Matthew Kenner - Geohell: Imagining History in the Contemporary World

Humans experience life through many combined mental/physical worlds. They perceive their worlds via phenomena items of meaning. The world is the combined continuous appearance all at once of every thing within Earths domain: specifically, this defines the whole world, or everything. Items of the physical world, those that appear primarily in visual space, which is to say, outside of the human mind, are always manifested as structures and parts of structures, however simple they may superficially seem. In other words, every thing, by which I mean every structure, is naturally complex. Most significantly, this leads to a situation where no thing in this case, no phenomenon on Earth can be truly understood without having been explained. But if it can be successfully explained, by definition it will be understood.

For humans, everything (the whole world) must be explained and hence understood primarily in terms of its relation to the planet Earth: Earth is the supreme area of relevance its the all-encompassing setting for the whole living system thats ultimately humanitys sole experienced context. Earth is the theater where events are staged. The universe is the all-encompassing setting for Earth; the latter mediates the former to human beings.

Although Earth and the universe are one, enormous differences arise in the human imagination between how each context, in-and-of-itself, can be perceived. For one thing, the universe is perpetually expanding, as well as infinitely diverse in far too many ways that humans arent used to; so we cant properly imagine it as a whole. In turn, constructed histories of its happenings arent possible. But human beings live on/in Earth, so they can realistically imagine specific circumstances happening within the planet from perspectives like those of first-hand observers without their having lived those particular circumstances personally. This is because they can understand what has been most significant to the working of Earth as a whole , from a certain perspective the perspective of humanity and in turn constructed histories of the planets happenings are possible.

Every latest moment of an individuals life is the most recent moment in human history this only changes in relation to an individuals life after he or she is dead so human history is always in one sense final, namely in terms of all such history until any given present moment. Generally, the until this moment expanse is known as the past. Therefore, on Earth, for humans, theres always a present, and hence always some imaginable past; in turn, on Earth, theres always history that humans can potentially find. The universe, by comparison, appears as a perpetual future, since (as was said) its nature is to constantly expand. So far as we know, the universe sets its own rules, meaning the rules for everything within its scope. Earths rules are ultimately set by a higher power, if only in the sense that its a physically finite locale within a physically infinite universe. Not only is there always some ongoing history on planet Earth, then, but also, besides that, there is in the largest sense always a single planetary history (whatever it might entail). In turn, for any phenomenon on Earth, theres always a single history of that phenomenon. Always, a phenomenon is whats historically unique.

A human world, that uniquely total, distinctly cultural sphere, is most comparable to a (the) universe, in that, on one level, it sets its own rules and boundaries. But in a much larger, more determinative sense, we know any human world can only work within the constraints set by the Earth as a whole. Thus, the types of conclusions were able to reach about humanity make it far easier for human beings to understand the human world than the universe at large, because we can know precisely (experientially) what bounds the human world. To elaborate, humans, aside from having the same common, broadest physical constraints as everything else on Earth, and aside from having their own physical constraints, just like everything else does on Earth, are most unique insofar as they have human psychological constraints. Every animal has its own species psychology too, but what I mean here is something different: what Im referring to is the human mind , unlike anything else known to human beings in the universe and so all the more unique in relation to Earth. Above all, the human minds uniqueness lies in its theoretically limitless potential for attaining knowledge, fostered by the immeasurably vast and ever-increasing stockpile of recorded symbolic communication. Since the human is by definition the only being with first-hand access to observation of the human psyche and relatedly the only one able to employ human intellectual tools, no thing is theoretically in a better position to be explained at the present point in time than the holistic human world.

However, weve only reached this point where human beings have the potential to understand sufficiently the concept of a holistic human world owing to the history of the human universe itself. Human beings today have the potential to know virtually infinitely greater quantities of information than humans from all past eras combined: yet we only have this potential because of everything already accomplished throughout thousands and thousands and thousands of years of cultural evolution, largely achieved via the lives of human beings were indoctrinated to look at as backward. As it has happened, the more culturally complex are the worlds humans create, the more conscious in general, and conscious of itself, in particular, humanity can potentially become. Generally, though, because of the kind of complexity humanity has developed in its culturally most complex environments, namely cultural complexity built on expansive war systems, the practical effect has been essentially the opposite. Certainly this appears to be the case in the most strikingly complex cultural context, the contemporary world the more culturally complex is the world humans inhabit, the more intrinsically confused are the inhabitants, and confused about themselves, both culturally and individually, most of all.