When the World Drifts Downstream
Historical Inertia.—Kenneth Clark began his account of civilization with its collapse, so that he described the end of classical antiquity before describing the beginning the civilization that would arise, and which is continuous with our world today. He paused over the kind of historical inertia that can survive in small pockets even as the larger structures dissolve and disappear, writing, “…life must have gone on in an apparently normal way for much longer than one would expect. It always does… Civilisation might have drifted downstream for a long time…” There are at least two perspectives on this downstream drift of history. Those inside the surviving pocket, isolated from the outside world, go about the ordinary business of life as best as can be, making do as necessary to compensate for its changed and failing relationships with the outside world. The making do becomes a peculiarity that separates them from others; their peculiar identity incrementally marks them as different, and the different reinforces their isolation. Those outside the surviving pocket survive also, but they survive by changing as world changes, infrequently in contact with those in the isolated pockets, keenly aware of their alienation from an increasingly changed and changing world. The small pockets get smaller and smaller, and one by one they dissolve and disappear in their turn. Their dissolution is scarcely noticed by the outside world, which had long left them behind. The wider world, well on its way to becoming something very different from what it was, no longer takes its measure by the standards once maintained in the surviving pockets of a now-lost world, which were once the standards everyone maintained everywhere. Some of the remnants of that former world remain undisturbed, and while the world, on its present trajectory, has no interest in these fragments, their preservation through neglect will be someday understood as fortunate accident.
