For my debut article, it seemed fitting that I should offer it as a dialogue on one of Garrett White’s recent posts. I hope that with this the reader can maybe glean a new perspective on the past, present, and future. Without further ado, here we go.

Humanity is obsessed with the future. Although if we are being technical, in a study done in 2019, it was observed that the participants thought about the present 68% of the time (Beaty, 2019). This is not a majority, but a vast super-majority. By the numbers we, as people, are obsessed with the present. For reference, the past was thought of 13% of the time, and the future 19%. I do not really think this is all that relevant, as that was not the thesis of Garrett’s article, nor what I want to focus on. Rather, I want to spend the reader's time to draw attention to our warped obsession with the past (as well as history) and how we learn the wrong lessons.

On a macro scale, the modern West talks about the past a lot, especially in the ways in which our forefathers messed up and made a muck of things. We love to talk about slavery, colonialism, racism, and oppression faced by all victimized classes. In the United States, we have spent the better part of the past decade removing as many statues of historic American figures as possible. We tell ourselves that our country was founded on slavery and exploitation of black and indigenous individuals. Our country has no problem berating and browbeating the poorest white Americans in Appalachia and the Rust Belt, explaining that they have institutional privilege and that the decline in race relations and the summer riots of 2020 are their fault. While all of these assumptions may be egregious and incorrect, that is not really the most important lesson. What all of these assumptions lack is any nuance. I will expand on this idea a little later on.

On the personal level, things are surprisingly very similar. In 2021 it was reported that 22.8% of Americans had some sort of mental illness (NAMI, 2023). This staggering statistic seems to imply that nearly a quarter of America is not of a sound or stable mind. Without making claims of what does or does not count as a mental illness, I think this highlights a modern trend of people, especially Gen Z, to hyperfixate on trauma. Social media is awash with teenagers complaining and grieving over past bad relationships and inevitable toxic behavior. Not too far afield one can find other posts or (heaven forbid) subreddits of people asking for help with their parents and for ways to try and get over past abuse done to them. In daily life people talk a lot about how broken homes, mental illnesses, and how relationship trauma has affected what they could have done and where they could have been now. People now seem to be unable to get over the evils done to them in the past, no matter how big or small.

The reader is probably now asking what these things have to do with each other? Let me share a quote that will hopefully help to start bringing these ideas together:

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

– Napoleon Bonaparte

Whether on a societal or a personal level, every person and nation has gone through bad and traumatic events. They may sometimes be self imposed, other times entirely involuntary. Either way, everyone has to reckon with the past, but nowadays in the current year, we have completely forgotten how. As the West has become post-Christian and as we have thrown away any and all traditions, we have lost what it means to forgive. The United States may have practiced slavery, but we also fought an entire war and killed ourselves to end it. We made a mistake, and then did our best to fix it. However, that fact is entirely irrelevant to modern sensibilities. We may have ourselves been bullies in elementary school, or had a relative who crushed our dreams and psychologically belittled us as a child. Whether they have come out later to apologize or continue to abuse us now, it makes no difference, they are evil and have caused us trauma. What we lack more than anything when thinking about the past is nuance. We do not care that the United States has brought millions out of poverty or that we have been the most successful multicultural society, we sinned once, and are therefore as evil as can be. We assume that because our childhoods were not perfect, that we will then have to struggle with these problems for life. Trauma never really goes away, don’t you know?

The past takes up so much of our energy as a civilization and on every level, yet somehow our memories are entirely one dimensional. Everything is either good or bad, and we have essentially decided that yesterday was a mistake. The worse news still is that via nostalgia we then have the ability to do an entire 180°, but can’t stop in the middle. Either our childhood was traumatic and will never stop scarring us, or we cannot wait for the new spiderman movie to come out, which we loved so much as kids. Why can’t things be complicated? Why do we refuse to color anything gray?

What then is the reason for the lack of nuance? I think it is in part due to the philosophy of liberalism, which is worth its own article, and a lack of the knowledge of Christ’s forgiveness. Humanity is gray, and we are not simple to pin down. We are both made in the image of God, and we yet ate from the tree and were expelled from the Garden of Eden. It is important to note that while even the smallest sin separates us from God, even the most Godly and holy people still sin even after receiving God’s grace. It is also true that the worst tyrants in history probably did something nice for their spouse or friends at least once. For those who are in Christ, we can have assurance of being made perfect once we are glorified with him in Heaven, but for now we have to live with two very different facts; we are now seen as righteous and must grow to be more like Christ and sin less, and yet we will still sin and make mistakes time and time again.

What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?

– Romans 6:1-2 (KJV)

We are gray and that is just part of the human experience. Our warped and almost legalistic obsession with the past is hurting us at pretty much every level of society. The past may have contained a lot of pain, death, and wickedness, but it was also beautiful. If the dear reader ever found themselves standing in the Cologne Cathedral in Germany or walking along the Charles Bridge in Prague, one would find that the past can be all things to all men, and it is. Our stories and histories are filled with our ancestors dying at the hands of foreign armies and then later becoming the same foreign army that once persecuted them. This is not to defend past sins of the West, but just to say that it is complicated. There is beauty and pain, and the pain makes the beauty ever more sweet.

As we near the end of this idea, I will share a quote from one of my favorite thinkers of the existentialist movement that I think helps to connect the past to the future:

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

– Søren Kierkegaard

We do not know that the future holds, and really can only make educated guesses. However, there is one aspect in which controversially, I think the future and the past are very similar. We can impact both. One often hears that you cannot change the past, but based on modern sensibilities, this is evidently false, at least to some degree. The modern West demonizes the past and only focuses on the bad, but we have an opportunity to focus on the good. By shifting our focus to the good, we can devote more mental energy and memories to truth and beauty and in effect, aim up. We can exemplify righteousness and offer reconciliation and forgiveness. Let us focus on how we grew from the bullies in our youth. Let us not hold on to trauma from decades past and thereby let the abuser win and continue to rule in our mind. Let us focus on the excellent achievements of our country and of our beautiful culture. Let us shape our minds and the past to be more representative of the best we could do, and not punish ourselves for mistakes that are centuries old. We should not be naïve, but we should remember that as Christ has forgiven us, we must forgive others.

Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies.

– Psalm 103:3-4 (KJV)

Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.

– Colossians 3:13 (KJV)

Works Sited:

Beaty, R. E., Seli, P., & Schacter, D. L. (2019). Thinking about the past and future in daily life: an experience sampling study of individual differences in mental time travel. Psychological research, 83(4), 805–816. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1075-7 

NAMI, an. (2023). Mental health by the numbers. https://www.nami.org/mhstats