I'm one of those persons who still--literally--feels nauseous when I think about the Holocaust or other examples of genocide, or about the long history of slavery in the Americas or anyplace. The passage of time doesn't make a difference; I never "get used to" these things.

Thus, it may not be surprising that I've been feeling sick lately following the looting of the antiquities in Baghdad's museum, which I regard as a catastrophe only slightly less serious for the very long-term well-being of humanity than the earth's being struck by a giant meteor.

Saddam Insane's fundamentally irrational, inhumane, sadistic regime made me sick too, and war is always a sickening business (I visited one war for a time in 1971). However, war isn't the only thing that causes death, and despite the terrible pain for the families involved, the casualties of war don't always represent a large-scale historical discontinuity.

For instance, some American military personnel are killed in training every year, and, like non-military people, some are killed in automobile accidents or die of cancer. Similarly with the Iraqi military or civilians. At any particular time, approximately one percent of the population is near death, which amounts to approximately 60 million of the 6 billion persons on earth. The earth recycles on a grand scale. In the long-run, everybody dies, and, so far, at least, all but a tiny fraction of history's deaths have occurred for reasons other than warfare.

Given that the Middle East is what it is, current events there may redirect the course of history, but whether the world will be a fundamentally different place a thousand years from now because of the overthrow of Saddam's wicked regime is at least questionable. History has a way of absorbing quite a lot, and being too close to anything can make it seem larger and more important than it really is. What are the real long-term consequences of the biggest, toughest guy in town slugging a thousand-pound marshmallow? Go ahead--take your best shot.

However, the loss of antiquities in the very region where Western Civilization began may very well help determine the conditions of human life over the millennia ahead.

Anyone who has had an Alzheimer's patient in their family knows about the devastating consequences of memory loss for individuals. Collectively, we can lose our memories too, and it can happen very rapidly, given the shortness of the human life span. What proportion of the world's population remembers the principal defining event of the 20th century, for instance--the Second World War? With each passing day, it's a tinier fraction, and soon, there won't be anybody.

We are inundated with words and images, of course. The good news as well as the bad news is that the world has been moving these billions of traces from paper into electronic storage. It's good because wide distribution is quick and easy. The modern world was made possible, in large part, because of Gutenberg's printing press. The digital revolution's consequences seem even more profound.

However, while broad access today may be easier when the storage medium is electronic rather than paper, access tomorrow may be harder. Suppose you have some very important information on 8-inch floppy disks from the Xerox CP/M desktop computer than you bought in 1981. The computer is long gone. All you have are the disks. How are you going to gain access to that information now, only twenty-two years later? I think I have articles of clothing older than that.

Only a few years ago, the smaller 5.25-inch floppy was standard, but when's the last time you saw a computer that used one? During the early 1980s, there were competing 2.0, 2.5, 2.8, 3.0, 3.25, and 4.0 inch floppy formats, before the 3.5-inch disk became standard--for a while. In recent years, many computers have been shipping with no floppy drive at all. Maybe you've already had to scramble a bit to find a machine that can read the little disks that, only about the day before yesterday, it seems, were everywhere.

Minnesota's Ramsey County Library system offers thousands of recorded books to borrowers. The great majority are on cassette tapes, but the system has been trying to move to CDs, which are better in nearly every way. At last count, they have about 465 books available on CDs.

Very nice--except that the tech news has been filled with stories recently about how CDs seem to be on their way out. Young people aren't buying music CDs much anymore. Instead, music distribution seems to be moving to the Internet and portable MP3 devices. By the time the Ramsey County Library has completed the process of moving its collection of recorded books to CD, that may already be an endangered if not obsolete technology, with fewer people possessing CD players, rather than more.

There is an additional problem with electronic storage, and that is that modifications are so easy. There was a time when photographs or films were accepted as evidence of something, but certainly not since Photoshop or CGI came on the scene.

The old Soviet Union rewrote history now and then, but it was a lot of trouble to collect all those printed copies of the official encyclopedia and replace them with modified editions. When Nikita Khrushchev was overthrown, making him a "non-person" could have been only a matter of a few keystrokes if his successors had had access to current technologies. George Orwell saw it coming.

