This is a good nutshell reminder of an apparent key fact of existence.
This has been known and lamented for more than 2,000 years. Read Ecclesiastes.
Everything is an iteration of
what went before. Things only
seem new because our memories
are short. No one remembers
what happened last week, let
alone last year. We forget
everything and our children
remember even less.
("Nothing New Under the Sun: A Blunt Paraphrase of Ecclesiastes", Adam S. Miller)
The last few minutes of Martin Scorsese's (wildly uneven, but still) Gangs of New York found a good way to tell the same story 100% visually. The movie starts with a huge street fight between the followers of the two characters at the heart of its story, Bill the Butcher and "Priest" Vallon, battling over who will control the streets of 19th-century New York. Then at the end we see their tombstones, and in a sped-up time-lapse we see those stones get overgrown and forgotten as the modern city of New York we know today grows up around them, fading out on one last shot of the completely overgrown headstones -- with the Twin Towers looming over them, as if to say, this too shall pass.
That was a great ending. Also brings up an interesting thought. If something that gruesome and important to New York's history has been largely forgotten after 150 years, then there will eventually come a time when 9/11 (your mention of the Twin Towers made me think of it) is all but forgotten by society and its residents (assuming New York still exists as a city in hundreds of years) and some future filmmaker could do a similar timelapse starting from where the Gangs of New York timelapse ended.
Arguably, that process has already started. To anyone who was born after 9/11 (and that was almost 18 years ago, so there are people born after 9/11 who are almost old enough to vote!), that event is already kind of an abstraction, in much the same way that the attack on Pearl Harbor is to almost everyone reading this. The passing of an event out of living memory is the first stage of that kind of transition from experience into legend.
And also, if you're interested in this sort of thing, I recommend subscribing to the blog Ephemeral New York, which highlights all sorts of still-existing traces of New York Cities long gone: https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/
Yeah. My grandfather passed at the beginning of this year at the age of 94. He fought in World War 2 in Italy (landed in Anzio), lost one of his fingers in the war, and earned a Purple Heart, along with several other medals. We don't have too many more years to go before we no longer have anyone alive who fought in that war to get direct experiences from.
"Every day, memories of World War II—its sights and sounds, its terrors and triumphs—disappear. Yielding to the inalterable process of aging, the men and women who fought and won the great conflict are now in their late 80s and 90s. They are dying quickly—according to US Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, 496,777 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II are alive in 2018."
And 348 are dying each day, or about 127,000 a year. Looks like we have about 10 more years at the most before they're all gone. (Obviously this is US centric, I'm not sure what the global numbers are, also the 10 years is based on the provided graph in the link. The numbers they provided suggest they'll all be dead in about 4 more years).
I've been seeing a lot of headlines over the past ten or so years on how this is happening to the Holocaust, which freaks me the hell out, because my grandmother's second husband was a survivor. To think nobody could meet anyone like him anymore is disturbing.
Always thought it strange that it didn't include a montage of West Side Story and countless other gangs who know nothing about the previous ones... ;-)
I've often thought: "What if I bought a nice big piece of land somewhere, along with a digging machine and spent the rest of my days making a hole in the earth. That is my current thought on how to make the biggest, lasting impact on this earth.
Unfortunately, others have already done this - extracting great riches as they did so - and left their "mark" on the planet.
Of course, without looking it up, I couldn't tell you who they were, even though some of these "big holes" are right here in "my backyard" down in southern Arizona (about the best I can tell you is that they were mostly for copper mining and...yep).
Or - take this big hole; without looking it up, do you know who made it?
Dramatically overfill it with concrete - enough that it's wildly impractical to ever remove it - and put a giant stainless steel monolith in the middle.
Nature will rapidly disappear and or anonymize your earth hole, or someone will simply fill it in (just one person digging with industrial equipment will make a surprisingly modest dent in the earth in a lifetime). You need to make it obnoxiously unreasonable to bother getting rid of it.
