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Don’t Let the Future Forget You
Do your part to be part of the historical record
Whether you’re an amateur history buff or a history scholar, the everyday lives of forgotten people retain an elusive allure. Call it the populist perspective, but for every pyramid built there were legions of unknown workers, for every medieval city captured there were nameless innocents slaughtered or enslaved, for every railway laid or canal constructed, there were regular folks hammering and digging away in anonymity.
Our tendency to celebrate and memorialize the well-known, the infamous, and the influential, while giving little historical voice to the masses silenced by enforced illiteracy, disease, or the crush and cruelty of circumstance, undercuts historical accuracy. Imagine, for example, if the view of our own time were based solely on Taylor Swift’s lyrics, a biography of Jeff Bezos, and the ruins of Rockefeller Center.
That’s why I’m urging the non-famous and the certain-to-be forgotten ones, myself included, to consider how we want our lives and times to be remembered as our civilization flirts with meltdown.
This suggestion isn’t political or paranoid, but practical. As the carrying capacity of the planet shrinks and the climate emergency grows, we can anticipate that the near future will be rife with social calamity, probable violence, and the impulse of the powerful to shave unpleasant or contradictory truths from the historical record.
Even so, some might ask that while the drama and dread of the present might seem all-consuming to us, will anyone in the future care to know what regular people — not just the one percent — experienced or endured in these troubling times? After all, how many of us today dwell on those who suffered racial prejudice in Imperial Rome, survived the ghastly horrors of the Black Death, or lived as 19th century Utopians? Not many is my guess other than the historians among us. But that doesn’t mean that a robust historical account is worthless or incapable of influencing behaviors and beliefs that our descendants might want to either emulate or avoid.
In short, future historians — who will likely be as curious as their contemporary counterparts — will want to know what today’s specialists wish they knew about the forgotten…
