Back to the future? Ideologies of declinism prevent us from seizing opportunities in the present

“The child is father of the man,” wrote romantic poet William Wordsworth – later to become the refrain of a song by the Beach Boys. Our past, when we were children, is remembered as a golden age, a paradise – to be contrasted with the fallen present. The romantic project can even be seen as an attempt to recapture those ineffable moments of our childhoods, before the alienations and earthly travails of adult existence took over.

Likewise, there is the notion of a golden past in India, where our ancestors were haloed beings of extraordinary wisdom, engineering a paradise or Rama Rajya often contrasted with a fallen and corrupted present. Such a notion may have been popularised by German Indologist Friedrich Max Mueller, who considered Vedic Sanskrit literature to represent the “childhood” of the “Aryan mind,” and pressed his view of ancient India as a Vedic idyll into the service of a romantic critique of modern industrial civilisation.

The traditional Hindu view of a distant Satya Yuga, lost in the mists of time, contrasted with the modern-day Kali Yuga also presents a similar contrast between a golden past and a fallen present. Such a view may be embedded in how primarily oral or manuscript cultures remember the passage of time. In such cultures, knowledge is recorded either in the memory of pandits, who recite verses inherited from ancestors, or in painfully handwritten manuscripts. Such knowledge is always subject to corruption and decay, and the primary perspective is one of loss of the inherited wisdom of ancestors. The dominant vision in such a society, therefore, is one of a glorious past and civilisation’s decline in the present.

That perspective changes, however, with the advent of printed books – when knowledge can be endlessly multiplied and rapidly disseminated. In print culture, knowledge becomes accretive rather than subject to loss. As the saying goes, one can stand on the shoulders of giants to see further than them. Society moves from rule of the greybeards to empowering the young.

Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press enabled such things as reason, science, the notion of advancing knowledge through the careful sifting of evidence, eventually the Enlightenment itself. Print culture created the modern world. With knowledge seeming to advance rather than decay, the view of historical time also changes – the past loses lustre and it’s the future that beckons. A perspective of modern-day vikas, for instance, would be inconceivable without print culture.

It’s odd, therefore, that narratives of past glory and present degeneracy – let’s call it an ideology of ‘declinism’ – have gripped present-day Indian politics. This is often combined with a fixation on obscure historical detail, even a will to undo history. It’s as if the past has become a compensation for the political and practical deficiencies of the present.

In the Congress version of declinism everything, apparently, went to blazes since the British took over; Sangh Parivar acolytes go back further in their search for the moment when India “fell” from its high perch – to the Mughals or to the Delhi sultanate. However, it’s been a long time since the British left; and today’s democratic republic bears no resemblance to the Mughal empire. Why, then, are we so obsessed with the past, intent on splitting hairs (or even heads) over versions of it, and permitting it to waylay the present?

What’s done is done and no amount of “culture wars” can help us undo it – especially when there are more urgent economic battles to fight. For instance, the vicissitudes of history have left many more of us knowing English than Sanskrit or Pali. The Mughals have left us with the Taj Mahal in Agra. Is there any point ruing or bemoaning any of this, or trying to turn back the wheel of time? We would be much better off playing the hand that history has dealt us, and leverage the unique access to global markets or technology that English can afford to us, or use the Taj Mahal to grow tourism and create livelihoods.

While India remains mired in culture wars – at whose root is an overly romantic view of the past – societies as different as America or China are more pragmatic in leveraging what they have rather than crying over spilt milk (Trump is the exception that proves the rule). Their future orientation, rather than obsessing with the past, enables them to move ahead and explains why they are superpowers today. Indeed, if there’s a real lesson of history to heed, it’s that future-oriented societies frequently overwhelm past-oriented ones.

This isn’t to say that the achievements of the past should be undervalued, and there’s plenty in Indian history to take inspiration from. Ayurveda may provide many potent drug formulations. Yoga and meditation could be useful, even world changing techniques. But the test of an ayurvedic drug would lie in whether its efficacy can be validated using modern scientific protocols. Yoga needs to be adapted to present purposes and lifestyles.

Our present needs to be the point of origin, and the past must be in the service of the present; not the other way round. Uncritical reverence for anything remote in time cannot be a panacea for our problems. History isn’t a fall from great heights. The present isn’t just a time of moral decay but packs in considerable wisdom as well, perhaps much greater than the hoary past.

Hans Rosling’s Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World – and Why Things Are Better than You Think is a fact filled guide to why people alive today have it way better than their ancestors ever did. There’s little point returning to a second childhood, Wordsworth’s poetic claims notwithstanding.

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