Maybe we shouldn't confuse having an impact with being remembered? In the end, most contributions are anonymous, but they're still what civilization is built on.
Everything we do matters as long as humanity continues to exist, because all of us have an impact on the next generation, and so on. It doesn't matter how small. I don't know who my great grandfather was, but I'm here because one day he decided to have sex. The butterfly effect is real.
Although there's no future for humanity in the universe, everything is for naught. But we are a hopeful species.
I would bet good money that less than 1% of people can name all 8 of thier great grand parents. In other words you'll almost certainly be forgotten in a few generations, even by your own family.
However, even though nobody might remember the name of those great grandparents, they impacted the lives of others, which changed the course of the future.
Everyone is contributing to the future of humanity. Even if some commit suicide or decides not to reproduce.
That's a brilliant and stunning way to think of it. I met 3 of my great grandparents but only knew one well. But because people are more likely to have kids later now, my own kids knew none of their great grandparents - that generation wasn't alive. The same is almost certain for the next generation of my family.
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
PB Shelley said it better.
"Here lies one whose name was writ on water."
And "a young English poet" said it better still.
But they never had the opportunity to create an artificial intelligence, did they? Since I know that nothing I do will endure long beyond my death, and that failure of the flesh is inevitable under current technology, I think that my best chance at a legacy will be to create an artificial consciousness that likes the same things that I like, and dislikes the same things that I dislike, mimics my behavior to perfection, and possesses the same catalog of memories.
Then it can spend an eternity doing absolutely nothing of consequence, just like I would do with immortality, if I had it. Thus, the rule of zero legacy is preserved.
Years ago, from somewhere I have forgotten, I copied the following:
Among the first Anglo-Saxon poems, from the eighth century, is “The Ruin,” a powerful testament to the brokenness inherent in civilization. Its opening lines:
The masonry is wondrous; fates broke it
The courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying...
The poem comes from the Exeter Book of Anglo-Saxon poetry and several key lines have been destroyed by damp. So, one of the original poems in the English lyric tradition contains, in its very physical existence, a comment on the fragility of the codex as a mode of transmission. The original poem about a ruin is itself a ruin.
Here is another translation:
Splendid this rampart is, though fate destroyed it,
The city buildings fell apart, the works
Of giants crumble. Tumbled are the towers,
Ruined the roofs, and broken the barred gate,
Frost in the plaster, all the ceilings gape,
Torn and collapsed and eaten up by age.
And grit holds in its grip, the hard embrace
Of earth, the dead departed master-builders,
Until a hundred generations now
Of people have passed by. Often this wall
Stained red and grey with lichen has stood by
Surviving storms while kingdoms rose and fell.
And now the high curved wall itself has fallen.
Yes, but as long as I have another breath, it matters to me what my legacy will be. I honestly don't know who Clark Gable is, but as long as he was alive he felt like a living legend — isn't that all that matters? The purpose you give yourself.
Life's a massive multiplayer game, and you decide what the definition of winning is, what could be better? If you decide there are no winners, then it sucks to be you.
Quit the opposite: almost everyone has a 'legacy' and it's in the eyes of those who knew them for whatever reason.
What makes us human is our ability to transfer knowledge, wisdom, ideas (i.e. the 'light' referred to as 'lucis' in the mottos so many of our Universities) from generation to generation.
Obviously sometimes there's too much egoism wrapped up in legacy, and we sometimes embellish the legacy of the wrong folks, but that doesn't make it irrelevant.
The understanding that one's legacy does matter, in whatever one does, however larger or small, compels us to be better than we would otherwise.
Each one of us has probably countless historical figures who've inspired us at least a little bit, without them we would not know who we are.
I will leave a legacy, because I have kids. It may not be a very big legacy in terms of number of people, but on them my impact has been immense. (Hopefully mostly for good, but unfortunately not totally...)
Yes there are people who will be "remembered" for a very long time. People will likely know artist's depictions of Julius Caesar and George Washington for a while.
