Can the past and the future coexist?

• Author: Brown, Matthew
• Position: Review Essay

Change is a modern phenomenon. Modernist scholars from Smith to Hegel to Marx viewed change as one of the defining characteristics of modern society. The idea of "change" became synonymous with the idea of "progress": modern advanced from earlier, primitive stages to advanced, better stages. With the rise of the idea of progress began the rise of the "past" as a distinct cultural phenomenon. Explorers, armies, and governments collected and displayed artifacts of past cultures as a way of illustrating the idea of progress.

With the rise of postmodernism and multiculturalism in recent decades, the debate about the past has intensified. The idea of progress as the natural result of change has been abandoned for the most part in these views, as have modern conceptions of the past. Rather than being used as a prop to support progress, the past is now seen as a distinct reality placed in great danger by the present and by the idea of progress. This reinterpretation of the past has influenced debates over environmental protection, the extinction of native languages, and the ownership of cultural artifacts. Globalization, with rapid increases in trade, travel, and communication between countries around with world, has intensified the debate. Along with this process have come increasingly violent reactions against change and the disruptions it has wrought to the political and economic status quo of many contemporary .

The change in cultural conditions, such as the decline of native languages or the export of historic artifacts, is one important way the average person becomes involved in globalization. Control of these symbolic aspects of society provides powerful opportunities for factions that try to expropriate them for political advantage. Responses to the increasing concern for cultural preservation have included everything from local conservation, to strict social (government) ownership of all cultural artifacts, to the designation of United Nations World Heritage sites. Systematic approaches to cultural preservation have been complicated not only by the obvious variety of opinion in diverse cultural settings but also by the sheer variety of objects, artifacts, resources, and traditions threatened by a changing world. A good recent overview of this situation is Alexander Stille's The Future of the Past (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).

Stille takes us on a whirlwind tour of the world's natural and cultural resources, from the most prominent, such as the Sphinx and pyramids of Egypt, to the exotic, such as wood carving in the East Indies. He shows that perhaps more than ever societies around the world are being forced to come to terms with the past, what it means, and how they want to preserve it. Approaches to historic preservation have been as diverse as the problems. The one commonality seems to be a heightened urgency of the problem. As societies have adopted some degree of capitalism and modern technology, they have often experienced a growing anxiety about the loss of tradition. As technological change has made available previously unimagined tools for the preservation and study of the past, it has also brought about unprecedented potential to destroy natural and cultural objects. Social and geographic mobility has also had a profound effect. As Stille points out, "Paradoxically, the rootlessness of contemporary society has created a tremendous yearning for a connection with ancient or vanished civilizations" (p. xiv). He illustrates with numerous examples how this "double-edged nature of technological change" (p. xvii) is...