stretch to say that memory is the basis of understanding and behavior. That's why everybody says experience is the best teacher. Experience is memory, which is a guide to understanding why things happen, what works in responding, and what doesn't. And what is likely to come next.

The memory of a society is called history. In thinking about where our society is headed, and what to do as we hurtle into that future, our history will offer a crucial guide. I'll have more to say soon, in a separate post, on the application of history specifically to a future of ecological collapse. In that post, I'll serve up the next installment in the Rules of Collapsotopian Futurology.

For now, though, some thoughts on a more general topic -- why is the study of history good for anything at all?


* * * * *

When I was a graduate student in the field of U.S. history, I had lots of conversations with professors and fellow students on a certain anguished question. It came up a lot, and the question was: why bother? What good is history? Why study it, I mean? What purpose does it serve to know about the past?

We weren't just talking about how to get a job as a historian. Although that was part of it, since those jobs were regrettably rare. And still are, so I hear. No, mostly we wondered why, in the philosophical sense, anyone should bother studying dead people and their bygone days. There are lots of potential answers, from the political implications of past events, like the conflict over Palestine, to the aesthetic pleasure of the great stories to be retold. Several cable TV channels have exploited this last use of history rather profitably, in fact. 

I must have missed the gravy train. I got an MA in history from a program that used the past to understand the present, but not just for pleasure or politics. We studied history to address public problems and make policy, in an intellectually rigorous, responsible way. In the little scholarly community where I once spent a couple of years in misty Appalachia, this was the goal of historical study. I tried to pursue that goal by two means. First, by using history as a pool of information about a contemporary subject. Want to reform Social Security? You have to know how Social Security was created, how it evolved over the decades and why, what sort of modifications were tried and why, whether they succeeded or failed and why. This pool of information about the past is a pre-requisite for doing anything about Social Security in the present.

The second means of using history for present-day problem solving lay in the use of methods unique to historians, distinguishing them from other disciplines, offering a perspective and insight not otherwise to be found. Certain other fields, we apprentice historians knew, thought their methods more intellectually rigorous than the practices of our little trade.

We had the economists and the political scientists in mind. They weren't shy about telling us that they did, indeed, look down on historians. To them, we were collectors of jumbled, antiquarian arcana, who wrote about moldy, forgotten archives via rambling, literary-esque stories, which we patched together from a mass of personal biases and half-baked pseudo-intellectual blobs of incoherent thought. That's an exaggeration, but not by much. We history students really did feel like the inhabitants of an intellectual ghetto, on the wrong side of the tracks from the more respectable neighborhoods of academia-town. Well, I did anyway. I'm pretty sure I wasn't alone.

Mostly, our rivals derided us because historians didn't see quantitative models, statistics, and reductionist interpretations as the holy trinity of methodologies in the social sciences. Economists and political scientists did. In contrast to their gleaming high-tech instruments of scientificalistic inquiry, we celebrated an old fashioned, well-worn, reliable toolkit, tracing its origins back to Thucydides. And maybe much deeper into the ancient night than that.

Among the tools in our kit, which we never presumed to specify completely and authoritatively, were:

• the comprehensive marshaling of written records about a subject from the human past;
• the synthesis of information in those records via the use of the world's most powerful and sophisticated information processing tool, which is the human brain;
• the description of the resulting synthesis within a narrative non-fiction story, chronicling events over time;
• the interpretation within the narrative of events and their causes, by means of reasoned, systematic inference;
• the grounding of that inference in the available written records but also in heuristic guidelines derived from thousands upon thousands of years of human culture;
• the incorporation of statistics and other quantitative approaches into the narrative where appropriate;
• the use where appropriate of theories, interpretations, and methods from the social and natural sciences to explain and analyze the events of the narrative;
• the holding to a flexible, pragmatic notion of the word "appropriate' in the above context, within the bounds of logic and the use of empirical evidence.

The economists and political scientists thought that we historians scorned the use of quantitative methods, and therefore condemned us as narrow minded. I will admit that I personally felt intimidated by math, and I know that many of my fellow students (and faculty) felt the same. But I also came to know that many historians did, actually, use quantitative approaches in their scholarly work. Some deployed econometric models to interpret the history of railroads. Some extracted statistics from old probate records to illuminate the material culture of colonial America.