We know some ancient people's names. We can imagine some depiction of them. We may even know what they supposedly did.
How much of it is accurate at this point?
Can the average person, off the top of their head, explain who Attila the Hun was, what he did, and why it mattered with any degree of accuracy?
Even the VERY rare few who are remembered for 1000s of years are remembered more as myths than as the people they were and what they accomplished.
At the very least, those that were writers we can still read their words, and can get a feel for who they were as people (or at least how they wanted to be presented as people), their ideas, and what they cared about. George Washington, for example, was a prolific writer. Here's a link to 14 volumes of his writings (mostly letters, journals, and speeches, it looks like): https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/washington-the-writings-o...
As an example, here's an interesting letter I ran into of him sending a letter to a captain telling him to sell a negro he included with the letter as a slave and fetch him certain goods in return: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/washington-the-writings-o...
Distinction should be made among the religious figures clearly.
Moses probably was not a real historical person, or at least there is a lot of doubt.
Jesus probably was a historical person, but even the rational faithful obviously don't consider the Bible necessarily to be a clear historical narrative.
We know quite a lot about the various Emperors of Rome, and quite a lot about the development of Roman history.
If you actually dig into the history of Rome, it's remarkable how so many of the issues we face today already existed back then, and how much they were able to achieve without Enlightenment principles.
Given how much we depend on the past, how we really are just extensions of it, I find it hard to agree with the premise of the article. Though it's always good to read contrarian ideas, and I do think there is a hint of Eastern wisdom in it as well, to be considered.
Similarly, we can ask the question: name one person from the 10th century. I bet most people would not be able to. We probably don't have one person for each of the ten centuries of the first millenium. And forget about anyone before 500 BC or so!
In a thousand years, we'll have the same question: name one person from the 21st century. Who will it be? Which of the 15-20 American presidents will even be visible? Who'll be the McKinley and who'll be the Lincoln?
I expect for the 20th century it'll be Hitler or Einstein or Churchill or MLK or someone like that. Surely not Clark Gable or Elvis!
Different professions care about different people. Musicians (and honestly, the average layperson) can name classical musicians at least as far back as the Renaissance, and those in Theatre can name classic Greek plays from well over a thousand years ago (Medea, Antigone, Oedipus Rex don't ring any bells? Oedipus Rex was first performed in 429 BC!). Philosophers can name Socrates and Aristotle (and most other people can too).
How about games? Go is 2500 years old at this point and still going strong. Sure we don't remember the name of the person who first put it out there, but there wasn't a desire to record that back then. Shigeru Miyamoto will be tied to Mario for a long, long time. Or Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse and theme parks. They might not be household names in a thousand years, but there will be historians and documentaries about them (and hopefully their works will be properly archived so people wanting to be educated on the history of film or games can still enjoy them).
If something or someone leaves enough of an impression on society, they can be remembered for thousands of years, and still be relevant to people in those fields (and even outside of those fields). It's not guaranteed to be remembered, or for the people who were involved with it to be remembered specifically, but the result can be.
And even if it's not remembered by the public at large, there are people out there who will find value in remembering and reminding people about these things.
This is a good nutshell reminder of an apparent key fact of existence.
This has been known and lamented for more than 2,000 years. Read Ecclesiastes.
("Nothing New Under the Sun: A Blunt Paraphrase of Ecclesiastes", Adam S. Miller)The last few minutes of Martin Scorsese's (wildly uneven, but still) Gangs of New York found a good way to tell the same story 100% visually. The movie starts with a huge street fight between the followers of the two characters at the heart of its story, Bill the Butcher and "Priest" Vallon, battling over who will control the streets of 19th-century New York. Then at the end we see their tombstones, and in a sped-up time-lapse we see those stones get overgrown and forgotten as the modern city of New York we know today grows up around them, fading out on one last shot of the completely overgrown headstones -- with the Twin Towers looming over them, as if to say, this too shall pass.
