Historical Perspective Is An Antidote To Cope
Students of history often take a very long view of the world. I knew this when I started my research. What surprised me is how this perspective helps think clearer about the future. Most people intellectually agree that at some point our civilization will crumble and be replaced by another, but you don’t feel it in your bones until you spend a lot of time sitting with the civilizations that have already crumbled.
Cope is one of the most powerful psychological forces distorting our thinking. People have an incredibly strong need to believe that things will turn out okay.1 For people who emotionally believe that the universe consists only of our present society, this obviously distorts how you see things, because you need things to turn out okay in our present society. This is the source of common fantasies about e.g. utopian revolutions (among those dissatisfied with the current structure), or “The End Of History” eternally preserving the post-WWII political order (among those satisfied with the current structure), and many other fantasies, as well as the much more common reluctance to look squarely at problems which seem hard to resolve with our present social structure.
Once you take the very long view, and your emotional universe includes the distant past and the distant future, a lot of this psychological pressure is lifted from your analysis of today’s conditions. Will things turn out okay in our present society? In some ways yes, in some ways no, but it’s not the final word. In the year 3500 this will all be dust and something else will be happening. Maybe it’ll be better in 3500, and if not then, maybe in 5000. You don’t have to load so much of the cope onto the things happening in your own lifetime.
The point is not that you should fall into nihilism. The fact that our society is temporary does not mean it’s unimportant. Our mistakes and failures might be repaired in a couple hundred years, but that’s not much solace to our grandchildren if we screw things up in the meantime. Still, people seem to think much clearer when they see the stakes as very very large, rather than infinite.
I’d go so far as to claim that people have a *literally unbreakable* psychological constraint to believe they’ll eventually achieve their deepest goals, but that’s a big and counterintuitive topic I won’t argue for here. The weaker commonsense claim is enough for the point I’m making.