That didn't seem to matter much to the econometricians and poli-sci crowd. To them, historians remained willfully ignorant mathematical illiterates, end of story. Despite evidence to the contrary. So it wasn't we historians being close minded or issuing blanket denunciations of a different approach. It was the other guys, who steadfastly insisted that numbers were the only valid form of knowledge and anything else was, basically, bunk.

The number fetishists got it exactly wrong. Quantitative knowledge is essential, especially in the natural sciences, where we have a good idea of what to quantify (atoms, molecules, energy flows in an ecosystem, the physics and chemistry of plate tectonics, and so on). But quantification isn't always possible. And numbers only tell us so much, especially in the area of human societies and cultures. We know, for example, the numerical value of goods and services produced in an economy, and we can quantify the ecological damage inflicted by the economy's machines. But numbers alone can't tell us why a society adopts one system of production over another, or why that system succeeds or fails, or how conflicts about the system's rules and results are resolved or not, and why.

Numbers can't interpret those conflicts because they are found in culture. Anthropologists, historians, and others define that term, roughly, as an intangible body of ideas, values, emotions, symbols, and customs, circulated through a society to give that society a sense of psychological cohesion, producing a shared mental universe rooted ultimately in the metaphysically complex interiors of the human brain. Out of that instrument come songs and stories, speeches and rituals, images and the emotions they evoke -- a swastika, a crucifix, a six pointed star. The intangible meanings behind these entities are transmitted like ghosts from one brain to the next, by the alchemy we experience as human communication (voice, writing, music, pictures, facial expression, sex, and much more). The alchemy passes the meaning through time from one generation to the next.

None of that can be represented solely in numbers, the way scientists do with quantum mechanics or molecular genetics. Unless memetics, the proposed quantitative scientific study of cultural transmission, ever takes off the way its proponents have hoped. In my opinion, it won't. Quantifying culture and the human behavior it governs will never happen. Not in the same straightforward way that has worked for genes and atoms. We know culture and society reside in the mental realm, which we know is found in the brain. We can do visual scans of brain activity, watch certain regions flash more intensely. We can measure the microscopic firings of neurons. We can determine, as neuroscience has in fact done, that the ability to learn languages is innate in a child's brain, not instilled by socialization.

But we don't know how any of these things give rise to basic components of culture, or to the rules that govern it. We can't measure, quantitatively, what culture fundamentally is, or its building blocks, much less its laws. Because culture isn't any single, physical thing, like an atom, or an amino acid molecule. It transcends individual components, and so it can't be measured, not in the way we can do with more clearly defined, contained entities and their laws. Like atoms and genes. We won't find the equivalent of atoms or genes for culture, because they aren't there to be found. Alchemy doesn't work like that.

So instead we do what we can. We gather the physical, macro manifestations of culture -- documents, stories, songs, pictures, symbols. We analyze them using our unaided brains, augmented by whatever numbers or other data we can get (how many documents were found, when were the songs composed, how were the pictures made?). And then we put it all together. We synthesize, as historians would say. Based on that big picture view, we ask what seem to us to be the key questions. What happened? Why did it happen? And so what? And around those questions we build a narrative. A story. Non-fiction, but a story all the same.

We do this all the time in daily life. With our families, our jobs, our decisions. Based on our experiences of the past, we have a sense of how the future will go. We can't say for certain what the future holds for the organization that pays our wage. But we can see how workplaces change over time, how they succeed or fail, and from this we get a sense of the possibilities for our own livelihood. At home, we don't know exactly how the lives of loved ones will turn out. But from experiences of our own family and others, we know what sorts of crises or turning points might happen. Or will happen, no matter what. We don't know when we will die, but we know that we will.

It's the same with the approaching future of global ecological upheaval. We can use history and memory to shine a light into the shadows of the next age and discern some of its features. We can't know everything, but we can have a guide at least, to certain passages, certain properties of the landscape. Certain aspects of what might happen, and how human communities might respond.

More next time.