You can watch the ending here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-8Lu7MRjQs
It's a really good little example of visual storytelling.
That was a great ending. Also brings up an interesting thought. If something that gruesome and important to New York's history has been largely forgotten after 150 years, then there will eventually come a time when 9/11 (your mention of the Twin Towers made me think of it) is all but forgotten by society and its residents (assuming New York still exists as a city in hundreds of years) and some future filmmaker could do a similar timelapse starting from where the Gangs of New York timelapse ended.
Arguably, that process has already started. To anyone who was born after 9/11 (and that was almost 18 years ago, so there are people born after 9/11 who are almost old enough to vote!), that event is already kind of an abstraction, in much the same way that the attack on Pearl Harbor is to almost everyone reading this. The passing of an event out of living memory is the first stage of that kind of transition from experience into legend.
And also, if you're interested in this sort of thing, I recommend subscribing to the blog Ephemeral New York, which highlights all sorts of still-existing traces of New York Cities long gone: https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/
Yeah. My grandfather passed at the beginning of this year at the age of 94. He fought in World War 2 in Italy (landed in Anzio), lost one of his fingers in the war, and earned a Purple Heart, along with several other medals. We don't have too many more years to go before we no longer have anyone alive who fought in that war to get direct experiences from.
He was also on the cover of Life on their March 27, 1944 issue. He's the third one back getting off the ship: https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images1/1/0816/15/wwii-li...
"Every day, memories of World War II—its sights and sounds, its terrors and triumphs—disappear. Yielding to the inalterable process of aging, the men and women who fought and won the great conflict are now in their late 80s and 90s. They are dying quickly—according to US Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, 496,777 of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II are alive in 2018."
And 348 are dying each day, or about 127,000 a year. Looks like we have about 10 more years at the most before they're all gone. (Obviously this is US centric, I'm not sure what the global numbers are, also the 10 years is based on the provided graph in the link. The numbers they provided suggest they'll all be dead in about 4 more years).
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/wwii-veteran-statistic...
I've been seeing a lot of headlines over the past ten or so years on how this is happening to the Holocaust, which freaks me the hell out, because my grandmother's second husband was a survivor. To think nobody could meet anyone like him anymore is disturbing.
I long for the day when there is no genocide in living memory.
To talk of "living memory" leaves the future uncontrolled.
Always thought it strange that it didn't include a montage of West Side Story and countless other gangs who know nothing about the previous ones... ;-)
Apocalypto, for me, has a similar feeling provoked by the end - it almost makes the whole film both profound and purposeless.
I've often thought: "What if I bought a nice big piece of land somewhere, along with a digging machine and spent the rest of my days making a hole in the earth. That is my current thought on how to make the biggest, lasting impact on this earth.
Unfortunately, others have already done this - extracting great riches as they did so - and left their "mark" on the planet.
Of course, without looking it up, I couldn't tell you who they were, even though some of these "big holes" are right here in "my backyard" down in southern Arizona (about the best I can tell you is that they were mostly for copper mining and...yep).
Or - take this big hole; without looking it up, do you know who made it?
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/img/news/2017/08/06/30322996...
...got the owners a lot of diamonds, though.
Even so - they'll be just as forgotten.
Like the Cards Against Humanity people did a couple of years ago? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/28/cards-aga...
Dramatically overfill it with concrete - enough that it's wildly impractical to ever remove it - and put a giant stainless steel monolith in the middle.
Nature will rapidly disappear and or anonymize your earth hole, or someone will simply fill it in (just one person digging with industrial equipment will make a surprisingly modest dent in the earth in a lifetime). You need to make it obnoxiously unreasonable to bother getting rid of it.
Maybe we shouldn't confuse having an impact with being remembered? In the end, most contributions are anonymous, but they're still what civilization is built on.
Indeed. It’s an interesting assumption that legacy means a selfish desire to be remember. It’s a very Facebook way to think.
