History is made in retrospect. If one looks back at the 20th century, one will find that trends in politics, in economics, and culture can be traced throughout the years, correlated with significant events that might have triggered shifts in sentiment, and taken for granted. Historians dig through archives to try to compile loose documents into a coherent chain of reasoning. The fruits of their work - books, articles, essays - are the only chance to understand more about the past. And so one will readily accept that the 20th century was begun by the end of the empires, carried by the rise of democracy, and resolved by the dominance of capitalism. It seems too convincing a tale to entertain the thought that all these developments could have been caused by chance. History is compelling because it makes sense. Or perhaps because sense is given to it.
This sense is rarely obvious in the moment in which history is made but not written. There are historic moments that are evidently historic while they are lived through. The moon landing was an unprecedented and as of yet unrepeated feat of human ingenuity and perseverance. Neil Armstrong must have known that he is in the process of making history as he set foot on the moon, even if he might not have felt the weight of history in that moment. But for every evidently historic moment, there are countless events that felt ordinary and where the observer did not have immediate agency. What was it like being a Russian farmer witnessing the revolution of 1918? What was it like growing up in post-war Germany, birthing a new country in the ashes of war? In our age of information, one may look up all of these questions and find satisfying answers in the diaries of Russian peasants and in the reports on the life in the young German Republic. And still, these documents do not answer the question of what it felt like living through these transitions. Did one, on a field near St. Petersburg, think that this moment in time would be a significant part of history in 100 years time? In other words: did one grasp that this time, this day, this very moment would be studied and analysed by millions of people that have not yet been born? That this moment would impact the course of the world in ways barely imaginable?
I call these scenarios the lived experience of history. They contrast the canonical defintion of history as the systematic and academic study of the past, the filtration of history. The work of historians is started by picking the most relevant tales of history (selection), interpreting that tale in a defined temporal or semantic context, and compressing it into narrative that is understandable by a wider audience. Our common understanding of the past is made up by this process, yet history itself is created by the lived experience. In some instances, the lived experience of history and the filtration of history align, as the example of Apollo 11 shows. In the majority of moments, the difference between the two categories of histories is significant. The volume of the lived experience of history therefore is vastly greater than that of the filtration of history - necessarily so, as every individual contributes to the lived experience while only a few contribute to the filtration.
If one accepts these two classifications of history, an interesting question arises: how should one judge the current moment? More precisely, can one make a meaningful statement about the relation of the lived experience of history and its filtration if the filtration has not been created? One may argue that one never is able to determine history in the moment it is made. This is easily falsified by Apollo 11 and Armstrong’s famous “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” statement. Clearly, Armstrong had an intuituion for the significance of the moment and aptly put it into words. Conditions under which the lived experience of history align with the filtration of history must therefore exist.
In Armstrong’s case, two conditions stand out. Firstly, the event of the moon landing itself was recognised as an inevitable milestone of humanity. Never had an adventure more daring been attempted. The pure novelty and grandness of the endeavour guaranteed that this event would be recorded and reported. The selection and interpretation process of the moon landing was therefore not done in retrospect but before the historic moment occurred itself. The filtration of history preceded the lived exeperience of it. Filtrations can be performed in retrospect and in prospect, which leads to the question of whether filtration can happen in the moment itself. From a process point of view, instantantenous filtration is hard to achieve. The event needs to occur and the selection and interpretation effects must follow immediately. In the ages of print books and newspapers, this seems not achievable. Technology and the age of social media indicate that it is possible. I shall return to this question later. Secondly, one can argue that had Armstrong not uttered the metaphor of steps and leaps, the moment would have been slightly less historically famous. The moon landing itself would probably not have been less historically significant with that quote but the moment of making the first step on the moon would have been. This emphasises the agency the astronaut had: not only did Armstrong let the event occur by his actions, he also provided a narrative compression of the moon landing. He performed a third of the work needed for a filtration of history while NASA and the press provided the selection and interpretation as eluded earlier. In speaking these words, Armstrong himself lived and partly made history in the very same moment.
