Artifacthood

Last week on the comments for Reality Breaks Into Fantasy, Glen had one of those remarks that the longer you pondered it, the more profound it became:

"Perhaps we are much the same to the pozzed, the woke and the enlightenment...we are dangerous artifacts being pushed to act in dangerous ways by matters of conscience?"

It got me to thinking about the nature of being an artifact.

The phrase "Things were different back in my day" is probably the most overused phrase in the history of mankind, followed only by various versions of "Publius, hold my wine cup...".  The older generation has been commenting on the seemingly different lifestyle of the younger generation for at least 3,000 years, maybe longer. 

But occasionally changes happen to a society, changes so dramatic that the before and after are breathtaking in their scope and breadth.  They literally create a new society, leaving those that exist and refuse to change artifacts of another way of living, coelecanths swimming in a new ocean.

In the reign of Tiberius, there were still a few men whose memory went back to the Roman Republic, to a time when men voted for those that ruled over them rather than serving under the Principate.  Or Scottish Highlanders of the 1780s and 1790s who still remembered the time of the clans. Or samurai after 1877 who lived on into the twentieth century, warrior relics of a different era.

These men and women undoubtedly seemed out of step with the "modern" times in which they were thrust, especially if they failed in some form or fashion to adjust.  For the most part they were never considered as serious threats, at least in modern times (In Rome, of course, the Principate was always looking for the slightest reason to remove potential threats), but rather as oddities - perhaps undesirable or weird, certainly no-one to be considered in the modern era as a "model" of the new society.

But an odd thing happened in every one of the examples I have given:  over the course of history it is those who were superceded - the Roman Republicans, the Highlanders, the Samurai - who are seen as models or admirable while the societies around them - the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Meiji Democracy - eventually fall from interest or regard.

Why is this?  I do not fully know, of course, but I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that those who persevered in the ways they were taught as youth were ultimately seen as standing for something while those who adapted were seen as simply one long line of "yes" men, the sorts that line history in greys and blurs and fall away into obscurity.

Dennis Hempson (1695-1807) was the last of the great Irish Harpers.  Blind and playing a metal strung harp with his fingernails in the old Irish style, he was a relic in a modern age of gut strung harps and continental music.  At the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792 he was by far the oldest harpist in attendance and played in a style unlike any of the others.  When asked about why he played certain songs in certain ways, he simply responded "This is the way that I learned it" or "I cannot play it in any other way." 

Like Hempson, may we persist in our artifacthood, if for no other reason to give witness to a different time in hopes that in the future, some of what we believed and stood for maybe remembered as worthy of emulation instead of fading to grey.