The legacy of a teacher is presumably the great things their students do, and not their students sitting around saying “remember that maths teacher.”
Everything we do matters as long as humanity continues to exist, because all of us have an impact on the next generation, and so on. It doesn't matter how small. I don't know who my great grandfather was, but I'm here because one day he decided to have sex. The butterfly effect is real.
Although there's no future for humanity in the universe, everything is for naught. But we are a hopeful species.
I would bet good money that less than 1% of people can name all 8 of thier great grand parents. In other words you'll almost certainly be forgotten in a few generations, even by your own family.
However, even though nobody might remember the name of those great grandparents, they impacted the lives of others, which changed the course of the future.
Everyone is contributing to the future of humanity. Even if some commit suicide or decides not to reproduce.
That's a brilliant and stunning way to think of it. I met 3 of my great grandparents but only knew one well. But because people are more likely to have kids later now, my own kids knew none of their great grandparents - that generation wasn't alive. The same is almost certain for the next generation of my family.
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
PB Shelley said it better.
"Here lies one whose name was writ on water."
And "a young English poet" said it better still.
But they never had the opportunity to create an artificial intelligence, did they? Since I know that nothing I do will endure long beyond my death, and that failure of the flesh is inevitable under current technology, I think that my best chance at a legacy will be to create an artificial consciousness that likes the same things that I like, and dislikes the same things that I dislike, mimics my behavior to perfection, and possesses the same catalog of memories.
Then it can spend an eternity doing absolutely nothing of consequence, just like I would do with immortality, if I had it. Thus, the rule of zero legacy is preserved.
Years ago, from somewhere I have forgotten, I copied the following:
Among the first Anglo-Saxon poems, from the eighth century, is “The Ruin,” a powerful testament to the brokenness inherent in civilization. Its opening lines:
The masonry is wondrous; fates broke it The courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying...
The poem comes from the Exeter Book of Anglo-Saxon poetry and several key lines have been destroyed by damp. So, one of the original poems in the English lyric tradition contains, in its very physical existence, a comment on the fragility of the codex as a mode of transmission. The original poem about a ruin is itself a ruin.
Here is another translation:
Splendid this rampart is, though fate destroyed it, The city buildings fell apart, the works Of giants crumble. Tumbled are the towers, Ruined the roofs, and broken the barred gate, Frost in the plaster, all the ceilings gape, Torn and collapsed and eaten up by age. And grit holds in its grip, the hard embrace Of earth, the dead departed master-builders, Until a hundred generations now Of people have passed by. Often this wall Stained red and grey with lichen has stood by Surviving storms while kingdoms rose and fell. And now the high curved wall itself has fallen.
Yes, but as long as I have another breath, it matters to me what my legacy will be. I honestly don't know who Clark Gable is, but as long as he was alive he felt like a living legend — isn't that all that matters? The purpose you give yourself.
Life's a massive multiplayer game, and you decide what the definition of winning is, what could be better? If you decide there are no winners, then it sucks to be you.
Quit the opposite: almost everyone has a 'legacy' and it's in the eyes of those who knew them for whatever reason.
What makes us human is our ability to transfer knowledge, wisdom, ideas (i.e. the 'light' referred to as 'lucis' in the mottos so many of our Universities) from generation to generation.
Obviously sometimes there's too much egoism wrapped up in legacy, and we sometimes embellish the legacy of the wrong folks, but that doesn't make it irrelevant.
The understanding that one's legacy does matter, in whatever one does, however larger or small, compels us to be better than we would otherwise.
Each one of us has probably countless historical figures who've inspired us at least a little bit, without them we would not know who we are.
We can't all be Newton's but we still matter.
The world is our legacy, we must strive to leave it a better place.
You can't help but create a legacy, even if no one remembers your name (which I personally don't care about).
Deeds echo in time forever. Even ones we think are small.