One condition for this simultaneous occurance is the availability of technology. Radio transmission and live broadcasting made Armstrongs words immediately available to the world. Only by extensive briefing in TV programmes was the significance of the moon landing pre-narrated. The further one looks back in history, the less we find technologies able to serve this function. When Cicero accused Catiline of treason in his Catilinarian orations, the event immediately received attention in Rome and the senate. With large parts of the people of the Roman Republic not able to read, the story almost certainly did not reach a majority of individuals in the republic. Had Cicero himself not published his words, the speeches probably would have been forgotten and not made into a filtration of history. Because Cicero was a historian himself, he certainly made and perhaps even exaggerated history. I would argue that Cicero peformed the act of filtration and by that elevated a moment of lived history that perhaps would not have made the cut if someone else had objectively reported on the matter. His peers might not have felt that his speeches were as historic as he made them to be. The gap between the lived experience of history and the filtration of it in this case is quite large.
The availability of technology that projects the historic event into the world and thus provides the opportunity of critical review is one condition of lived experience and filtration happening simulatenously. With technology I mean methods of information exchange. If the exchange process is slow and local, the gap between the two forms of history increases. When speed and global reach are present, the gap shrinks. Those adjectives aptly describe the most prevalent social phenomenon of our age: social media. Social networks propagate information immediately and globally, which should ultimately make us feel that the gap between the lived experience and the filtration of history is closer than ever. Personally, I feel that the reverse is true. With seemingly historic events happening every day, it neither feels like we are living through history. Nor does the filtration seem to be happening at an adequate quality. Are we the first generation for whom history is never allowed to become history?
I have begun thinking about this question while reading an article on Chinese strategy in which the hope of an eastern 21st century was discussed. In 74 years time, historians will begin to look back at the past century, study its quirks, and weave a narrative to make sense of all or some of the chaos that inevitably occurred in it. Essays will be written on President Donald Trump and his war in Iran, on the inability of the German government to reform in the 2010s, and on the meteoric rise of China at the very beginning of the century. Social media is selecting - thanks to the power of an information market, a thought that I think Hayek would have liked - and spreading events instantaneously. Newspapers are quicker than ever to interpret and narrate stories. The New York Times announced a book on the US/Israel-Iran war a mere five weeks after it started and before it finished. On a surface level, this war seems to have all conditions that require history to be experienced and filtrated simultaneously. We should feel more historically involved than ever before. And yet I feel the exact opposite. Events seem to fly by without creating the sense that the lived experience is translated into meaningful filtration. The information market of social media fails to produce a coherent narrative. We have more and better information than ever before - and still we feel less historic (and heroic) than ever before.
I believe that we face a new technological quality that prevents us from experiencing history as the people watching Neil Armstrong did: volume. While the rate at which events occur probably can be assumed as flat over time, there simply is too much being brought to our attention for us to develop a sense of historical importance. Both lived experience and filtration (at least on the short term) are everywhere and we struggle to digest the importance, to define a single theme that defines our current period. In a way, history is disappearing before our eyes and postponing itself into a future where a deeper filtration process will need to take place. Too many things have been brought to my attention in my life time to put a thematic stamp on the first two decades of the 21st century. It will take the historians of the 22nd century to untangle the lived experience mess that social media leaves behind.
Perhaps this the key inddicator of the 21st century – never have we created more documented lived experiences. Never was the rate and volume of filtration greater. We have created an overabundance of historical narratives one ever shorter time frames and scales, all competing with each other for the attention of the individual. Exactly because everything is historically significant, nothing is. We have destroyed the sense of living through history and replaced it with consuming its immature filtration.
And so we remain with the paradox that feels as acute as never before. History is made in retrospect. For the first time in it, it will be made against the background noise of its immmediate and omnipresent filtration.