While the United States may continue in something resembling its present form for several more centuries, this certainly isn't assured. Rome evolved over its thousand-year history, then morphed into something quite different: the Byzantine Empire, which also lasted about a thousand years until terminated by the Turks less than a half-century before Columbus brought Western Europe into collision with the Americas.

History used to "morph" as if driven by the original Intel 4004 microprocessor of 1971. Now, it's driven by multiple Pentium 4s. It's hard to know what sociopolitical conditions may develop during the years ahead and who will attempt to make history a work of fiction, either because it will seem expedient at the time, or because they simply won't know any better. We won't want it to be too easy for them.

When we lose our memory, we lose track with who we are, and it becomes both necessary and convenient simply to make things up. For centuries, Western Europe lost touch with its Classical origins, as well as most of early Christianity. In fact, Christianity might have evolved very differently if, all along, there had been significant archeological remains from its early days. Instead, the first solid archeological (as opposed to literary) evidence that Christianity even existed on the earth during the first couple of centuries of the common era is rude anti-Christian graffiti from about 180 C.E., as I understand it. That's about as long after the estimated time of the death of Jesus as between the beginning of President Franklin Pierce's administration and the present day.*

Already, there are people who deny that the Holocaust of the 1940s ever occurred. There are others who, not knowing much about any history, may be easily convinced. Not so long ago, I had a conversation with a graduate of the University of Minnesota who apparently hadn't heard about it. I'm not sure she believed me. Honest to god.

It can help that there are still places like Dachau with its very tangible ovens, and so forth, that people can still visit and which require explanation. Without physical artifacts, it's too easy for people simply to make things up, and, in fact, past a point, there may be little alternative. Right now, we're seeing what happens when ancient traditions and myths, long largely separated during the many centuries when the world was a very different place, come into daily collision. These traditions, constructed over long periods of time, are attempting to reconcile themselves to each other at the same time they are trying to cope with the tsunami of modernism.

Ideological conflicts will always be with us to some extent, because much of each individual's "reality" is a result of interpretation. It's simply how human brains function in default mode within social contexts. However, conflict could be reduced somewhat if everybody were to rely on the same empirical information base. Now that so much of the world that we experience is made up of symbols and images, real, tangible things are even more important for anchoring at least some of reality against fraud, superstition, or collective delusions.

Gary Johnson
April 23, 2003

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*In November of last year, we learned that an ossuary has been in private hands for several years on which is written the inscription, "Ya'akov, bar Yosef, akhui di Yeshua," which we are told reads "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" in English translation. If it is genuine, it will be the very FIRST physical object from Christianity's first century that can be tied to any of the early Christians.

So far, so good. Experts say that the ossuary does appear to be from the first century C.E. However, the names "James," "Joseph," and "Jesus" were about as common in that region during those years as "Bob," "Bill," and "Tom" are in the United States today. Statistical analyses have been performed in order to estimate the number of cases in which persons with those names would have the relationships indicated, given the estimated size of the population at that time. That narrows it down considerably.

However, lacking physical facts, it's easier to imagine things. The past becomes a Rorschach ink blot. As Jane Austen's character remarks about history, "I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention." As with nearly every other issue, there is no consensus among theologians as to whether Jesus HAD a brother. There are passionate opinions on all sides.

Some scholars are saying that there is reason to believe that "James, son of Joseph" was inscribed first, and that the last part of the inscription, "brother of Jesus," was added at some later time by a different hand. This opens the possibly that the overall inscription is either a fairly modern forgery or even an ancient one. Words scratched on physical objects are more permanent and less subject to modification than those written on paper or those in electronic storage. Still...

Pillagers and treasure hunters aren't popular among genuine scholars. For one thing, archeologists don't like to try to interpret artifacts independent of the contexts in which they have been found because of the loss of information. An object in isolation that's been handed around, the origins of which are obscure, can end up being like a lot of the stuff that floats around on the Internet.

If it turns out that it can be demonstrated that the ossuary is genuine and that its inscription refers to the people described in Christian tradition, it won't mean that all Christian claims will have been validated, even to the extent that there is some core consensus, but, at least, it would be SOMETHING.