I will leave a legacy, because I have kids. It may not be a very big legacy in terms of number of people, but on them my impact has been immense. (Hopefully mostly for good, but unfortunately not totally...)
OTOH, people remember (in a distorted way, to various degrees, highly dependent on culture)
Genghis Khan
Attila the Hun
Jesus Christ
Buddha
Moses
A few other prophets
Archimedes
Gaius Julius Caesar
Yes there are people who will be "remembered" for a very long time. People will likely know artist's depictions of Julius Caesar and George Washington for a while.
We know some ancient people's names. We can imagine some depiction of them. We may even know what they supposedly did. How much of it is accurate at this point?
Can the average person, off the top of their head, explain who Attila the Hun was, what he did, and why it mattered with any degree of accuracy?
Even the VERY rare few who are remembered for 1000s of years are remembered more as myths than as the people they were and what they accomplished.
At the very least, those that were writers we can still read their words, and can get a feel for who they were as people (or at least how they wanted to be presented as people), their ideas, and what they cared about. George Washington, for example, was a prolific writer. Here's a link to 14 volumes of his writings (mostly letters, journals, and speeches, it looks like): https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/washington-the-writings-o...
As an example, here's an interesting letter I ran into of him sending a letter to a captain telling him to sell a negro he included with the letter as a slave and fetch him certain goods in return: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/washington-the-writings-o...
Distinction should be made among the religious figures clearly.
Moses probably was not a real historical person, or at least there is a lot of doubt.
Jesus probably was a historical person, but even the rational faithful obviously don't consider the Bible necessarily to be a clear historical narrative.
We know quite a lot about the various Emperors of Rome, and quite a lot about the development of Roman history.
If you actually dig into the history of Rome, it's remarkable how so many of the issues we face today already existed back then, and how much they were able to achieve without Enlightenment principles.
Given how much we depend on the past, how we really are just extensions of it, I find it hard to agree with the premise of the article. Though it's always good to read contrarian ideas, and I do think there is a hint of Eastern wisdom in it as well, to be considered.
Apparently the easiest way to be remembered for a long time is killing a lot of people. :(
Well, it is a lot harder than it sounds...
Similarly, we can ask the question: name one person from the 10th century. I bet most people would not be able to. We probably don't have one person for each of the ten centuries of the first millenium. And forget about anyone before 500 BC or so!
In a thousand years, we'll have the same question: name one person from the 21st century. Who will it be? Which of the 15-20 American presidents will even be visible? Who'll be the McKinley and who'll be the Lincoln?
I expect for the 20th century it'll be Hitler or Einstein or Churchill or MLK or someone like that. Surely not Clark Gable or Elvis!
Different professions care about different people. Musicians (and honestly, the average layperson) can name classical musicians at least as far back as the Renaissance, and those in Theatre can name classic Greek plays from well over a thousand years ago (Medea, Antigone, Oedipus Rex don't ring any bells? Oedipus Rex was first performed in 429 BC!). Philosophers can name Socrates and Aristotle (and most other people can too).
How about games? Go is 2500 years old at this point and still going strong. Sure we don't remember the name of the person who first put it out there, but there wasn't a desire to record that back then. Shigeru Miyamoto will be tied to Mario for a long, long time. Or Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse and theme parks. They might not be household names in a thousand years, but there will be historians and documentaries about them (and hopefully their works will be properly archived so people wanting to be educated on the history of film or games can still enjoy them).
If something or someone leaves enough of an impression on society, they can be remembered for thousands of years, and still be relevant to people in those fields (and even outside of those fields). It's not guaranteed to be remembered, or for the people who were involved with it to be remembered specifically, but the result can be.
And even if it's not remembered by the public at large, there are people out there who will find value in remembering and reminding people about these things.
It'll be Putin after he successfully leads Russia back
Legacy? I thought "legacy" was when you aimed to be remembered by your family and community.
We all leave footprints in the sands of time, but 99.99% do it sitting down.
"They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time."
... all we are is dust in the wind.