A lecturer on the history of Rome mentioned something about one era looking on a historical event with very different feelings from another era's opinion of the same event. He used the phrase "from a different vantage point in time" and it struck a chord in me. Reading "Pillars of the Earth" by Ken Follett was a real experience for me and quite a bit of the impact was feelings events and their meanings from the point of view of some English of the year 1100 AD. While I could see what life was like then, I could see at the same time, what I feel and think now. Medicine, law enforcement, architecture, religion and many other aspects of life are really quite differently constructed 1000 years later.
Ornstein's hypothesis of our mental wiring says that we notice things that are recent, vivid, comparatively superlative and meaningful over things that aren't so much. The first component, recency, is related to time. We notice what happened yesterday but pay much less attention to the headlines from a week or a year ago, even if we never read them. A big factor is our lives is habituation or conditioning. Some people in our town were habituated to the train whistles and hardly heard them after getting used to them. Some people were conditioned to think of trains or of the time of day when a whistle blew. Now that the trains are silent, a new sort of adjustment is taking place.
From a different vantage point in time, the meaning and effect of a train whistle changes. The meaning and feelings associated with the Norman invasion of England in 1066 or with the recent Haitian earthquake over time, even though the event more or less stands still in time. It is only more or less since we may uncover tomorrow an effect or result of the quake that is new to us. Just as it can be an eye-opening way to see changes in ourselves by re-reading a book we read 25 years ago, we decide on the meaning of US slavery or prohibition or anything in big history or our own history against changing backgrounds and with different accompanying sound tracks. Individually and collectively, we are different selves with different views of the past over time.
